A Bump In The Road (Patreon)

Hello Everyone!

Our apologies, but we're back with an adjustment to the roadmap we posted not two weeks ago... but circumstances have changed!  

What Happened?

We were notified this morning that Paypal is dropping us as a customer, likely as part of a new wave of crackdowns against artists in our genre on the platform.

Fortunately, we don't keep too many funds in that account at once, so the losses for Luciana and I are probably as minimal as they can be. We're already investigating ways to keep the Patreon working of us, but losing Paypal closes our simplest and easiest solution. If rumors on The Internet are anything to go by, this may also be a prelude to further pushes from payment processors against developers like us.  It not only hampers our ability to receive payments, but also disrupts our ability to pay for the art we need.

As a result, we are making an emergency adjustment to our road map and future plans, to ensure you get the best possible product we can give. 

The Changes

This update (the romance update) will be completed as planned. We've already paid our artist (whew!), and our word count is about half-done, so the romances for Petra!Siren, Sammy, and Petra!Drow should be ready for a backer's build within the next 4-6 weeks. However, we will be discontinuing the art preview on Patreon and only doing art previews through Discord.

Secondly, we will move the Epilogue update up the calendar to immediately follow this one.  We want to make sure that Paradise Inc's story has a firm and satisfying (!) conclusion. We may be forced to make the Epilogue an artless update depending on how things go, but we'll cross that bridge once we get to it. Right now, the hope is that everything goes smoothly. Either way, we're committed to completing the Epilogues for you even if things become difficult on our end. You've taken the ride with us this far, and you've earned a true ending!

That leaves the status of the final update of the game:  the romance finales for Damien!Bull, Xavier, and Jolie!Masked.  That update is... now in limbo. We had hoped to finish out each of the romances that we started, but these may have to be adjusted textually and closed out. Another option is that we complete them should we decide to release Paradise Inc on Steam, but... we're just not able to guarantee it at this time.

And... The Future?

We plan on keeping Patreon going through the end of the year, just as we originally intended... if we're able to!  However, this recent news will prevent us from using Patreon as our primary contact point for future projects.  (Patreon only offers us two payment systems, and... Paypal is one of them).

If you want to stay in touch and make sure you get any news, please join our Discord if you haven't already.  We'll use it to communicate out any other places we (and our games!) might call home in the future.

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We're sorry to have this issue throw our future plans into confusion this close to the finish line. The U.S. continues to have extremely strange business practices that are sometimes detrimental to developers like us. We'd like once again to thank you for supporting us for all these years, and we look forward to finishing Paradise Inc for you.

Sincerely,

Cambion and Luciana