To me the original storyline hits a deadend fast. That why all the other remakes have failed in my opinion. Max wins what comes after???, Eric wins.. ??? Game over. For me the goal is to break the mold early an create a large foundation where more room is provided for building on. Unfortunately running three stories simultaneously is an almost sure fire way to stagnate and polarise a project unless you like NLT. Because generally most patrons will only see 33% roughly. of all the work done and it extends to production time.
It depends a bit ... Eric is only part of
some aspect of the game, most others work completely without him. Are they bad? No, I don't think so. The problem is in my opinion that the game gave the
impression on focusing on Eric, while in reality it didn't. It raised false hopes in the wrong people.
If you focused on getting him out asap, there was plenty of things to do after he was gone. And I don't think they were bad at all. The one exception was Ann. She was as dumb as a half empty cup of yoghurt with growing fungus can be, also having the same personality. She was nothing more than a fuck toy. And well, Lisa could have been better. That whole teaching aspect really messed her progress up. Her other content, like catching Max and Alice with some consequences was better. Still like Ann's content it was focused too much on who controls who and gets blackmailed by whom. There was no realy story behind it, just how to get from one porn movie scene to the next.
Sadly the whole Big Brother aspect (and by that I mean the hidden cams, since Max is the older brother only to Lisa, but not to Alice, Ann, Kate, Kira and Olivia) got completely ignored. That aspect would be a good soil for new stories.
I think the game died becaise the dev had hardly any plan how to go on and just came up with new sex scenes (mostly for Ann), like his Patreons wanted and that got old pretty fast. He had no idea how to actually conclude the story.
And last but not least he was planning to work on a spinoff focused on Kate anyway.