IoM Steam News!!! (Wall of text incoming!)

Hello people! Today I was going to make a post to say what you can all expect for the second episode of season 2 and what's to come, however, the hottest topic right now is the situation on Steam, so today I'll talk about that, and by Wednesday I'll share with everyone what you can expect for this new season. 🙂

The game was denied on Steam and many people want to know why, however I prefer not to mention it directly on Steam since as I am the developer and I don't know if by sharing the information on Steam I might be breaking any of their rules.

In case someone here wants to check the post, it is here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1958390/eventcomments/6597293740379850661?snr=2_groupannouncements_detail_

However, sharing it here is no problem at all and I know I help the community, as there are people here who want to develop their own games; they have asked me for advice, help, etc. And sharing this data gives very valuable information so they don't make my mistakes. 🙂

They have asked me to make simple changes like for example to remove all the links to Spotify and things like that, these are changes that do not take me much time and if they require it I will do it, changes of that kind do not take me much time and it is not a big disruption either, however there is something that they ask me that is very problematic and for which I am looking for solutions...

The game is created as Early Access (I think you know how Early Access works, an incomplete game is published on Steam and people buy it, trusting its developer, and the developer updates the game).

Here comes the huge problem, which, sadly I was not warned about and honestly I didn't see any warning in the documentation, in the particular case of adult games, to approve a game in Early Access, they are asking me for ALL the adult content that season 2 is going to contain.... They need to evaluate all these scenes before accepting the Early Access, which is impossible to do.... It's incoherent to combine Early Access with adult games, if the game was complete, I would just release it in its entirety and that's it. They are asking me for something that is impossible, and I would have liked someone to help me and recommend me in the process, since they had all the necessary information beforehand, but, sadly that was not the case.

Now, they recommend me to change the game mode and rather sell episode 1 and then the rest of the episodes as DLCs (This way, they would not require me to give them 100% of the adult content of the second season at once, but only the one that the DLC contains and they would evaluate it), which was not my idea, so they are changing the way I wanted to do things and what I had told the community there. However they set the rules and I simply have to follow them if I want to be on that platform, plain and simple. Now, if I do this, I have even more doubts, because if so, the game would no longer be Early Access, and the page says Early Access, so it would be wrong, and maybe I would have to do all the work of creating the page again. In about 30 languages, which is a lot of work...

I don't know exactly what to do and am waiting for a response to an email I sent them (The average reply time for an email is 3 days from my experience with them). This, for everyone's information will not delay episode 2, I have no idea how long this process may take so I will soon start developing episode 2, as I told you, by the middle of this week I will inform you all what I have planned for this season 2, it is very ambitious, and I am anxious to start the development. 🤩

The vacation week I had planned has been screwed up because of this. 😅 However, I hope this information will be useful to all those who are eager to get into adult game development, in short, never mark an adult game as Early Access, it will only get you into trouble. In my opinion, it should be blocked by default for adult game developers.

I have to take this opportunity to mention that I am a super lucky person to have 2 communities as big and supportive as Patreon and Steam. 💗 (Also Subscribestar, but that community is way smaller in size; nonetheless, it's also very supportive) I've had a frenetic weekend receiving invitations on Steam, one message after another and many words of encouragement, and at the same time many messages on Patreon indicating that the start of season 2 has been amazing, I have been blessed with these communities, pure words of praise for all of you, thank you very much. 🙏

I wish you all a wonderful week! 😎