The Future of Kickstarters and This Patreon

Hello Beloved Patrons,

So, it should be pretty clear by now that the Kickstarter for Oni Onsen was a failure.  

I'm sorry I can't fulfil rewards for you. The game is canceled (more on that in a bit) and I will not be making the rewards.

Please keep what I post here confidential. This is insider information for you insiders.

I really thought this Kickstarter had everything we needed to be successful. It's an AMAZING game. Beautifully written. With gorgeous art. Fun, dramatic, funny, interesting. Everyone who played the demo fell in love.

And before we launched I had 1,000 followers on the Kickstarter pre-launch page. I thought it was a safe bet to ask for the total amount we needed.  I've asked for less in the past, and then ended up struggling to cover development costs toward the end of the project.

That's what I'm going through with Orc Covenant. We ran out of the Kickstarter money in February and I've been paying out of pocket for development since then. For those of you keeping track, we still have two routes of Orc Covenant to create, along with all the backer rewards.

So I asked for the $80,000 I would need to cover the development costs for the entire Oni Onsen game.

It includes a year of the full-time artist's salary (they work for us exclusively during game dev) as well as programming, music, assets, testing, marketing, gui, logo, animations, sounds, and all the rest.

It does not include payment for my writing. So technically, $80,000 was even less than what we needed. (I have to eat, and Y Press is my only job.)

We failed. We failed fantastically.  Only 400 past backers showed up (where were the other 600?) and only 11 new backers gave us a chance. We couldn't get there in the end.

The day before the Kickstarter launched I was getting the Steam page ready. Everything was good. They wanted one change to the description text and then they'd make me live.

I fixed what they asked. Then I waited. They were taking forever, and I didn't want to launch the Kickstarter without the Steam page.

At the same time, there was this huge Steam code scam going on, where an old game that had be approved to go live by Steam a long time ago had the title, description, images, everything changed to make it look like an exact copy of a popular expensive game.

800 of these fake versions of popular games were made all at once. The scammers started selling keys to these fake game copies. People would buy a super-cheap key for like the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, but then they'd redeem the key and get Match Two Burger Game.

It was a mess that I didn't know was going on. That's why Steam was taking so fucking long to approve my page. That's why Steam was in a very bad mood when I did this:

Yeah. I dared to rush them. And they made me pay for it.

After I sent that, they locked the page and said I had to submit the ENTIRE game for final approval before they would consider approving the page. It was because I rushed them. There was no other reason. They had already given me the greenlight except for a change in description text.

THIS CAME OUT OF NOWHERE.

I sent an appeal. I begged them not to do this. I apologized for daring to rush them. I did a mea culpa and bared my soul, begging them not to punish me. I didn't know why they were taking so long. The news didn't hit until after all this shit.

They just sent the same message back verboten. No individualized text response for the likes of me. Steam page rejected. Make the whole game, submit that to us, and we'll think about it.

So, we lost out on all the Steam traffic the Kickstarter would have gotten. It was significant. We usually have 30% 'never backed one of your Kickstarters' before people. This time? 2%.

Steam has done this in the past with two of our other games, but the reasons were always...reasonable. The blocked Sentimental Trickster because the characters looked underaged on the Steam kit art. Fine. Whatever.

They blocked some other game because we mentioned that there was rape in the game in the content warning. Okay. It sucks, but okay.

Both times we built the whole games with sketch art, submitted them, and eventually they would approve the store pages. Not without a fight, but eventually we got the store pages live.

To get the Oni Onsen store page live we'd have to do the same thing.

We'd have to make the entire game without any guarantee that Steam would carry us.

We lost all the wishlists we normally get during our Kickstarter. We're losing wishlists every day the store page isn't live. And, we lost all the Kickstarter traffic we would have gotten from having our demo live on Steam.

That's why I MUST diversify our income so I'm not so dependent on Steam.

I mean, bad things happened to me when I was a novelist relying on Amazon 100% for my income, but these things always hit all writers equally. It was never personal.

As far as what to do to get out of Steam's clutches, the options are few. For a while I was thinking of getting out of games. I'd go back to writing novels and see about making a YouTube page with this idea I'd been playing with.

But starting from scratch when things are so uncertain is a daunting thought.

And the games are successful. We have fans. We've carved out our place in the market. I've spent 7 years building Y Press Games and I don't want to throw that all away.

So what are my options for continuing with games sans Steam? Selling direct, something tricky with adult content, and Gum Road decided to stop being an option right when I would have considered it. Or doing something on Patreon.

If you've seen the new header you know I'm turning this Patreon into a subscription site for a new game serial.

If you're reading this, then you're grandfathered in to keep all your current benefits

Even if you move down to a lower tier. You can still cash in your Patreon money for crowd-funding rewards or to buy games or DLCs.

But, starting in July, you'll be getting episodes of Monster Ops, the first serial game I'm launching here and on Subscribe Star (in case Patreon 86s adult games one day).

One episode a month offered for $5/mo. You get the episodes 6 months before they go live on Steam/Itch and for $2 less than their retail prices.

I understand if you want to downgrade to the $5 tier now.

With this disaster of a Kickstarter I'm not sure how viable crowdfunding is for us going forward. I still plan on a Kickstarter for Monster Lover 2, but we'll see how it goes.

For Those Of You on the $20 or $25 Extra Content Tier

You'll continue to get weekly extra content, like my past manga and ebooks until July. Then your 'extra content' will be the MONTHLY episodes of Monster Ops. So, again, think about downgrading your tier to the $5 tier in a few months.

We're starting with Monster Ops, a Military secret ops thing where soldiers battle/fuck the monsters created from a military experiment gone bad. There is a main couple in the game that bare no resemblance whatsoever to Soap/Ghost from Call of Duty.

They're named Tide and Wraith.

If I can get at least 223 subscribers by the end of 2024, then I'll call this a success and roll out the second subscription game, XXX Wrestling, about a pornographic gay pro-wrestling league. (Some of you may remember that I used to be a pro wrestling promoter in Las Vegas, so I know more than the casual fan about the business.)

If we don't get enough interest then the XXX Wrestling game won't go here and will just be the big game we put out in 2026. I'll have to think about ending/canceling Monster Ops too.

But I'll promote the hell out of it and try my best to make this successful. You know I need to escape Steam any way I can now.

So by 2026 I'll either have XXX Wrestling as my big game for the year, or we'll have monthly updates of Monster Ops and XXX Wrestling that also sell as a serial game on Steam/Itch.

What's the big game for 2025?

It was supposed to be Oni Onsen. And I don't know how we're going to make it without a big game in 2025. Just Monster Lover 2 won't be enough to keep us in business, particularly if the Monster Ops subscriptions don't take off.

I don't have the funds right now to support both Orc Covenant and Oni Onsen.

OC gets the money because I already sold rewards for that Kickstarter. After that, however, I don't know. It all depends on whether we can ever get the Steam page approved.

Without Steam Oni Onsen was doomed to fail regardless.

...But there's still a chance.