I seriously doubt f95zone users are even a drop in the bucket of the Steam market HentaiWriter can pull right now. Let's get over ourselves here.
I doubt it: sure, there any new platform means wider exposure, but it's akin to moving from a tiny marketplace where you have a booth as large as anyone else's to a planet-sized marketplace but you still have the same tiny booth on an empty roadside hundreds of miles from the country-sized monolith of "Triple A titles". Eroge/hentai titles on Steam are still a relatively small share of overall interest, and word-of-mouth/recurrent interest (e.g. people who already followed on other platforms) are probably as important as anywhere else. Even factoring in the assumption that HW is just incompetent, if Steam were such a potential goldmine I'd think they would have put more effort into actually putting the game into a release-ready state, rather than dragging their feet for the past what, year or two since the last time they tried?
F95 may not be huge, but it is definitely a large name nowadays among...uh..."h-game hunters" (I have no idea wtf to call us as a generalized demographic lol)? H-games face the massive hurdle that they can't widely advertise, meaning that any forums in which they can be discussed are arguably essential to promoting them; if they weren't, I don't think HW would waste so much of their time and life force reporting people and whining about bad reviews. Even if the Steam release were their golden goose, they can't even be consistent on what they want the game to be, as demonstrated by arguments throughout the thread about whether this is even meant to be "about the h-content" or if it's just an incredibly poor Metroidvania that happens to have h-scenes. Without any kind of identity, the game wouldn't draw anyone in no matter how large the audience: why play a mid-tier sidescroller that (as of recently) has self-indulgent levels of dialogue about a non-existent story when I could just play Blasphemous, Risk of Rain 1, or just about any other sidescroller that's vastly superior at the low cost of not having h-scenes (which, as aforementioned, isn't what the game is about according to some)?
All of this is really just to say that I
do think our opinions and discussion matter given the difficulty of wider advertising for h-games. Even if they do eventually release on Steam, they will first have to sell enough to offset the impact it will have on their subs: no more project means less backers (assuming they're not all on automatic payments and forgot about them years ago), and unless they intend to market it as an h-game, as mentioned above I
highly doubt any significant number of people will be impressed by the gameplay. They're either gonna have to suck it up and accept that their "brilliant writing" isn't going to impress anyone when stacked against vastly superior 2d platformers that have released in recent years and refocus on the hentai elements, or I just don't see how they get any more than a few hundred/thousand downloads.
And just to be clear, this isn't taking shots at the game or anyone: the only relevant things to discuss about the game currently are the prospects for the Steam release (assuming HW is even being honest about the release schedule in the first place), so I'm just giving my two cents on the importance of smaller communities like f95 in relation to h-game marketing and the relative likelihood of HW benefitting from Steam even assuming they do release by the end of the month.
