As someone who used to support Gunsmoke, (did for almost three years), I legitimately thought this game was worth the 5$ a month I was pledging for it. Got access to builds early, got to be part of the discord, met some pretty cool people there. After they moved to the 'bi-monthly' releases, I thought that would mean more content, after all, they had twice the amount of time to work on a build as opposed to monthly releases. And then bi-monthly becomes bi-monthly plus a few days, then a week, then a few weeks, then almost three months. I wound up pulling my pledge because I was sick of giving them free money, only for them to keep jerking everyone's chains with empty promises of 'it'll be out by the end of the week, it'll be out by the weekend, it'll be out next week'. I stopped pledging to Oni for the same reasons, a lot of empty promises regarding possible release dates that they kept missing. Whether this is because they are falling behind on work, biting off more than they can chew when working on each build, or they're just setting up potential launch days just so people will stay invested even though they have no intention of honoring that release day, I've had enough.
The last build for this game came out in NOVEMBER, four months ago, going on five now. Even if you factor in Gunsmoke taking a break for the holidays, that's still more than enough time to crank out another build. The sad part was that the build launched in November was supposed to be their October build (I think), meaning they were also incredibly late on THAT build too.
Missing deadlines is already annoying enough, yet the minds behind SU keep insisting they're doing bi-monthly builds even though the gap between releases only grows with each new build. They're milking the patrons they still have left. There's an easy way around this and they aren't taking it. They could do the method of only charging patrons when a build is actually released (but then they wouldn't get months of free money for no effort). Or they could change the release schedule again, do a 'the build will be released when it's ready', rather than 'it'll be out on the 12th of never'. Hell, that's basically what they're doing now, only releasing the builds when they're ready. If Gunsmoke or Smoke-Shank would just come out and say that, I wouldn't have as much problems with what they're doing. But it's because of this baiting with empty promises that I will never pledge money to this game ever again. You can use the argument of 'well, you're getting the game for free by pirating it, so you don't have a right to complain' all you want. I've already paid MORE than enough for this game.
SU may be a fun game, maybe one of the best on this site, but it's definitely not worth all the months I gave gunsmoke free money.
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