‘Harvest Moon meets hentai’
Breeding Season, a Harvest Moon-esque simulator with large-breasted cowgirls (like half-cow, not someone who makes uncomfortable Facebook posts about Obama’s birth certificate), has been canceled after a messy spat between the art director, Vladimir Sandler, and the rest of the team. The game had been commanding $42,300 per month via Patreon.
The issue stems from Sandler’s contract. According to another developer known as H-Bomb, who wrote a length missive about the cancellation, “I also allowed him to retain the rights to his artwork, under the assumption that if either of us ever chose to leave the project that they would be able to then sell their portion of the product to the other, or negotiate for royalties.”
Last month Sandler took his artwork to a new project, Cloud Meadow, which currently is pulling $1,225 per month on Patreon, with an initial goal of $3,000 per month to hire a full time programmer. He does not want to sell his work back to the Breeding Season team.
“Because the wording of his contract let him do it, he also walked away with half the entire studio’s savings, and then purely out of malice directed us to strip his assets from the game under threat of legal action,” H-Bomb wrote. “This leaves Breeding Season half stripped of assets. Effectively, this would scrap the entire project as it currently stands, forcing us to start over completely from square one. There is no way the project could actually survive the process, the game is just dead, that’s the end.”
Sandler paints another picture of how things went down in a partial response (he’s working on a “point by point” refutation), where he insists he is not keeping his work “out of spite” — which seems to check out since he is using it to make another game, not just sitting on it.
“Cloud Meadow…was not made to simply steal the profits of Breeding Season for myself, but to actually save what I could of the Breeding Season Project, and deliver on the spirit of the promises made by the project,” he writes. “The way the actual Breeding Season game development was going, it would never have actually been finished, even if myself and the other artists worked 24/7.”
His resignation and move to the new project was meant to offer, “a valid option for funding a game about banging monstergirls/boys and running a monster farm,” even if he did, “[receive] over $190,000 worth of patron money over the course of [Breeding Season‘s three-year development],” according to H-Bomb.
The latter ended his lengthy, emotional post with thinly-veiled instructions on where people could download, “every file involved in the game’s creation” — including Sandler’s work. “That would be illegal, since those assets belong to S-Purple, and therefore I would never condone someone actually doing that,” he writes. “But wouldn’t it be funny?”
via [Kotaku]