Progress of the new update and other information

Today's progress report will contain a huge rant, but sadly there's a lot of bad news to cover.

I'm sure you've heard the recent news about bans targeting nsfw games. An Australian organization called "Collective Shout" has been pressuring payment processors to remove certain types of nsfw games from game stores (steam and itchio). The power payment processors hold over them is huge, without them stores can't sell anything and there aren't that many alternatives in that business. This is the first time steam completely bended the knee. They modified their rules to explicitly say pretty much "We will ban anything that payment processors don't like" and banned many games. Soon after that itchio was hit. Itchio being a smaller platform and one that doesn't vet the games to the extent steam does didn't have much choice and delisted all nsfw games until further notice. Delisting means, you can't search for/games don't show up anywhere on their website. While this is a temporary solution we don't know how long will it last. It will likely take months if not years. There's thousands of nsfw games on itch and I assume they'd have to be manually checked by itchio staff.

Itchio's delisting of nsfw games has affected us directly.

The amount of new users our game is getting is dramatically going down. The little peak there is thanks to my posts on twitter, but that can only get us so far. As you might know our game was not allowed on steam and itch was by far our biggest source of new players. Losing itch is terrible news for our game. I will go into more detail about what that means for us, but let me digress a little.

Nsfw game industry to many seems like an easy way to earn money, but reality isn't as pretty. There are many issues that I don't want to bore you with, but the biggest one has always been payment processors. Do you know how can you withdraw money from Patreon? There are two ways: Paypal, Payoneer. Both don't allow nsfw content in their rules, meaning at any time your account can get banned and you will no longer be able to withdraw money. (We for example got banned from Payoneer already) Paypal is even worse. If Paypal catches you, you will not only lose your account, you will lose your money. This has happened to other developers before. For example Toffer Team lost 35k$(link) and there are many cases when smaller developers got robbed like this and couldn't do anything.

The current fiasco with steam and itch isn't something new. This is what we, nsfw game developers deal with daily. This is the first case when they hit someone as big as steam. Payment processors really shouldn't have that much power over what is and isn't allowed.

What can you do to help? Biggest way to help I'd say would be to tell people about this situation. The more people know, the more people will protest it. There are petitions like this one that you can sign. People are also calling visa, mastercard, paypal, stripe etc. to ask them about this whole thing in hopes of annoying them enough for it to bring change.

So what's the future for our game? There are different scenarios and it depends on how the situation develops.

Best case:

itchio restores nsfw games within a few months and we don't get hit with a ban. We will be able to continue as we've done till now.

Worst case:

if itchio doesn't restore nsfw games or they ban our game, we will have to heavily change our approach. Without itch it's only a matter of time till our support on Patreon dwindles. The only way MDRG can survive in that situation would be to switch to a paid model and sell our game on other smaller game stores. In this scenario the update we're working on right now would likely be the last update and we'd start working on a completely new game, one that could be released on steam.

Of course this doesn't cover all possibilities and it's hard to tell what future holds, but this situation sucks. I will make sure the current update happens, but the future ones are definitely in danger.

To finish off here's a few words from the artist (Sixie): This has been one of the darkest time for our game and the whole industry, but I'll still return with Jun's smug smile.

Oh and I hope you like the progress of new shower scenes! It's the first time you will be able to see her ass like that!

And as always thanks for your support. Without you, the game wouldn't exist.