See we all say this and think it, but OTOH, do we know what the sales numbers were for Artificial Academy 2? Do we know what their customers asked for? Did they do any market research? Did they even have the staff that was able to implement such an idea? If we look at their output over the last 9 years, it would seem they weren't interested in making any sort of games that had improved gameplay.
Shame about Steam, I bought games there like Goblin Walker, Prison Fight etc (now delisted) and they even had a game that was titled The Raped Knight of Sylveria, which then changed to the Noble Knight, then was delisted. There was a shortish years where games with the usual themes were kosher, now they've cracked down and those games there's a weird air of keep it not-too-obvious-ok nowadays.
They tell you explicitly that the studio is for private use only not for commercial things. Either they are clueless about the whole patreon thing or choose to ignore it.
According to them:
So they just didn't allow it at all, but turned a blind eye to people breaking that rule rather than making any effort to monetize it? Oof, yep, that's about the dumbest thing they could do. All those Patreon/SS devs better get ready for the shakedown coming their way from whatever creditor ends up with the rights. Even if that company isn't interested in "dirty money" from porn and just sits on the IP, somebody's gonna notice there's gold just waiting to be mined and try and buy it from them. (I'd also be worried that once there's an official relationship with money changing hands and everything, content restrictions would come with that - hopefully they'll be as easily gotten around and loosely enforced as Patreon's.)
Basically, they pulled a WinRAR. "Hey, what you are doing is completely not-OK by our standards, but we also won't really do anything about it either. Just letting you know that our feelings are hurt uwu"
What if they did that but still closed? I bet you would be calling them dumb for doing that move then.
It's hard to make money selling games you're not really allowed to advertise, to people who'll never admit they played one. Let alone tell their friends. Especially since the one way for word of mouth to spread is via the forums on pirate sites that give the things away for free.
Neither advertising nor piracy were the problem. Either their target market was too small to recover the costs and/or they failed to deliver a product worthy of the price point they chose to sell it at. Hint: it's both.
I probably did not see that.
Actually their english is pretty bad there because they used translators, they didn't meant it that way.
