It's literally still theft though. It's his property, he is allowed to get mad about it if he wants.
Oh shit, I completely forgot about the whole Illusion Koikatsu thing. They don't exactly appreciate people making commercial ventures with their products, but they also don't have the money to pursue legal action about it in the US. So not only is
owning the copyright on something very, very different from something being someone's
property, but Selebus doesn't even own the copyright on the visual assets he uses in-game, and by your definition is "literally stealing" from Illusion
I'm also not saying he isn't allowed to be mad about it. I'm saying it's in the opinion of this and many other former patrons that the optics of him getting so mad about it are not good, and to speculate that he'd probably be doing even better than he is if he wasn't such an immature weirdo about it.
The fact that people are taunting him going "Lololol I got ur game for free 2 weeks early get rekt bozo piracy4lyf hehehe"
You shouldn't be basing your argument around something that's either never happened or is purely the realm of weird internet trolls who wanted to get a rise out of him because he already got demonstrably assmad about being pirated. Trolls are like sharks, it's the blood that's already in the water that really gets them going.
It's also telling that he's said he'd torpedo this site if he could, even though at LEAST 75% of his patron base came from here. The only non-pirate way to find it would be through itch.io. Good luck with that
If people pirate it, it takes away potential income from him, which literally means it's theft.
I personally don't care, I download games, try them, and if they are worth support, I support them. If not, I will either put them in a "maybe try again in the future" or in a "not for me" folder and not support them. I don't think that's the type of piracy that bothers anyone.
So your stance is that piracy is bad and is "literally theft" then admit that you yourself are a pirate, but you're one of the
good pirates. That's not a good look, lil bro.
This is very stupid. Lets take a look at light novels. A light novel has on average around 50.000 words. blah blah blah Why would a book series with 1.000.000 words be worth more than a VN with 1.000.000 words, when the VN is way more work to create?
I hate to break this to you, but light novels and a lot of other weeb goods are horrendously overpriced. You can buy physical copies of the first 3
Stormlight Archive books for $25, word count ~1.2mil, and those words are way better than anything Selebus has vomited up. Also, I don't know where he's getting his word counts, but I suspect they're inflated.
Saying "no game is worth $600" is beyond stupid. You can't just take an arbitrary number and say "anything above this is not worth".
It's not. If Selebus theoretically put LiL up for sale (again, he can't, both because of the subject matter and because he doesn't own the entire copyright) at $600 he would sell a max of 10 copies to his most loyal whales. Sorry.
Marketing 101 includes there being an optimal price point for consumer goods where the combination of the unit price and the sales volume lead to a maximized total profit, and for a titanic visual novel with dated graphics it's not going to be great.
Wonderful Everyday, another 2010 game with similar subject matter (LiL's biggest influence, in fact), is still selling for $30, but I doubt it moves that many units these days.