I’m going to clear up some things here.
You have heard nothing from this game because it is a scam. The developer Critical Bliss is a scammer and a con artist. He is quite literally the Yandere Simulator Developer of western erotic games.
The information in this post comes from me watching the way Critical Bliss operates for the past three years. Over time, developers have cut ties to him or blacklisted him because of what I am going to tell you below. My developer group (Kyungeki) has absolved all relations to him last year but kept watching to see what would happen. Nothing has changed or improved.
Critical Bliss consist of one person. He is a former professional marketer with the goal of taking the money of everyone he encounters with minimal effort on his part. Those side games he is “publishing” are an attempt to get Patreon and Kickstarter money off of their work, and then run away with it. He will not allow any of those games to release on an expected schedule. If a game looks like it will soon be finished, he will convince the creator that something is not done right, which will cause to game will tank so it is better to never release it. This method of continuing to push back deadlines allows him to suck up as much Patreon money and Kickstarter money as possible will stringing along expectant fans.
Any developer he partners with, he will do everything possible to control the Steam account, Kickstarter campaign, or whatever method that will make the money goes to him first. Then he can “allow” the developer to have a cut. To get the initial trust of a developer, he will scout naive ones. He will promise “I can get [blank] artist to work on your game!” Or “I have [blank] developer that can do [unfamiliar] part of your game for you!” Or “I can get you a ton of marketing! Look at these other games my fingers have touched!” Never mind that these other games had cult followings before he even knew about them. He does the bare minimum of marketing if any at all. You can even see how devoid of updates his own Patreon and Kickstarter page are for WMNAD. He does not do email updates, or reach out to forums, or mention the game anywhere outside of his own Discord.
If you have a complaint or concern, and you are a backer, he will usher you out of the public eye of Twitter or Patreon or Kickstater and into his Discord. There he will direct message you with empty promises and “proof” that the game is still being worked on. In reality, he is doing everything he can to make sure the game never makes progress. If you dare to bring this up in a public channel of the Discord he will give you warning and then a ban, or just an outright ban and messages removed.
If the developer he is “publishing” is keen enough to push their game to completion, he will immediately insist on a “marketing percentage” for all of his hard work. He will fight tooth and nail not to have this in any kind of contract. He will insist on a verbal agreement because “you can trust me right?” Otherwise you are a racial slur. If the developer looks to have particularly high potential he may cave and allow a written agreement. If you show any uncertainty in this process he will offer to write it himself. For “free” as he will convince you you can’t afford a basic contract lawyer. He will then type up a “contract” with the legal power of a wet noodle in Microsoft Word over the course of four months, so as to delay your game as much as possible. In a verbal agreement or a written contract he will go back on it. He will suddenly decide to stop paying you because of “personal money problems”. That will then be backed up with a sob story of how hard his life is right now, so he needs your promised money to make up for his own terrible budgeting practices.
By the way, if you talk to him for any extended length (because he insists on voice calls and no text communication, likely since there will be no written transcript that can be saved) you will see his personality to be the most un-ironic caricature of a Dave Chappell sketch. He has a loud hatred of anything resembling professionalism and a love of anything sleaze. Most people rightfully take his presentation as a running joke. But it is not. He really is that kind of person.
When WMNAD was early in development a number of skilled individuals volunteered to help. If anyone made something substantial, their contributions would be taken and then they would be sidelined with a promise of future tasks to work on. No one would get future work. But they are just volunteers, it is no problem right? Well not everyone was a volunteer. More than one artist would be hired to make some graphics for the game, and then he would give that artist less and less work until nothing. This is because they were moving too fast for his tastes. Any of those amazing artists could have finished this short 2D visual novel in 3 or so months. Instead it has been drawn out to three years. But he “hired” them right? He paid them a lump sum once, and then promised them a cut of the profits when the game sold. Unknown to them, the game will never be sold. These artists would check in every week or so expecting another assignment. They set aside larger and greater projects to be ready to work on this with the expectation of a nice payout. He will give them an excuse of “next week”. There is always another week. He does this just to gleefully waste their time and stop them from focusing on something that may take attention away from his never-to-be-completed game.
Art is only one major part of a 2D visual novel. The other part is the game/engine itself. He has refused to use a proven and community supported visual novel engine like Ren’py or RPGMaker or Visual Novel Maker or even Unity. Instead, it must be made with the most low-powered and out-dated software he could find: TyranoBuilder. For one, this allows him to blame any delays on legitimate tech issues. Two, he can claim he built the entire game from scratch by himself, since he can’t find anyone to do it. The reality is that this is a lie. CB’s sister entity is Lewd Media, which runs the hentai and eroge review site Lewd Gamer. The developer behind Lewd Gamer is phenomenal. That developer has skills that would make multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley engineers worried about their positions. And that developer is barred from touching the (atrocious) source code of WMNAD. As is any outside developer that offers assistance to the game’s technical issues. Much like YandereDev, when legitimate progress is made or possible, he scrambles to kill it, since that would make his scam come to an end.
Similarly to how he would push back the release date of his “publishing” games indefinitely, he has done the same to WMNAD on Steam. He did this to stay at the top of Steam’s “Coming Soon” algorithm of recommended games. This is part of why you have seen WMNAD on the bottom scrollbar of recommended games when looking at similar erotic games on Steam. Steam made this a bannable offense for Steamworks developers last year.
Why did it take so long for a post like this to be made? Because my development group (Kyungeki) began to get seriously taken advantage of and antagonized by him in April 2019. Since then, we wanted to build our case with as much facts as possible and hoped something changed before exposing this behaviour.
What can you do about this? Take it off your Steam wishlist. Report the game’s Patreon. Report the game’s Kickstarter for fraud. Don’t support scams like this. It makes every independent erotic games developer look horrible. It is already a niche genre of games and unsure developers. Behaviour like Critical Bliss’ erodes the trust of everyone and guarantees that the genre never grows.
Happy Mother’s Day, 2020.
Stay safe.
