I wonder if they'll get sued by Nintendo, now thta you mention the company.
On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that after all of this years there isn't another group of people doing exactly what you are saying. The original concept, but new and better looking. It's like free money out there for the taking so it's weird that noone is doing it. Is it because they fear getting sued? I've got no clue quite honestly.
It's a very interesting question actually, on which I keep thinking from time-to-time. Me and my current programmer with whom we are currently making a game have discussed the opportunity to maby develop a Krystal game instead of our original setting, but we ended up doing our own thing anyway.
It's an amalgamation of various factors that stops developers before they even start, rather than only 1 specific reason.
Let's take me as an example and go through the points and thoughts of why starting a LOK game would be complicated.
Am I enough? What would be the course of action for somebody from my position?
First things first - you require 2 main people to develop a game - an artist and a programmer. If you're unlucky and you can't programm 100% of your ides while also drawing them from scratch, you will have to find a 2nd person as minimum who will be able to deal with either coding or drawing. This sole thing is already a stopping point in your journey, because not so many people will be ready to make a hentai game their main paybill resource. Why? Because of several reasons.
1 - patreon or any other crowdfunding platform is not a 100% viable option out of the blue, you will be able to work with it only if you already have an audience that is ready to support you or if you have god-level marketing skills to make people know about your game and you can make them interested in supporting it and even if you are and your skills are sky-high, it's not a 100% set in stone that you will find sucess right from the start, which means that your financial status will be under a question for quite some time while your following is growing. If you are about 20 y.o. you could more or less deal with it while living with parents and working on such a game for the future, but if you are 26+, you live alone, you need to pay your bills, you might have a gf/bf/ a kid or two, then suddenly you are out of options, you just can't allow yourself to NOT get paid.
2 - if the project fails, you wont be able to use whatever you came up with for your portfolio, because in serious companies when giving your CV and saying that you worked on a hentai game, it will lower your chances to be hired, because people in companies don't take NSFW positively. At the very least HRs won't let it pass in 9/10 occasions.
3 - game design differences. I tried once coming up with a game with my brother who is a really good programmer, but he wanted a quick-shoot-no-brain platformer, while I wanted to have a DragonAge:Origins-style of slasher with platfroming parts. And since I was the one who was doing game documentation and he wanted none of it, I felt like we could lean on my design more... Nope. He was simply not interested. We stopped working together even before we've done anything at all.
But ok. Let's imagine that you can deal with previous problems in theory and let's see what we have to work with.
I'm for example an artist - I can do both 2d and 3d art without much of hasstle,. I also have experience in game development and I can do game design and documentation, I also have pretty clear visionery skills and I do write my own comics plus Ihave interested myself in writing and story skills for years at this point. I alone can cover a lot of ground for game developing, including even story, dialogues, game design and documentation.
Next step for me would be finding someone who is interested to work with me and MY ideas to make them a reality. Let's say that I accidentally find such a person... Is their skills enough? In order to create a game with a programmer who is not you yourself, you need to understand their personality and skills - can they work on the project full time? Are they lazy? Do they have enough experience with the game engine? Will they be able to execute your ideas via coding? If not, will they be able to learn how to do it in an acceptable amount of time? Are they open to the opportunity of hiring more than 1 programmer in the future? Have they worked with others already? What is their cooperation skills and will it be a hindrance to the project an to the team?
Let's say a person passes all of those and voila - You have 2 people ready to work on the game. Great!
I hope one of you is ready to pay full time to another one, because if not, you better stop at once, since creating a complex game while working on it 2 or 3 hours a day max after work while being tired is simply noncense.
Our next problem comes with the IP. Is Krystal safe to do? Absolutely not. It's an already existing IP that some megacorporation owns - there are really high chances for your game to be taken down at some point if it somehow close to their concept. Even if it isn't, the very fact that they have money to get you into the court might simply shut you down, because you will not have money to defend yourself even if you worked over your designs and story to be way different from the original. Long story short, working on the game that has concepts from other IP will always put your project into the dangerzone.
Let's say that you're ok with that and you decide to work further by changing as maximum stuff from the game as possible to not represent the original concept. That will hinder your marketing and some portion of pottential supporters will fall off.
But let's say that this is not a problem for you.
Thus: you are an artist, you've found yourslef a viable programmer, you're somehow payed, all of the previous problems have been dealt with one way or another or you have accepted them and you will work through them. Great! It's time to start working on the game.
Is it time to put it on Patreon? You don't have anything... This is where preproduction stage comes in - you need to create an overall design for the game, write down mechanics, characters, story, imagine how it all will work both from visual criteria, coding set up and so that in the end it all would've worked together as 1 fine clock.
The idea on itself is still not enough though and preproduction requires at the very least some kind of demo (not even a vertical slice, but a working demo with minimal base things working). And you start executing it.
This is where you will find out that 2 people can cover a lot, even all of it, but in exchange for time. 2 people is not a lot and you will simply struggle with the amount of sutff that needs to be executed. Yes, you can deal with tasks and even most complicated tasks from your design is executable, but because you are just 2 people it will take you months to concept it+execute itvisually+code it in+iterate on it+add various things on top+polish it for finalisation.
This is the point where you understand that yes, you can deal with all of the steps, but very simple stuff still requires time to be done... And thus you will have to spend a year or 1,5 years or even two, in order to nail all of the basis for the game in order to put what you have online and get yelled on because game is empty and doesn't have content yet after all of that development time since you have only nailed the needed basis ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Only after doing ALL OF THAT you will be at the point where you have a clear picture of how it works with your partner, whether your game is executable, whether you have enough supporters in order to finance the game development, whether you still have the wish to continue at all, and so on...
Upon that you also have to add real life challenges like personal issues, health problems, your personal ambitions, etc throughout the entire development cycle.
After thinking about all of that you sit there in front of you computer and think to yourself "Maybe continuing drawing commissions online would be better and waaaay more simple after all...".
