A lot of things being pointed out always assume that the dev knows what happens in this thread and on patreon without any evidence of such. That they are watching but not saying anything until something happens. Which they then need to go into damage control over.
From that perspective if it was all true would make anything seem like a scam, sure. But the reality is no one even knows if the dev logs in to patron and looks at anything. Or if they look at the email associated with their patron.
August is one month after the month window of June-July they had planned and thought the update was going to be done by. That is what they stated and to me they made a post that next month because of missing that window. If you look back at the page on the dev often missed their own self set windows for release. Often giving away the update to those that were subbed for the month(s) that the update was intended to come out by.
We can both speculate as to what the devs intentions are and if they are secretly observing everything and not responding but it would be just that speculation. The truth is no one knows what’s going on. I don’t particularly think the update is just going to drop and I’m not sure the project is being worked on at all anymore. But calling it out as a scam and that this was all some big brain masterminded way to take advantage of the community is too much of a leap to make without the sufficient evidence that claim requires.
If you go back beyond this current update the dev has said that an update is close to ready and it’s not released for a period of time then as well. This isn’t the first instance of this. As time goes on the time between the updates has increased each time.
I’m not trying to defend any behavior on the devs end they got themselves into this situation but spreading misinformation is dangerous and making speculative leaps can be just as harmful. If the intent about any of this is to draw attention for others to beware of the devs possible inactivity and cation support to save hardships and people’s money. I’m all for it. But outright referring to what has happened as a planned scam as if it’s an established fact is misleading .
That is a good point - I wonder if the customs for the $30 tier are getting filled or if he’s radio silent on those as well. I don’t see anyone complaining in the comments about those being ignored but I figure those people would also be able to get word about why things are what they are which also isn’t the case. Maybe no one is at that tier so it’ll remain an unknown.
Fair enough. I can understand that. I just see similar behaviour/patterns that happened the last time a Dev started acting like this and that didn’t exactly turn out well. My utter frustration is that certain Devs need to be held accountable but that’s irrelevant to this forum so i’ll drop it.
What i would say is if you’re looking to invest in a Dev, this guy isn’t it. From may to november i’ve invested roughly £35 (own choice) and in return i’ve seen two posts and nothing about the actual game. Regardless of if said update comes out this year it’s poor.
Sure I had been supporting the dev since they started the patron until I think June I had many times where I was going to stop because of the consistent lack of communication. I never minded how long it took but I just needed some reassurance that my support was worth it.
I want the dev to be able to come back and regain trust and launch an update. That however might be a long hard path they put themselves on. I think there are many, rightfully so, upset individuals I just don’t want to see the rhetoric around the disgruntled feelings at the situation distort what we actual do know. Especially for those who aren’t as well versed in the ongoings on patreon over the course of development.
I’m all for people being aware of the situation and being cautious until anyone knows more though. As they rightfully should be able to choose how there money is spent and hopefully do so safely.
Sigh…Here we go again talking about something we’ve been trying to warn people about for months and in one case almost a full calendar year. I don’t know Bobo or Voca personally but nobody with a pair of working eyes can deny that both of them have created a cloud of negativity and deception with their behaviour. I agree that calling someone is a scammer and a thief is a serious accusation and should only be said when warranted evidence is presented. Bobo has earned over 5 figures on a side hobby, god bless him for making some pretty good money for a niche fetish VN, but are you seriously telling me you can’t login one single time over the last few months and say anything? You could post the eggplant emoji and that would be more of an effort than anything he has done. His absolute ridiculous tier prices are way to much for any monthly subscription but people are willing to do it so I won’t cry over spilled milk. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, when you put content behind a paywall, you have a responsibility to keep up to date with your subscribers. Ignoring messages and going quiet on status updates when your making any amount of money is unacceptable.
Voca is in the same boat too, he’s actually worse and deserves the accusations he’s been getting. He never responds to messages, blocked all his accounts that he’s ever had so nobody can message him, and still earns money after saying he couldn’t because of his job.
There’s a lot of people who don’t want to hear the truth, but we all play a part in this too. Stop defending and protecting scummy devs that don’t give to shits about your hard earned money. Start speaking with your wallets and stop subscribing to these devs Patreons every month. I’ve subscribed to both of these devs multiple times and was duped like everyone else and you know what I did? I unsubscribed and haven’t given them a penny for all their lies and false hopes.
All in all guys, not every dev with a Patreon is a scammer, but when we encounter one’s that fit the mold, we have to have better ways of protecting new users and hold shady devs accountable for misleading supporters and earning money for doing less than nothing.
This is getting dangerously close to another thread discussing this exact issue, sparked from this very game. It seems we’re doomed to go through the same “aaa, dead game, scummy dev” loop every few months.
I’m not going to rehash what’s already been said, but to this point in particular what happens on Patreon is an issue for Patreon (or any other payment site). It’s unreasonable to expect every Patreon link on the site to be checked to see if the developers are doing their work (at which point this whole “make games as a hobby” thing becomes much more like an office job), and ultimately it’s the user’s responsibility to decide where they’re going to spend their money.
This situation sucks, sure, but if people either can’t read the hundreds of posts talking about the lack of updates or check the Patreon’s activity (or ideally both) before pledging support then that decision is entirely on them. I don’t see any reason why WeightGaming should be responsible for that.
I don’t disagree with all of what you said, I haven’t posted anything in months but I still check the site to see what’s been going on. I never knew that there was a thread made talking about this situation but like you said, its unreasonable to think someone has a finger on the pulse of everything going on.
What I have a counter argument to is your last sentence about how WeightGaming isn’t responsible for Patreon activities. I agree with you that Patreon problems should be dealt with on Patreon first and devs should be dealing with subscribers on that platform. Totally reasonable, its not your business. What I think is being lost in all of this, and maybe we aren’t typing out what we have in our head as we are trying to explain this on our end, is this site is the biggest and most known location for this community to interact with similar minded people. It’s also the easiest and biggest site for devs to create game threads and link their various external sites to garner as much attention and traffic as possible. The reach it has whether good or bad is real and to think that this site holds no blame for allowing a few (not all) devs free exemption from ghosting supporters is not fair to the people that want to shed light on suspicious behavior. Again you’re right, you can’t know every single little detail on what’s been happening on a devs Patreon, but its fair to assume that if there’s a lot of traffic on a specific dev that’s using this site to promote their game, then stepping in and doing an internal investigation is totally within someone’s responsibilities here. There are a lot of things that someone with the authority here can do i.e: message the dev, lock the thread for a certain period, delete the thread etc. This site has a lot of reach and if a shady creator was to lose a thread here or be held to respond in order to get it back, it would lower their subscribers and monthly earnings on Patreon and would give new users here a warning, and if they still go and subscribe then that’s on them.
Anyway I’ll stop rambling on as I guess that I’m not talking about the game in this thread anymore, but I see where you’re coming from and I hope I explained this a bit better from my end on the things the community has been trying to say as well.
If one is feeling disgruntled about the matter, speak with your wallet, unsub, wait til there’s an update; following devs on patreon is free. Finances can be a trouble for some, so its understandable when the cost of a service isnt realized, but it’s off-kilter for someone to be upset that others are spending money when oneself does not feel the cost is justified. One persons “wasting money” is another persons “supporting content creation”. To that effect it seems a bit unfair to call out a devs monthly revenue for “doing nothing” when its moreso “showing nothing”, for all we know there could be some serious workings going on, however I completely understand the trepidation felt by many given tangential events. burned once, twice shy, as they say.
Bemoaning the circumstance publicly seems in poor taste, and comparing an unknown circumstance to other devs shenanigans is to assume a very black & white outlook on development as a whole. inciting an angry mob is not the answer if you truly want an update.
This comment is not about Patreon owners. Not attacking, not defending.
There’s a lesson here for current and would-be Patreon supporters, unless you’ve got money to throw around:
For every account you support, keep track of the last time they released their main thing. For this purpose, nothing else counts. Every month, take a minute per account to consider again: “given this month’s progress, am I still happy about funding this one?” Think about, if they posted a release of the usual size today, how much you would have paid for it. Would you be willing to pay that price for it? If not, then it’s time to pull out, promises or no. Never say to yourself, “But I’ve already spent $$$, I can’t waste it!” or “I don’t want to miss the next update, I’ll sub until then and then stop”.
Another way to to say it: your money alone is probably not enough to change the pace of development enough for anyone to notice. You shouldn’t spend the money hoping to make the updates bigger or sooner. You should look at what has been posted recently, at what tiers, and ask what tier you should have been at the last couple months to be most happy with the results, and go for that one.
You cannot control the Patreons. You can control your money.
People will speculate if there isn’t any official information released.
Creators fading out while leaving the billing running isn’t anything new or even anything specific to Patreon. Same thing happens in other subscription based platforms too like in OnlyFans. There is just quite a big catch on it for the creator to not to say no to money people give. And some of them don’t even consider it being scam if they didn’t promise anything specific in return.
Although there’s no answer coming out from bobo i’m still surprised he’s making a grand. Around 300+ patrons and ~500 followers, and if those 300 patrons suddenly agrees to stop supporting him either he comes out saying something or we can confirm the game’s dead after ~4 months of seeing the same promises. If i’m not wrong i think he did something like this when he dropped 0.2. So we got enough opinions about this before we start repeating the same thing like parrots over and over again lmao
Y’know, all i hear is a lotta talk about the project, patreon, and so on.
Is it a scam? is it not?.
Long and short, if the patreon ain’t worth it, unsubscribe, i dunno how many projects of promise have existed over the years since crowdfunding became a thing that have just vanished off into the ether but if that’s the case here, then it’s a drop in a very vast ocean.
Plus, there’s the matter of people just don’t tend to unsubscribe to things because they forget. Yes Bobo could pause the whole thing, however.
Still! i feel that while it may feel justified to some, keep the accusations of being a con, aside until you know that it’s more or less a certainty.
Which brings me to my point: is the creator okay? are they in a good space mentally? are they still even alive? it’s worth pointing out that, well, lack of logins here and lack of social media presence?
Its hard to say about creator, I have not seen any links to social media for them, only posts here and patreon which are not wery descriptive and any problems with exception of business trip this spring were mentioned after they were resolved.
And I agree in thinking that what is happening now can’t be nececerily clasified as con or anything like that as we don’t have too many facts. At the same time I think its good to discuss this. as you say people tend to forget to unsubscribe or not care, but if they forget discussion like this might remind them if they don’t care good for the creator I guess like Voca Labs that openly announced cancellation of the Thicker Treat almost year ago with no communication after that still has 43 paying patreons (kind of funny given Voca Labs was saying he is cancelling due to having to disclose any sources of income and not wanting to have fetish game on there, but is still taking money year later for it)
But even considering that Voca Labs was upfront about the game getting cancelled even though he promissed one more version that never made it out. Compared to that Bobo wrote multiple times that V0.4 is almost finished and will be out soon and those comments were followed by months of silence only to get “not dead, it will be ready soon” in August and again nothing but silence from Bobo. That kinda raises alarms that are hinting to this being not too honest and people feel need to warn others who might care.
Bro this is getting out of hands. everybody just chill this forum has nothing to do with patraon activities if you have complaints you can do that there not here this is a peaceful place for god sake
We know Bobo had to do sudden work outside of the country before and in the August post he also mentioned difficulties with file size/compression of the new images and a count for them ~1400. Limited access to internet/workstation + computationally intensive remaining work could definitely explain the continued delay. Most things on this site are passion projects, typically made by people with little experience in the medium they’re working in. Something seeming ‘almost done’ and then taking many times as long to complete isn’t remotely surprising. I can see him not wanting to/not being able to release an 8gb game because of uncompressed images but also having that be a massive bottleneck for workflow.
As for communication I think it’s worth turning to some other non-grift instances - there’s been a lot of talk about other instances of abandonment and that’s fully justified but considering counterexamples is also worthwhile. Hello Games gets talked about a lot as an instance of positive change but one of their early issues was total radio silence - they didn’t say anything post-launch and just focused on working. The belief was (and I’m not saying this is correct) that continually announcing intentions and delays would burn further trust. I don’t know Bobo, but I know that people can respond to guilt for continual failure (delays) by shutting down their communication. Maybe he abandoned the project because of that and is still cashing checks, maybe he’s working and doesn’t want to come out with another delay post after so many. We can say and understand that having explanations would be preferable but that’s different than feeling that way as an individual while under pressure to deliver what you feel you have to.
Those are my generous/optimist takes on the situation, I fully understand the pessimistic ones, particularly from those who have been burned before and in similar situations. My stance at this point is that I hope the game gets updated but I wouldn’t start recurring Patreon payments until/unless the update is released, maybe it’s worth it to grab for one month so you can download the most recent version - I don’t consider the cost high for a single month relative to the amount of game there is but that’ll vary based on individual finances.
Honestly if I was Bobo, I’d be terrified to even dare come back even with an update in fear of having an army of pitch-fork wielding fat lovers after my blood demanding where I’ve been/why it took so long… as others have said, just unsubscribe, don’t pay anymore, and get over it.
Okay i didn’t want to do this but this is really getting out of hand! @Krodmandoon hate to ask you but can you lock this topic down for a while please?, i think everyone needs to cool down!
I think you really can’t compare Hello Games and one person project. Hello Games is an actual business with actual financial connections and burdens related to it.
Would agree patreon is just a here’s money for this project but only posting it’s nearly done when it isn’t is at that point promising a product for supporting and not receiving multiple times has no justification. And the tiers offer general support, voting for what you want to see and to add your own suggestions, but the lack of content means lack of voting, lack of suggestions as he doesn’t respond. At basic level unless the sub tiers was just get game whenever it’s out its false promises.
All of this, every bit of this would easily be resolved with basic communication, screen shots and proof of game progression if any.
People like me are rightfully mad, everything said, every angry person on here is all on bobo
