That’s all! After raising a little over $5,000 from 179 backers they’ve decided to refund every one of them and absolve themselves of the project. Backers want to know why. Even though I didn’t back the game personally even I admit to have been obsessively following The Guardian’s Spell. I feel an explanation is owed, but chances are we’ll never receive one. In absence of reasoning I’ve been left to my own devices wondering what the heck brought about this end. To be honest, it seemed obvious that something was wrong. After all, in July of the same year they released a little game by the name of Sakura Spirit.
Had this been any other release I don’t expect that it would have affected development of Winged Cloud’s “main” project The Guardian’s Spell. However, Sakura Spirit was not just any old game. Sure, it’s a pretty short visual novel that clocks in under three hours long with a middling storyline. But, do you know what it has in spades? Relatively high quality anime artwork with a tremendous focus on sexualized women. As they say, sex sells – even though there is certainly no sex in this game (if there were it wouldn’t be allowed on Steam)! Playing to the “prurient interest” of some gamers, it achieved tremendous success at a $9.99 price point.
I don’t have the numbers of how many copies were sold in total, but there are close to 5000 user reviews on Steam. By any barometer that’s a huge success. Steam has become so cluttered that most games fail to even achieve 100 reviews. In any case, with that many reviews on file you know that at minimum double the amount of folks own a copy of Sakura Spirit. Seriously, using Ars Technica’s Steam Gauge report for 2014 they estimated Sakura Spirit as being the 204th top seller on Steam. It might not seem huge, but when thousands of games launch each year it’s a big deal.
And how much did this little visual novel make? If we can trust Ars Technica’s data then they suggest 113,264 folks own the game. Let’s just round that down to 100,000 for simplicity. Heck, let’s pretend everyone paid $5 as well (allowing for sales prices). That results in a tidy $500,000! Remove Steam’s 30% take and we still have $350,000. Remove $50k for Sekai Project (no, I don’t know how much the publisher actually receives) and that’s $300,000 in profit for a game which very likely didn’t cost that much to make. And that’s only sales in 2014. Who knows what the legacy game has continued to make. This is so much more than many indie developers can hope for in half a year of sales. Honestly, if I knew I could make money off an easily exploitable formula it might be hard for me to refuse.
Although Sakura Spirit alone didn’t signal the death of The Guardian’s Spell, the reveal of Sakura Angels on January 1 did. Winged Cloud were working hard, but only appeared to have Sakura games to show for it. To be fair, outside of the art and music, it doesn’t seem they’re particularly challenging to produce. They seem simple enough to pump out one after the other, which is why ever since Sakura Angels’ launch that’s exactly what they’ve done. After Sakura Angels launched in mid-January, the announcement of Sakura Fantasy cropped up in March. Then, in April (and before Sakura Fantasy was out), Sakura Beach was announced! Things were moving faster in the development scene for Sakura games while The Guardian’s Spell Kickstarter remained silent outside of backers worrying among themselves.
Winged Cloud updated their Twitter, website, and even launched a Patreon and only the website made any mention of The Guardian’s Spell. Even when folks mentioned The Guardian’s Spell on Twitter they would basically refrain from responding. At this point it was basically cemented in my mind that they had decided fanservice visual novels were worth pursuing at the cost of anything else. Yes, they ran a Kickstarter to make The Guardian’s Spell, but at the end of the day pleasing those 179 backers was nothing compared to the thousands of bucks being netted by Sakura games. Of course, this is just my hypothesis, but it’s hard to see any other reason that the campaign was silent for so long and canceled without any explicitly stated reason.
If there’s another reason at the core, I’d have expected an explanation of some sort. After all, in December Winged Cloud did make a rare public statement about the state of their Kickstated title to Technology Tell. They laid the blame of delays on certain people working on the project. These claims were later refuted by the accused parties, but it’s up to the reader to determine what the real story is there. “Funnily” enough, if you follow press back a little more, a VNs Now post questioning the future of The Guardian’s Spell on November 24 predicated the lone Kicktarter backer post by a few days. What do you want to bet that the Kickstarter “update” was made as a direct response to the article’s claims?
These are my thoughts on why The Guardian’s Spell was canceled but I have no actual inside knowledge with which to back up these comments. As such, these are not statements of fact but editorialized opinion. What are your thoughts on the matter? Do you agree with my assessment or feel that something else was at play? For those that backed it, or who were simply interested in the game, do you wish The Guardian’s Spell hadn’t been canceled? Let us know!
I’ll be honest here. While I love visual novels, I don’t follow them as closely as I do adventure games. I had no idea any of this was going on. Hell, I didn’t even know that this title existed in any form. But, I do have to say this. If a game is being promised to be worked on it should be worked on regardless of other “side projects”. Sure, delay it but don’t can it. And because of this, I do agree that backers are owed some form of explanation for why this decision was made.
I’m hopeful they will post an explanation (maybe because of articles such as these?), but who knows. They did have sub 200 backers so may feel that there’s little need to do so.
Yeah I think this was a purely PR decision. Winged Cloud does not strike me as one of the joy of development types but as one using games for monetary income. I base this off their prior titles and lack of community involvement anywhere. (their twitter was only made two months ago, even.)
This KS is a black mark on their rep so its best to cut all ties with it. Also, possibly, to appease the very clear male fanbase they have who aren’t quite as open minded as Marcus.
Their lack of community focus definitely strikes me as odd. They just seem to have come out of nowhere and just crank out games, while Sekai Project serves as their PR agent. I guess that works, but it’s unusual when compared to most EVN creators who seem more active on Twitter, FB, forums, etc.
One Less Otome in this world ;(
Luckily XSEED announced a new one recently…
no they didn’t unless you mean Aksys for norn 9 and Code: Realize ~Guardian of Birth~ and Idea for Amnesia unless your thinking of Eikoku Tantei Mysteria that Brandish: The Dark Revenant replace some said it might be that xseed japan contract with Karin Entertainment was no longer good and they didnt think it was worth it for that one game?
Augh, that recent XSEED Corpse Party news (Which is neither an otome or visual novel at all, lol) somehow got in my mind while writing this. But yeah, I was thinking about both Code Realize and that Norn9 title. Definitely gonna buy those both when they’re out!
True, I forgot that Pyrite Heart was free before it came to Steam. There’s no doubt in my mind that an otome audience exists on Steam, but compared with “fanservice” seeking players it probably is not as large, unfortunately.
Heres my take: I am a firm believer in the open and free market, popular demand determines what becomes popular and what becomes niche, the same rule applies to Visual Novels In Japan or in the west). So I don’t blame Winged Cloud as a studio for following the money, as that is there right to, and there is nothing wrong with making fan service games or porn games. However where I do fault them is there failure to keep comunicating with their customers and for throwing there backers under the bus. I hope all the backers get there money back and Winged Cloud comes out and makes an official statement.
Totally! Even though I didn’t pledge to this campaign I have been worried FOR backers of The Guardian’s Spell since it succeeded as they failed to provide basically any updates. It looks like Winged Cloud posts more frequently to their new Patreon, at least. Still hoping they provide closure for the Kickstarter backers.
A bit late, just want to say that they’ll probably offend any otome players if they decided to come out and say they want to focus on galgames more. So in this case it might be better to stay silent and let everyone move on. Since they refunded all the backer’s money, they don’t really owe the backers anything else.
I disagree! The issue here was that Winged Cloud for two years didn’t communicate properly with its backers, the refund was the absolute bare minimum they could do. Make no mistake, as I stated above I am in favor of fan service in Video Games, and for the inclusion of porn games into online storefronts. Where I have an issue is that a specific niche that invested time and showed patience were completely ignored by the people that committed to a project.
I just think it would be a PR issues in any case, just as bad as the silence is. They might not be able to name the trouble party due to contract clauses, and certain hardcore segments of the niche fan base can be quite vocal (ie. I’ve seen yaoi and yuri fans that are quite strongly against the other side, could be the case for some otome fans too). Not to say your opinion does not have merit, but I think they took the less harmful option. Btw, it was only one year wait (KS was done on April 2014).
But I’m not a backer, so my opinion is void. At least otome fans now can rely on professionally made games that are actually getting localized on handhelds and not just indie games (like this one), unlike its opposite niche.