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I just read through that whole post, and... well, honestly, I had no idea you were doing this as a full-time job! Most people I know are doing this on the sidelines in their free time while working a regular full time job. Or while being students, heh.

Frankly, you're more than charismatic enough, at least judging from our conversations. If I compare you to all other indie developers I've had contact with, in terms of charisma and openness, you're clearly in the top third at least, so no issues there.

It's gotta be a PR problem. I've seen maaany Yuri / LBGT+ Kickstarter campaigns by now, most of them advertised by the Yuri Empire (as was your game), and most went well. I'm not sure about Patreon (I greatly dislike running costs), but something like Kickstarter should work.

From my own customer perspective, I'm more likely to pledge higher amounts of money in the context of KS campaigns. It's like the eBay effect; As time's running out, you get that rush of emotions that just pushes you further in terms of spending.

I also think that the presentation of such a campaign (with videos and people explaining their ideas in the video, plus some demo footage) really matters. If it looks solid and trustworthy, I'm far more likely to pledge.

Other than that, I'm honestly shocked. Rose Seed Replica is such a sweet and also deep game (philosophically speaking), that I can't help but be disappointed that so few people got to see and play it.

Bottom line:

"[...] I wanted to make a unique, quirky, genre-defying, adorable, positive, inclusive, non-violent, deep, flaming gay game that no one else could make [...]"

You sure as hell did, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise...

Thank you for the kind words!

I'm not sure if it's the marketing department me failing, the game being too expensive, the economic meltdown hitting my audience hard or the game simply not being brilliant enough compared to competitors. But, in any case, the truth is that other games still seem to sell alright while Rose Seed Replica didn't, so I guess I must have failed one way or the other.

But it happens, and I'm not letting it discourage me. I'm excited to do some real development on my next game already after all those months of testing and marketing. It'll still take a while, but I'll run a Kickstarter campaign once I have something nice to show off. It's surely going to take a lot to convince people that I can make the game happen since I'm still not quite out of the nobody zone, but having at least madeone complete game will hopefully help a bit.

Oh, and I guess I can appear pretty harsh on myself, but I prefer to think that it's better to err on that side than to learn nothing from my mistakes. It's a highly competitive business environment, after all, so taking every opportunity to learn and become better at this is important if I want to succeed.