You can literally scroll back and see dozens of games that have not been marked as abandoned, despite going more than 3 months without an update.
You can clearly see that it is not abandoned, and hiding behind the very arbitrary rules to defend a stupid decision is asinine. If the rules don't serve the original purpose, then they are shit rules and should be changed. If it was automated, and applied to each and every project I could see the defense, but it very clearly is not. Either through ignorance or malice, somebody fucked up and won't admit it.
What is up with this doubling down? It's an easy mistake to fix and nobody would have cared.
Sigh... I'll just quote what I said in another thread, because no one seems to want to bother looking up how this actually works.
I feel there needs to be more highlight on how the Abandoned tag actually works. Nothing against you, most people don't know either, but you've been here 4 years, this information should have reached you in some way.
The F95 staff does not have a direct line of communication with the devs. They don't know any better than we do. The site has it's own rules on what gets labled as Abandoned. The tag is NOT official, and by no means definitive. Anyone can report a thread, the mods will verify if any of the following conditions apply:
- Abandoned: used in the following cases:
- The developer states that the development has been permanently suspended.
- After 3 months of inactivity from the developer's public creator/crowdfunding accounts (Patreon, SS, etc), we will resolve special circumstances or scenarios on a case-by-case basis (no creator accounts, creators developing for free, Patreon accounts under review/ban).
- No game update has been released for an abnormally long period of time (>18 months).
- Game threads that are marked On-hold for over 6 months with no game update.
- Note: this prefix is only removed upon the release of a new update for purchase/download.
1 - This is all an abandoned tag is. More often than not, it just means the dev has lackluster communication, rather than the game being 100% abandoned. Perhaps the rules are flawed, I personally think Discord posts should count. But they are what they are, and as long as it works like this, it falls to devs to follow them if they wish to promote here. This dev is a member of the site, he should be aware of these rules.
2 - The previous Patreon post was made 23rd of September. Which means this could have been labled Abandoned as far back as Dec 23rd. It was labled what, a couple days ago? Which means this game also got away without it for around 3 weeks. So let's calm down on the conspiracy theories. Rules should apply to everyone, if you find other games breaking the rules above without the label, feel free to report.
3 - Instead of witch hunting whoever made the report, how about we hope that the dev takes this as a sign he could be making more frequent reports? More communication is never a bad thing, everyone wins. A simple "hey, development is going fine, the game should be released around January" would have sufficed, and this whole situation would have been avoided.