I saw someone mention before the reason the game isn't getting many subscribers is probably in part due it using Twine or AI art and...
I'd like to firmly disagree with both? There's ample successful games based on Twine - Dryad Quest RPG is very profitable, Unholy arts sort of is despite having very little art still and being rather on the janky side (noticed a certain someone's PFP of it - I love the potential of the game, but BOY does it need some work still...), Degrees of Lewdity is one of the biggest lewd games out there and very much Twine (even if it isn't commercial at all), Course of Temptation is brand new and highly profitable...
Transylvania and other games also come to mind... Twine is great, its easy to work with, totally free and can do pretty much anything you want it to. Best of all, it is entirely web based. This means it's low barrier of entry and easy to shield from non-subscribers. Put it on a website, require a login for the paid part. Yes, it can still be extracted and pirated, but it's such a pain, most games taking this route end up without it happening I think.
So long as your games are text based mostly, I'd be very very hesitant to swap away from it. Unity, Godot etc come with graphics but sacrifice a lot in terms of great display of text, ease of development, and the web version. Godot 4 for the web is a bit of a disaster still, Unity for the web has always been terrible.
AI-wise... yes, people get upset about it. But like, this shows in some salty reviews. Most people just play games that look good for them and don't play them if they don't look good...
As for why it isn't doing so hotly? Not sure. Maybe it's the lack of an enticing title image, I think the screenshots aren't all that interesting. Maybe it's that you don't push people to patreon that actively, I never once got the vibe during many playthroughs that I am missing out by not subscribing. Maybe it's that it's not all that much fun to replay - I enjoy the writing a lot, but some of the gameplay feels pretty darn grindy, and not in the fun way. Progressing the story feels like a grind to me, yet there's not that many simulation elements for me. Like, it's a lot of 'Keep exploring until you've seen it all', which to me always feels kind of flawed because I end up clicking until way /after/ I stop enjoying it because of FOMO and it kind of sours things. And do you really want people to miss scenes because they didn't explore enough?
Something some semi-sandboxes do amazingly in my opinion is instead putting the scenes behind just progressing your character. You do the story when you feel like it and otherwise get your character better jobs, better housing, and so on. And while to a degree that is in this game, it's all so locked behind story and feels so forced every time it is unlocked (...things get quite hard if you dont do it, in my opinion) and there's so little side content using it besides the story... There's a lot of games out there mixing sandbox with story, but in this one, it kind of feels like the sandbox is a mandatory grinding tool distracting from the story. It, for me, is not fun to re-do it at all. And picking up the game again from where I left off feels jarring to me. So I don't.
Sticking to either, /just/ the story with less distractions, or actually taking care to make both, a fun sandbox /and/ a fun story with both being enticing on their own, both would IMO make the game more fun to replay over and over on updates and give it more of a tail.
....sorry for the long ranting, I am just sharing my thoughts and hope I am not coming across as dismissive or such. I could well be wrong on all of it, but sometimes I word vomit. I do enjoy the game, but... That's why I don't support it on patreon, or play it as often as similar games.
LOL
