I think it's more of a testament to 10k a month rather than willpower.
Not really, it was never about money, that's really just because this is his exclusive source of income at this point. This has always been a passion project by his own admission from the time he was active here. However, that one source has now been threatened on several occasions, most notoriously by Patreon trying to shut down his vision to save their revenue stream from the credit card processors because we can't have that, we have to censor artistic vision to save our own skins (we obviously referring to Patreon).
Hey guys ,i dont know anything about selebus and leaking game but ,i felt like this war is like ,Warner Bros and Empress lol . Empress was angry that warner bross added denuvo to stop piracy ,and Empress said i'll crack your game in 10 days ,warner bitches . Its similar ?
Not really, there was no free release in that case and Denuvo is an actual performance threat, like adding it risks some serious performance issues in the game itself like with Hogwarts Legacy, which there are already reports on Steam about framerate issues because of Denuvo.
This is, unfortunately, not true of every person, some are in it for the extras, which in this case was the two early release and more recently the care packages, both not being an actual benefit anymore since everyone can get them free if they know where to look.
I have been this type of subscriber to other projects before, my only reason in those cases was access to cheats that I was otherwise unable to get, which is still true of at least one of the projects I supported before I cut off Patreon last year for being Patreon. I am a regular lurker in the F95 thread for that game and not once have I seen the cheat version for it leak, the standard version not so much.
For this game, it is indeed to support it, my other benefits are optional to me and I would even surrender them if I could, and in fact did last month since Sel needed time away from providing the higher tier benefits and I was not alone. For me, it takes some serious heat or heat directed at me specifically from a developer to drop, so I won't be leaving even if there are some things I don't agree with because the game is still what I came to support, not the developer.
Is there anyone else here that discovered LiL through itch.io? (I'd downloaded the game due to a Rin pic, lol, although she isn't currently my fav) In fact, I came to know of F95 thanks to LiL after its itch.io page was temporarily taken down; I had randomly arrived in this thread looking for the reason (or so I guess, I don't precisely remember how exactly). Thought of creating an account here to discuss the game, seeing I didn't want to join the LiL discord (I had my fair share of bad experiences with shitty discord mods. And had intuited that I'd be banned fairly quickly from it). Also, this isn't the sort of game you can casually discuss with people you know IRL due to its degeneracy. Didn't care about the leaks here and didn't know the dev hated this place.
That's more or less why I find this whole discussion tiring. I just
HOPE hope you guys don't make Selebus go apeshit (any more than he already is) and give up making the game altogether (probably won't happen, seeing his income) or stop freely distributing it after two weeks (much more likely, although I don't even know how unlikely it is in the first place).
Also, wasn't/isn't Selebus technically sort of a pirate as well? I mean, he sold renders he'd made using proprietary software he didn't hold a license to (nor any commercial license exists as far as I am aware; it seems like Illusion doesn't want CharaStudio being used for that sort of thing). Pretty hypocritical of him if that's the case, but then again, I don't really care. Someone more knowledgeable about legal matters, please enlighten me on this.
CharaStudio was actually specifically designed to make these sorts of things and Illusion, like most Japanese companies, couldn't care less about people in the west, otherwise they would put up a bigger fight against people like those in the modding community for their games that has existed for nearly a decade (the Japanese don't like mods, either). As far as this discussion, part of the issue is that everything about the game has already been discussed at least once, some things multiple times. Until a new version comes out and there is new content, there's not much else.
everything 'bad' that has happened to selebus has only happened after he did crap to piss other people off, and more than likely wasn't even done by people from this thread. there are tons of threads on this site and on other sites and one GREAT way to get a pirating community to target you for destruction is to attack any one pirate or group. this thread and even the mods have been widely tolerant and kind to him after his actions by F95 standards so far.
when anyone targets an internet pirate, even if the pirate says 'guys don't hit back' word of it spreads and every other pirate not into this 'game' or this 'book' or this 'whatever' immediately does a yes/no assessment to fire back just on principal and to make an example to anyone else that would even consider doing it. this is why the majority of creators here don't act like cunty assholes, especially here, considering the creators more often than not don't have a legal leg to stand on.
edit:
this is also one of the reason why a large chunk of the gaming industry considers piracy a 'nice' problem to have. because (1) it means you are popular and finacially secure enough to get pirated in such a way and (2) if you dont wage war on those communities, when you really needs it the piracy communities come out and fight for you in weird ass ways. I recall an instant when a creator had some kind of legal trouble and asked the internet for help and then the opposing side got flooded with documents/viruses and other shit making it a huge ass headache
yep, it was pretty obvious. pirates are nice because they don't generally let people play the victim when they set themselves up in the first place to be the victim for the sole purpose of social engineering and scapegoating their issues onto others
Everything? I don't recall anything of the Patreon or Itch.io issues being his doing, those were just for creating the game and he got targeted over the content, especially Itch.io, which if I remember correctly was some advocacy group targeting his game over the ages of characters, ages that until now haven't been confirmed officially and only a few have been confirmed even now.
Dude, they enforced their rules. They might have done so somewhat rudely, but like the 10th render used to be "here's a pic of you fucking your niece to tide you over"
Rules that shouldn't even exist to the extent that artistic vision is victimized, but yes, that is basically what they did.
I agree, but this is the wrong characterization. No matter how much money someone makes on there, Patreon isn't "fucking anyone over" by not allowing content they don't approve of to be funded on their platform. It's not even their policies - they're beholden to the wishes of financial institutions that are much more puritanical than they are. We're lucky they allow hardcore content to be funded on there at all - look at the problems Onlyfans had last year.
He banned me on his Discord for criticizing him on here. Did he "fuck me over" by doing so? It was a dick move, but of course not. It's private property.
Did I try to go back and edit all of my posts in a futile attempt to get him to let me back on instead of moving on with my life? Also no
Honestly, I'm surprised they allow adult content in any capacity at this point.
I mean, sure, they have all the right to enforce their rules accordingly. I was thinking more along the lines of the Huggy Boy fiasco (I'm not familiar with the finer points of what happened). Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I've heard, Patreon led him to believe should he make Huggy Boy, everything would be fine. Until it wasn't. That's why he went ahead with such an insane idea in the first place. I remember seeing him complain about an unhelpful/rude Patreon staff member or something (probably the person who caused the "misunderstanding").
It this is what really happened, it certainly would fit 'to fuck someone over.' Patreon could've merely kicked him sooner, he'd have adapted earlier to another platform, and it'd have spared him the ridiculous job of modifying the game to a shitty version to please Patreon.
Basically:
1. He makes game with content Patreon does not like.
2. Patreon locks his page.
3. He moves to gain a secondary source of subscribers, SubscribeStar.
4. He remakes the game into what we know today as the "huggy boy" version and continues to release the original on SubscribeStar while his Patreon is unlocked.
5. Patreon discovers the SubscribeStar, partly due to the fact that his SubscribeStar URL doesn't change if his user name does, so renaming himself Subeles didn't fool anyone let alone Patreon.
6. Patreon locks his page again, surprisingly not an immediate full deletion for once as this is usually what happens to second offenses.
7. The "huggy boy" version stops entirely and everything goes back to full steam on the normal version we have today, but he still has income to recover at this point, income he would not have lost if Patreon was actually in support of free expression.
That sums it up as best as I can remember.
I've had a theory for a while now.
Patreon only went after this game in November 2021. They didn't target a whole bunch of KK based games (even though they claimed it was the KK models looking so young that was the problem), and the other KK-based games with young-looking models were untouched at the time. So this wasn't a sweep, this was targeted, and that means the game was probably reported. And it was probably reported again after he got Huggy Boy out, because if someone's gonna be that petty, they're gonna be that petty twice.
And we know that some users here are petty. Hell, the instant leaks are being done mostly because he's made it clear that it upsets him, and if there's anything trolls love to do, it's continually activate people's triggers.
So yeah, I suspect that someone got banned from the Discord (see the screenshot from a post he made a couple weeks prior to the drama starting), and everything afterwards was petty revenge.
Very much so, but to be undeservedly fair to Patreon, they do rely on user reports of violations like most sites. We didn't see exactly who reported it, so it could have been anyone from a disgruntled patron to an actual anti-fiction activist (in this context, anti-fiction should be obvious, but to explain just in case, it is referring to people so vehemently against adult content with younger characters even though the characters they are against do not exist IRL that they make a move against the fiction depicting the character in that way, in this case reporting it to the anti-fiction site the fiction was hosted on).