Regarding the game update and itch.io

I feel like a have to make a recap of what is happening, which situation we are currently in, about itch.io and episode release. I gave separate small updates in comments and on discord, but let’s sum it up here, as some people have missed it. So, let me briefly explain the stage at which this too-bad-to-be-fiction vaudeville is at.

Part one.

The war. As you know, we still live in Ukraine, and the war is still going—actually even worse than before, due to the almost daily drone attacks on city infrastructure. This means constant power outages, air raid alerts for several hours a day, there’s no heating as of now. The “lemonade” here is when the power is off or in a shelter, without computer and internet you can actually break out of socials cage for a bit and think of more meaningful things. So I’ve gathered quite a lot of ideas and improvements for the game. There’s nearly endless amount of drafts and things to be done after the war is over: the initial story got way more intriguing, while character development and lore will be way deeper yet cuter now.

Still, sadly, each day people die. I’m not talking only about soldiers on the frontline but about simple people in rear cities, as kremlin regime, unable to win on the battlefield, regularly terrorizes civil homes. This means that a missile or bomb with 500 kg warhead hits a multi floor panel apartment, and it fully collapses like a card house, burying everyone inside under rubble, which is even worse than the explosion itself. Previous year the missile struck a hospital next to the house of my grandma. The explosion wounded her with glass shards as she was sleeping in a small room. Nothing too serious, but this is how we live here. You go to sleep, knowing you’ll see a victim count in the morning. You pray your family isn’t on the list. But it only means someone else’s loved one have died.

Obviously, this creates both technical and psychological issues for working, so sometimes I simply can’t turn my computer on or have to drop everything and run to cover, and sometimes I just see that fifty innocent people died on a street I went pass each day, and…

Let’s just say we can’t post updates as frequently as we could before the war. It’s hard to think about something kind and beautiful when all you see is death.

Part two.

Nevertheless, we did finish Episode 9 by the end of summer as we promised, and it’s ready for release. Quite a big one, it’s gonna add some important content to the game, and I want people to finally see how much stuff we made.

But. Here comes the shitshow. First, itch.io simply delisted all adult games without any warning because of yada-yada, some feminist from Australia was mean to us. Many games that followed the site guidelines and didn’t have any ugly content were simply removed, and even though we weren’t, our itch page is in fact dead the same as most other adult games. And, finally, mastercard and visa stopped working with itch.io, so we decided to cut off the payment account at all because I’m sick of vile actions of the payment processors (don’t make any itch.io payments to us, we won’t receive them).

And, with our main publishing platform down, we simply have nowhere to share the update. Posting it on Patreon only wouldn’t be fair to vast numbers of people who bought the game on itch. Not posting it won’t be fair to Patreon supporters who keep paying monthly and don’t get any updates.

As an alternative, itch offers fully free game page to be republished. This means the latest updates won’t be available on itch anymore, only the public version. So players won’t be able to normally buy the game (only find it on Patreon), and also people who bought the game on itch won’t get the same updates, only the public version as anyone else. Since there’re many people who bought the game on itch, we’d like to keep the current “public version + buy the game and get all coming updates.” If we make the page fully free there's no turning back. But it’s been three months already since itch does nothing to fix this, and no one knows how much longer it will take. Maybe they’ll restore everything, maybe not. The time’s ticking.

I dunno what is right here. Maybe wait a bit more (like a month) and then share the update on Patreon only. And then if itch solves nothing, we’ll have to turn our page into public version only, just so the game is accessible at least. Or maybe keep waiting so thousands of players who bought it will be able to get the updates? You say.