Whew! Finally done lurking through all these comments. Wild. I Remember this from ages ago and only saw it again as I was going through my Steam Library installing FINISHED games. I was curious if the Steam Prologue was the same as 0.44.3 (I know it's not, thanks for the info mates.)
You know, lurking through everything here, reading the timeline, popping in the discord to still see people getting flamed for asking questions. It's all wild.
Patreon Issue - Seeing that this guy was crowdfunding to make boatloads of money only to turn around and do nothing but apparently play Genshin Impact (lol... personally, fuck Hoyo honestly) is pretty eye opening. The thing is, he clearly walked off with a bunch of money with no intent of finishing this. Sure, Patreon might have hit him up about 'incest' but frankly, that was for SIDE Halloween content outside of the actual game... why was he acting like such a stiff about it? That was suspect as hell. Just let people download a patch and tell Patreon it's done and dusted. Devs do this ALL.THE.TIME. I personally think, as one person confirmed they themselves did, that his outright suction of funds without ANY results caused him to get reported by several people backing his patreon and patreon themselves hit him up for it. So once again, this is 'sticking' it to supporters. It just doesn't make sense. Patreon asked you to change a 'incest' scene for side content and that's where you boldly drew the line for your 'vision'? xD lol, a vision that isn't even 'canon' to the game? I mean, come on.... You have outfits that can be purchased ingame, the logical thing to do is to have those scenes become available if one purchases and equips the costume? Even this solves that problem because then the costume is just 'patched' out to appease patreon.... all this to say, the 'incest' or content crap patreon was talking about clearly wasn't the whole story, just a ready made excuse for Red to bail on MGI and it's supporters. The soundtrack getting released by LewdK was also a clear sign this game was dusted and LewdK wanted to get something for the work he put in since he knew Red had killed it.
No more NSFW - In regards to him hilariously removing NSFW and 'claiming' to make some VNs. I just... what? People can say what they want, I enjoyed the characters and story, sure, but at the end of the day, doesn't matter how you felt about the story. We came to fuck monster girls. Period. And this whole 'I don't want to do sex scenes, they're boring' is hilarious. So, let me get this straight. You stop working on MGI to have apparently been doing MGI Saga/ Love;Again with NO sex in it (aka how YOU want to make the game) yet you have nothing to show? Like, nothing? Aren't you now developing the game WITHOUT the hard/boring part? So where is the content? A screenshot? A gif? Text? NOTHING?! LOL! I hate to admit, but hubris here seems to have killed MGI and that's being nice because truthfully, MGI just had the misfortune of being developed by a shitbag human being. I can only assume with everything presented that Red planned for it to go this way from the start. It makes NO sense to have gotten that many funds (to the point he personally said he got more than enough to finish the game without patreon funds) and you don't bring in help to make your game, let alone finish it yourself. Chapter 4 ends on a cliffhanger. Concidence? I think not. He saw a good point to 'end' the game and took it. Red even says something stupid like 'I can't do a game without help' in his infographic/roadmap. What?! Then PAY people to do all the work, you HAVE the funds. You have more than enough funds to assemble a team under YOU that does everything YOU say to make YOUR vision come to life. Red has to realize outside of just saying 'I don't want to do it' he has no argument with the aforementioned being factually true. At the very least, stop gatekeeping MGI as if you're going to do anything with it, and let someone else bring it to life. This is the final scumbag nail in the coffin of nonsense.
Excuses - Even wanting to go to consoles, makes no sense. You're already on Steam, mate. That's about as far as adult games go, that IS your console. What nonsense is this to act like anyone is going to purchase and buy MGI related things on a Playstation or Xbox? It's a shifting of the goal posts. Even VNs, SFW or not HARDLY drop on console hardware. When I look at this, I see a guy that had no plans to actually EVER finish this thing. He was going to ride the 0.44.... 0.45.... 0.50.... train right until it ended but truth be told the train ended sooner than he expected and for once patreon got rid of a scumbag.
At the end of the day, he was riding that gravy train and would have kept riding it until his patreons started reporting him. I have no doubt that's what happened with a combo of the 'incest' crap. That was easily able to be worked around. It's unfortunate what this does not only to the Monster Girl Genre, but equally to solo or small time devs using crowdfunding. MGI was a really great game. I'm working on my own franchise. I bust my butt to pay my artists, my composers and to equally do my own part in bringing it to life while working every damn day and having to pay all of that out of pocket. It's extremely difficult and yet someone else claims they're 'busy' meaning playing games? Seeing crap like this, it kinda pisses me off. Sometimes, you only get one shot to do something or make something. So you have no excuse to not give it everything you've got and make it the best it came be. Red had one shot to make something truly great and to the bafflement of everyone, he chose to be a fucking loser.
I would love to make adult games that exist within my franchise at some point. I already have monster girls (called Bestials in my franchise) and I'm CERTAINLY going to utilize alot of the girls in MGI as reference for characters within my franchise (possibly even right down to having the names, I don't give a shit). If my first project does well and my company becomes something, I'll certainly put assets towards something like MGI.
Cheers all! Appreciate you if you read this wall.
(But sometimes Red was far worse)..