A Heavy Day, and Looking Ahead (Patreon)

The headlines here are that today Kal and I received confirmation from Steam that the TRW Visual Novel has been firmly rejected for sale on their platform, and that today's Monday strip for the Level Two tier has been delayed, possibly until next Monday. For details, please read on.

The rejection message we got was as vague as it was frustrating. The primary reason given was the high school setting, as apparently no amount of us explicitly stating that every character is a legal adult was enough to counter that one detail in the eyes of our reviewer. It's frustrating because I'd estimate abouuut 99% of all the lewd anime-styled visual novels already on the platform include a high school in some capacity. And aside from Parker (who would be considered "busty" if she were a real woman) one would be hard pressed to argue that any of my characters don't look like adults.  

So personally, I think there was more to our dismissal than that, and that our reviewer just wasn't in the mood to provide us with an essay stating the rest of their specific grievances.  They concluded by telling us that we are unwelcome to make changes and resubmit. The TRW visual novel is permanently banned from Steam. 

I don't normally talk about this kind of stuff here, but needless to say, this is a pretty devastating blow to Switchverse Games. Kal and I are looking for silver linings and trying to stay positive, but come on, it's not every day that a project you've been working on for five years gets perma-banned from the biggest gaming storefront in the world. As for me, I've been staring at a blank page for a couple hours now, and I think I have to just admit that an idea for a Monday Strip isn't going to come to me today. I'll be fine, and TRW will still post this Thursday of course, but as of now I'm simply not in the headspace to come up with anything good, and I apologize for the delay.

So I guess the big question is "now what?" As far as where Kal and I should be focusing our efforts moving forward, I mean. We both figured that game design was the path towards growing our business here, but in one single day that's been thrown in to question. I've been working on a proof of concept demo for a new adventure game for months now, and that demo WILL be finished. No crisis of faith could ever make me scrap a project I've put this much work into already. But what about after its finished? Should I focus more on animated shorts? More TRW pages? A spin off comic? I guess I'll have to wait and see how the demo performs upon release to make an educated decision, but in the meantime if you have any suggestions or opinions to share, I'd love to hear them. 

I'd like to close by thanking you all for being here. Whatever the future holds for my content creation, your support is more appreciated now than ever.