Apparently, lack of time. VN creation is one of those things that is time intensive and hard to juggle with a job and other personal life commitments.
It is understandable, as much as I (and many of us commenting) think dropping the VN is a mistake and are sceptical of how successful it would be as a book.
(Something can be both understandable and a wrong move at the same time)
That's rough but understandable. When looking for games, I may take a quick look at the update history but mainly just want to paly it to see if it's for me or not.
I found Evermore in early 2024. So, at the time, was still apparently in full development. There were public updates on Patreon showing 0.6 as being in progress.
After that cliffhanger, I was actually contemplating becoming a paid member. Luckily the Indefinite pause update went up just before I decided to pull the trigger.
But it's annoying. I was enjoying experiencing the story as the character. It's a different experience that what I get when reading (or, these days, listening to) books.
It is a shame. Prometheus clearly had the talent, it’s just a shame that it will get overshadowed by the sheer loss of goodwill such a direction shift has brought.
There are plenty of of posts (and upvotes) here showing that people would rather it continued as it was.
For actual support, there are a grand total of 7 comments on the Patreon post. That’s it.
Granted, comments are subscriber-only. So maybe there are a lot of non-paying supporters who are Ok with things. But if that were the case, surely that support would show up here?
The story’s audience is VN players and I highly suspect this is unlikely to change much any time soon.
I think multiple things are clear at this point:
I can see this last point being very problematic. A quick search on Amazon shows that “Evermore” is not an original title. And many of them are already fantasy and/or romance.
Starting over as a regular novel series just feels like setting up for failure.
Unless the dev has a miraculous change of heart (unlikely), it is abandoned in game/VN form.
Apparently, it will eventually be released as a series of books. But the current hanging plotline… I wouldn’t expect resolution and time this decade.
Personally, as someone who has seen stories go on hiatus since the 90s and 00s, I don’t see it ever resolving. Every once in a a while it does happen but it’s rare enough to not be worth keeping your hopes up.
That’s the bit they’re not taking into account.
Rather than seeing it as the dawn of a new book series, it’s merely Yet Another Abandoned Indie Game/VN”.
There have been so many over the years that most people are just likely to move and on forget. Those that don’t, many will just remain pissed that the original got dropped.
The real question here is when will the story catch up to the cliffhanger reveal? (And will it even get that far?)
Leaving it there then going back to rework the story from the beginning is just… I dunno, it leaves a bad taste.
This isn’t like a show being cancelled by a network, or a commercial game series being dropped by a publisher.
And it’s not like long running series that get dropped because the author has to stop entirely.
It’s someone making a conscious decision to change from one medium to another and rewrite from the beginning, despite a major cliffhanger, and to hell with the audience.
Even if that wasn’t the intention, it is how it comes across.
Question, though. What are the chances of success if a significant chunk of the current follower have zero interest in the change of direction?
At least, not until the "new" series catches up to the current cliffhanger.
This just feels like a massive misstep. I've seen enough of them over the years to recognise the signs. Pivoting a product away from what people want, absolutely convinced they'll win people over. I've seen projects and entire platforms/companies fail over this kind of thing.
You cannot force people to like a product they don't want to. If you're really lucky, you can hit on the right combination of factors that really does pull people in. More often than not, though, you have to make what people are asking for or you don't have a sustainable audience.
As long as he gets he may have to rebuild the audience practically from zero.
The current audience likely want it mostly as-is. Not many are guaranteed to want to shift to a whole new medium.
Even those that are willing are mostly going to want to see the story progress. Currently fans will mainly rejoin when the current cliffhanger resolves. Oh, they'll dip in to see how the rewrite goes but they won't want to retread old ground.
It would almost be better to just start over with a whole new story. People who like the narrative style will still get something familiar but with no preconceptions or regrets about how the story should go.
Then, once established, revisit Evermore after having proved that he can complete a project before revisiting an abandoned one.
Because, yes, to all intents and purposes Evermore is abandoned, even if the narrative isn't dropped forever.
Although the level of vitriol is disappointing, the general sentiment here is quite understandable and (to be honest) justified.
Something that was enjoyed for what it was has been cancelled in favour of recreating it as something that it wasn't. Of course people are pissed.
Especially anyone who stayed subscribed to the Patreon. Yes, subcribing to a Patreon is a risk. Yes, staying subbed to one that's on hiatus is a bigger risk. But going silent for a year before announcing a total shift in direction is a little sketchy.
As I said in the comments on the actual post, for me, whether I continue to follow is completely down to if there's an audiobook. That's how I experience book these days. When driving. When on a train (standing room, to space to hold a book). When doing household chores (adulthood sucks, but these tasks need completing).
If I have time to sit down, I'm gaming or playing VNs. And this was one of the good ones.
And now it's abandoned. Something may rise in its place, wearing its skin, but it won't be the same.
I'll never not want to know where it could have gone in the VN format.
I enjoy exploring the world visually.
I'd love to know how, and how not, to attract the other women. And see where the relationship combinations could go.
You have to take it in the direction you need to go. But it was as a VN that hooked many of us into it.
Personally, the only other format I follow is audiobook. And having the characters be acted (even b a single narrator) would be excellent. But given the time it would take to write, then sell enough to cover the cost, the actually record. It'd be years. Maybe I'll be nostalgic for a story that grew from a VN I had fond memories of. Maybe I'll've moved on.
Who knows.
I'm in two minds as to what I think about this.
On the one hand, the direction of the overall plot was interesting and a part of me would love to see where it ends up going - regardless of the medium.
On the other, I got into this because of it being a (A)VN. And part of what made it an interesting story, for me at least, was the relationships aspects. In all of their harem/smut glory.
Aspects of some of the characters and events just wouldn't work as well if you toned down or removed the sexual aspects.
Ultimately, though, for me it'll boil down to a combination of how much gets toned down and whether there's an audiobook version. I very rarely read regular books anymore. I listen to audiobooks on my commute and play games & VNs during my downtime.
A good story and a good narrator and I'll continue to follow the story.
(Even if, to me, it'll never quite beat experiencing it in VN/game form. That's what hooked me in the first place.)
You should be worried.
Right now, adult game pages are still accessible but the developers' pages are not. So, you'll say goodbye to even existing followers being able to easily discover any new games.
Chances are they'll put in some sort of age verification process soon. But that still requires people to want to jump through that particular hoop.
As you say, there's a chance even your own dashboard could be locked out.
And the main thing really is that all it now takes is some lobby group on a power trip to convince whoever government at the time that your particular subject matter is potentially harmful to kids and you can kiss visibility goodbye.
Itch fighting this here would mean ALL creators here get fucked.
You're not wrong but it does go a bit deeper than that.
Intentionally or not, Itch are now saying that they heavily favour safe content. And that the definition of "safe" can change at any time, depending on who can bully the flow of money at any given time. Which doesn't quite sound like the open marketplace for independent digital creators with a focus on independent video games that Itch still claims to be.
We're all angry about this buy boycotting itch won't help anything, they're probably lost half their revenue from this situation, and might not even survive. We should probably be supporting them.
It's never quite that simple in cases like this, though.
If external circumstances stop a company form providing what you're after, how can you support them if there's no actual reason to use them. A similar, but not NSFW, situation would be a store being let down by a supplier. It's not the store's fault they aren't stocking what you want to buy but it doesn't change the fact that they aren't stocking what you want to buy.
It may not be a deliberate boycott but the end result is the same. There are people who will not use Itch whilst the current stance stands. For no other reason than devs won't go where they can't supply their games and players won't go where they can't buy them.
They made the wrong choice, IMO.
They are going to haemorrhage users because of this. Players go where the games are. They're not going to stick around.
I get that they're between a rock and a hard place, the problem is I don't think they quite understand that yet. Or, at least, they're hoping (uselessly) to avoid it.
Without payment processors, they can't charge customers or pay devs. This is true. But without customers there's nothing to pay with.
And they will lose customers over this. And lose word-of-mouth goodwill. This is going to hurt them.
People will just move to whatever the next big thing is. Eventually the payment processors will get jumpy when things get too popular but it takes time to get up to critical mass.
Sadly, you can't. I assume you're using the desktop app.
It can only download games through Itch's own platform. As far as I've been able to figure out the past year or so, it simply can't handle third-party downloads. Sadly, as VNs tend to be very graphics/video have, a lot of them just go over the limit Itch can handle.
All you can do is download from a regular browser and run the game directly from its folder, not using itch as a launcher.
That certianly appears to be how it works. Although, a lot of people don't seem to grasp it so maybe it's not universally obvious.
Or maybe it's just more obvious if you follow the Patreon, which people following the free releases likely won't be.
It certainly looks like the current release series is 0.3.x(a/b/etc.)
With the free/itch version always being at .x-1. But, I assume, the most complete iteration of it.
So those of us paying on the Patreon get 0.3.4, which has had three sub-releases so far. But, I assume, once 0.3.5 starts to come out on Pateron, the itch.io version will then be 0.3.4c
But it will "appear" like the Patreon version is the only one getting obvious movement. However, only because the "latest" version seems to get released in smaller chunks. The itch.io version will make fewer, but larger, jumps, to the latest of the previous release.
