Patreon not immune to drama: $42,000-per-month-earning, Farmville-style hentai game cancelled

Breeding Season

Bad news for anyone into watching badly-drawn monsters sexlessly humping anime catgirls in a repeating animation loop – Breeding Season has been cancelled. 

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Breeding Season was pitched as “Harvest Moon meets hentai”, but it really looks more “Facebook meets hentai”. Despite this, it saw mega success from certain groups, throwing money at it presumably in protest at the way the industry is progressing. It was earning $42,000 per month through Patreon alone at one point.

It’s Brexit all over again, basically. All the team’s promises have turned to dust, the money has gone and the project is cancelled. This decision was apparently made because of a dispute with former Art Director Vladimir Sandler, via Kotaku.

In a Breeding Season blog post written by project creator “Harista-PipeBomb”, the creator claims Sandler, AKA S-Purple and Shwig, was given an “incredibly generous contract” that gave him the full rights to his art and allowed him to take half the revenue. Imagine calling yourself Shwig.

Since last month, Shwig has been conspicuously absent from the project, and during that time a very similar project called Cloud Meadow, featuring familiar art, cropped (sorry) up.

“[Shwig] had gone entirely behind our backs to spend an entire month’s worth of work (for which he collected over $9,000 of patron money, by the way) working on a new project that he planned to abandon Breeding Season entirely for,” Harista writes in the blog post.

“Not even once had he brought up to me the notion of him leaving the project or faced me directly with his desire for different leadership. Instead he took the most cowardly possible option, to the point of even fooling Subtank [another artist] into believing the work he was doing was for Breeding Season’s benefit, and straight-up swindled us.”

The swindling accusation is aimed at what happened after. Shwig allegedly walked off with half of the studio’s savings, which his contract allowed, but he also invoked his right to his art and demanded it was stripped (sorry) from Breeding Season. Harista offered to buy the assets, but old Shwiggy wouldn’t have none of it, the blog post says.

“This leaves Breeding Season half stripped of assets,” Harista continues. “Effectively, this would scrap the entire project as it currently stands, forcing us to start over completely from square one. There is absolutely no viable reason for him to do this except to be an emotionally-stunted man-child destroying someone else’s sandcastle.

“He can’t even reasonably repurpose any of these assets for use in another project because anything that is either based on my design or was touched by any of the other artists or animators also jointly belongs to me. And there is no way in fucking hell I am letting him get away with what he did on any level.”

“Breeding Season is over, we’re never even making it out of alpha and every promise we ever fucking made is invalidated by the fact I put too much trust in someone else to do the right thing.”

Shwig has since responded to these accusations in a blog of his own, citing disagreements with the management of Breeding Season and claiming Cloud Meadow is his way to “deliver on the spirit of the promises made by the project”.

“The way the actual Breeding Season game development was going, it would never have actually been finished, even if myself and the other artists worked 24/7,” Shwig writes. “I had intended to not take the money owed to me for the month I worked on this from Breeding Season’s accounts, and simply announce this at the same time as I announced my resignation so that people would see that while Breeding Season might finally be dead, they would still have a valid option for funding a game about banging monstergirls/boys and running a monster farm.”

It’s a messy, public affair, but it’s worth remembering that the real vicitims here are those who funded the thing. It definitely highlights the risk of crowdfunding, and it’s one of the reasons I’ll never put my hand in my pocket for a crowdfunded game.

At the same time, I’m glad some people do, as we’ve had plenty of Kickstarter success stories that have led to brilliant games.