If you just want to know when the next update will be released, mark your calendar for January 25th!
Aside from that, we have a lot to talk about!
===== Looking back…
To say 2025 has been challenging would be an understatement.
===== A Rocky Start
Steam and Itch.io have cracked down on adult games due to payment processor pressure, age-verification requirements are becoming more widespread across the US and Europe, and consumer computer hardware has skyrocketed in price. Everything indicates that things are just going to become more challenging for studios like ours.
Although the we receive is incredible and helps out a lot, it’s not enough to everyone working even part-time on the project. Our primary programmer, Scion, has historically bridged that gap with funds from his full-time employment.
In late April Scion was laid-off into a horrible job-market after just closing on a new property. His savings and credit have allowed us to close out the year without cuts, but we needed to find a new source of revenue.
===== WhyCloud
After the fiasco with Steam and Itch.io (which closed off another source of donations) we thought to try and crowdfund an effort to help creators gain their independence and self-host their own content with WhyCloud. This is based on technology and knowledge we used in our own journey to become fully self-hosted.
In spite of receiving a large amount of , it wasn’t enough to for Scion to be able to both himself and us while committing to it full-time. We’re still going to release the source code, but Scion needed to become financially stable first.
===== Looking ahead!
The good news is that Scion has managed to land some well-paid ongoing private contract work for the studio that will allow us to keep going, and fulfilling these contracts directly benefits the studio. We also have the assets complete for the next 2 major updates we plan on releasing.
The bad news is that we will need to significantly reduce the amount hours we can pay some of our artists and programmers for at least the next several months. We will revisit the situation at the end of May to see if we are able to return to normal.
Thankfully there is more good news than bad, and we do believe that we will pull through this tough time eventually. We also will want your opinion on what projects the studio does, or could pursue, and will be having a poll for Patrons and Subscribers in the next week or so.
===== Pony Waifu Sim 6.3.0
In spite of everything we do feel comfortable enough announcing our next release date: January 25th!
This will make the currently secret-scene public, integrate it into the game world, and add a lot more cute and sexy context to it.
Although we were hoping to have our next update by the end of the month, some technical challenges took priority.
We finally were able to migrate all of our issues, attachments, and pull-request history to our new Gitea code repository.
We upgraded all of our games to the latest Unity long-term version, which involved solving some annoying new issues.
We also made a lot of progress on the writing for the next Flustershy route, and it’s becoming quite involved!
Thank you for all so much for your continued , and we hope to see all of you in the new year!