So I've been noticing a bunch of games lately getting the "abandoned" tag on the front page. I don't know if it's happening more or if I'm just noticing it more, but it definitely has my attention. A comprehensive review could probably identify all of the warning signs for each game and find commonalities; but from what I'm seeing there are a couple very obvious related tell-tale signs that happen before the dev either disappears or the game is official canceled.
- Irregular release dates
- Increasingly long development cycles
- OPTIONAL- Remake is announced
All of these games seemed to suffer from confusion as releases sputtered along at irregular intervals for years before the game was abandoned. No one ever really seemed to know when to expect the next release. Sometimes the dev would set a release date and make it, and sometimes they would miss it, but in both cases there didn't seem to be a far-out vision of when the next release should be ready. Instead, they all seemed to proceed on a "it's done when it's done" philosophy.
This made it harder to really criticize when development cycles began to creep up. Those irregular releases didn't seem to be a big deal when it was 45 days or 60 days between releases. Slowly but surely, those cycles became 75 day gaps, then 90 day gaps, then 150 day gaps, etc. These threads/Discords are full of "But the story/renders are more complicated, of course it's going to take longer", and
that really grabbed my attention. The game keeps, slowly, coming out, and the clock starts again. But eventually the excuses begin to pileup and five or six months have passed and there's no word when the next release will be out. In some cases the dev just goes silent, and the game gets an automatic "abandoned" tag after three months.
Occasionally, all of the above will happen, but the dev will announce some sort of remake. While this doesn't happen often, it does seem to have a 100% failure rate. The dev will promise that the remake will fix some issues with the original game (could be code, render quality, story, whatever) and may even release an update or two starting the game over, but pretty quickly this seems to fizzle out.
The point is, I think there are some very clear tell-tale signs that we should be on the lookout for. I'm not trying to say that L&P is definitely going to abandon the game; I'm just saying that there are other games/developers out there that we should pay attention to. If I were still a Patron of L&P I think I would be asking him "Hey, game X, Y, and Z were all abandoned recently. What are you doing to make sure that AWAM doesn't end up in the same spot?"
Edit- I forgot to add that I think the post-COVID world is going to be tough on adult games. Devs that suddenly had more time on their hands in 2020, and saw a huge new captive audience willing to explore lewd games, may feel whiplash in 2021. As the world begins to open back up, we could see a really challenging situation as devs have less time on their hands to devote to games that have grown more complicated/time intensive than they were a year ago, while their audience begins to shrink as more people chose to spend their money/time in other ways. Suddenly this hobby isn't as much fun as it use to be, and also isn't as profitable. That could spell doom for a lot of games.
