💌 Patreon floats anniversary billing and HuniePop 2 has a release date in Mr. Hands' Naughty List #13
Hello, lovelies!
This has been a wonderful week for adult games news, with big game announcements, changes to Patreon, and people being horny for tall vampire ladies. So I hope you’re strapped in tight because this newsletter is jam-packed with all that goodness and more!
And if you don’t mind a weekly dose of games about love, sex, and romance in your inbox, why not consider subscribing?
Let’s get into it!
Patreon floats (another) change in payment processing
In a move that has not been universally well-received, Patreon has announced that they are experimenting with a new way of processing payments they call “Anniversary Billing”. Currently, customers on Patreon (called patrons) are charged a subscription fee for each creator they support on the first day of each calendar month. Patreon is now running a pilot where patrons are charged on the day of the month that they subscribed originally
Long-time creators on Patreon were blindsided by these changes and say they were not consulted prior to its implementation.
Patreon’s reasoning for this change is that they saw a lot of customer complaints about supposedly being charged twice for the same subscription. Patrons are currently charged an (optional) onboarding fee that allows them to access a creator’s backlog immediately and are charged a monthly subscription on the first day of the next month. If these dates are close together it can appear that Patreon is charging twice for the same subscription.
The problem with Patreon’s solution is that Anniversary Billing makes certain business models on Patreon a lot harder to implement. When creators ship out physical rewards to their patrons, they need to check if all the payments came through beforehand in order to avoid losing money. If all the payments are processed on the first day of the month, the administrative overhead is very small: creators can batch all the shipments together and send them out a few days into the new month.
But when payments come in on different days of the month, they will need to either track every payment for every patron or send rewards always one month delayed. For small-time creators, this increased amount of paperwork will make it impossible for them to offer physical rewards to their patrons.
Infuriatingly, it appears that these pending changes to the platform have not been communicated to creators beforehand:
Kavaeric, a long-time creator of digital furry art on Patreon, points out that the platform’s reasoning for these changes makes little sense when they themselves introduced the current way of charging patrons to solve a different problem they were having:
Patreon says it will continue to take feedback from the creators on its platform into account when making changes and has apologized for screwing up their latest product update.
HuniePop 2: Double Date
NicheGamer reports that HuniePop 2: Double Date has announced February 8th as its simultaneous release date for PC and Mac. This puzzling & dating sequel to the 2015 unexpected hit has you going on double dates on a tropical island to save the world from ancient lecherous spirits.
The original HuniePop is widely credited for being one of the first “mainstream” adult games on Steam, so to call its sequel highly anticipated is perhaps a bit of an understatement! 😄
For details on its availability, check the game’s official website.
Get started on Itch with Easy Releasy ✨
If you’re looking to release your game on Itch.io, there’s no better resource to get you started than Easy Releasy! This resource pack includes example graphics in all the correct formats, which allows you to have confidence that your own assets will look great on the website. 🤗
What remains of The Remainder? 🔮
If you’re in the market for a dark and brooding visual novel filled with mystery, romance, and blood featuring a non-binary character, The Remainder might be just the game for you!
Piece your past together from the fragments of your memory in order to find a spell that will save your life. The Remainder promised to be an intimate tale of love, acceptance, forgiveness, and sacrifice.
Try the free demo now on Itch!
Everyone got horny for the tall vampire lady 🦇
So. There’s a new Resident Evil coming out and it looks to be… good? It’s not a remake this time! According to the blurb:
Set a few years after the horrifying events in the critically acclaimed Resident Evil 7 biohazard, the all-new storyline brings Ethan Winters to a remote snow-capped village filled with a diverse cast of terrifying enemies.
But you wouldn’t know about any of this if you get your news from Twitter. Because people collectively only noticed one thing: vampire lady very tall. And this has resulted in some amazingly horny posts on the timeline.
A sampling:
Personally, I’m not that into horror games, but I can see the appeal!
Writing Wrap-Up 📖
Synstoria is working on Imperial Grace and wrote about how they want to deal with choices in their game:
I want to make games where choices matter, but I’m also the kind of person who’s so afraid of getting a bad ending I can’t play most games without a walkthrough.
Velvet Cupcake Games wrote about gender in their game and how it isn’t necessarily representative of what they would prefer society to look like:
Avalon is a binary culture in general. The contrast between light and shadow, the difference between commoner and noble, the relationship between human and fae - for Avalons, things tend to come in twos. You’ll find out in the prologue that traditional Avalon thinking associates men with light and women with shadow, though Marion challenges that thinking.
Creating believable characters is vital for any game genre, but visual novels in particular. LewdPixels writes about the difficulty of creating believable characters:
People are usually more than one thing. A person may be an authoritarian at work, but may prefer to be ordered around at home. Other things real people may have are: quirks, sets of phrases they use often, food preferences, odd habits, and more. This is before we get to deeper things like sexuality and triggers. These small things help to make a character not only believable, but compelling.
Tomboys need love too in this devlog from Steel Hearts:
Tomboy in what way? For one, she looks the part. She has short hair, wears boyish clothing, has a boyish figure. What else? Many tomboys are peppy and energetic, but Hannah, not so much.
Long-time visual novel letsplayer FlareBlitzed was interviewed about his motivations:
I’m after happiness, heartbreaks & anywhere in between with each character shining in their own ways throughout the VN. Most importantly, though, through the few years of playing Visual Novels are the friends made along the way,
From the archives, BlerdyOtome writes about why she dates hot guys on her iPad:
Lately, I’ve been so caught up with all the schedules and reviews, that I’ve kind of lost sight of why I started this blog in the first place: because I love otome games and I want to share that love with the world.
Cheeky chuckle 🤭
Artist spotlight 💡
Thanks for reading this far!
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Until next time!
-Mr. Hands