So The Arcana’s pricing scheme is exploitative and terrible and I’m astonished nobody is talking about it.
The standard response from the developers is that all of the paid content is ‘optional’, but you know what I want out of my romance game? Romance. 90% of which is paid content.
Also, this assumes I don’t want to pay for the game. Except I do! I backed it on kickstarter! I want to give these people my money. But I also don’t want to be bled dry.
This isn’t even getting into how the kickstarter promised backers the game itself as a reward, then reneged on their promise, offering a paltry $10 refund to make up for it (which will buy you a grant total of 1 chapter for 1 character’s route).
This kind of business practice hurts other kickstarter projects down the road, because it erodes people’s trust in the platform. A lot of indie otome game devs rely on kickstarter. But my experience with The Arcana has sure made me think twice about supporting any other projects.
The worst thing is I like the Arcana. The art is gorgeous, the characters are fun. I supported it on Kickstarter. I told my friends to support it on Kickstarter. But I can no longer turn a blind eye to how Nyx Hydra seems to be willfully exploiting their fans.
UPDATE: So this is what they posted in response to a fan asking them about this on twitter
I’m sorry, but this kind of snark in response to a legitimate question is horribly disrespectful towards your fans.
I’m sorry, but you’re insidious framing doesn’t give you an excuse to call out another’s person snark when you and your supporters have already repeatedly harassed a single person despite their intentions in pointing you towards the right direction (hey, how about you send an email??? ¿¿).
You want to know what’s horribly disrespectful? Egging on and then omitting all of the terrible replies your ‘supporters’ have hurled at the game devs and intentionally framing the person who is handling all of this negative feedback when they honestly can’t handle the attacks anymore.
Yes. You guys are being manipulative and exploitive (excuse me for using your own buzzword on yourself). You deliberately alter the image of a person through the use of selective evidence and then deride the person because you supposedly have the moral high ground in this ‘argument’ (you don’t).
You guys are honestly being super ungrateful about all of this. It’s rare to be able to receive a game where there are major genderfluid and POC characters. The game devs and artists work very hard to bring you all this content, be it free or paid. The main story of the game is free to play and paid content is strictly extra. Honestly, you guys are all really privileged to be able to receive such good writing and art without an active paywall blocking you. You might complain that the extra content is ‘too much’, but you are also deliberately ignoring the fact that many other games in the same genre have all features completely blocked with a paywall.
And the ‘paltry 10$ refund’ is a highly misleading statement also. Backers were given a choice to either wait for a free full release after the game was complete or choose to be refunded 10$ due to the rules placed by the apple app store where paid content could not be given out for free. In this situation, it isn’t that the refund is too little, but that you don’t seem to have the patience to wait for the completion of the full game.
All in all, this entire post is just misleading. You’re simply cherrypicking facts and circumstance and running it with your own unscrupulous motives. When faced with all the facts, this entire ‘argument’ falls flat and appears as only a shallow attempt to garner 15 minutes of self righteous infamy.
