2020 Transparency (Patreon)

At the beginning of each year, I write a post describing how I spent the money that I received through Patreon during the previous year. I wrote a post for 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, and now it's time to write the Transparency Post for 2020.

Several years ago, it was decided that, no matter how much money I make through Patreon, my personal monthly salary would be capped at $3,500, and any money past $3,500 would be stored as a surplus so that it can be used to compensate volunteers. Last year, the surplus was at $24,311.84.

Here is how much money was raised over the course of 2020:

• January - $3,003.83
• February - $2,831.83
• March - $2,955.85
• April - $2,675.85
• May - $2,277.34
• June - $2,109.84
• July - $2,574.29
• August - $2,466.61
• September - $2,855.41
• October - $2,710.15
• November - $2,311.68
• December - $2,522.67

That's a total of $31,295.35. Because there weren't any months  when I received more than $3.5k in a single month, no amount of money went into the surplus for paying volunteers, and it remained at its previous number, $24,311.84.

In 2020, seven volunteers received compensation:

• Chaikin - $600 (3D models)
• Only Wednesday - $150 (Music)
• Kira Buckland - $162 (Voice Acting)
• Kayli Mills - $117 (Voice Acting)
• ToxicStrawberry - $300 (3D Models)
• Dawn M Bennett - $200 (Voice Acting)

That's $1,529 in total. Subtract that from $24,311.84, and the surplus is currently at $22,782.84.

I didn't put much thought into my Patreon tiers when I made them. The $1 tier is meant to represent "Any Amount, even if it's as low as $1" and the $100 tier was intended for companies who wanted to sponsor the game, rather than individuals. However, many people interpret my Patreon tiers as if I'm saying, "Give me one dollar or give me one hundred dollars!" ...which is not the intended message at all.

There is another reason why putting the lowest tier at $1 was a mistake. After Patreon's cut and credit card processing fees, I only get $0.67 of a $1 donation. I won't bore you with the math, but to avoid losing a large percentage of the donation to fees, Patreon recommends that people set their lowest tier to $3. Patreon doesn't let me change the amount of money associated with a tier if there are still people currently donating to that tier, so instead of changing or deleting the $1 Tier, I've created a new $3 Tier.

I'm still trying to think of rewards that I can offer to people based on the size of their donation ($5, $10, $20, etc) but it's difficult for me to come up with ideas that wouldn't take a lot of my time away from development. Do you have any suggestions?

Progress and Plans

In 2020, the first rival was completed, Yandere Simulator graduated from being a "debug sandbox," and I was finally able to provide an "official demo." According to the official roadmap, we are currently at Stage 5 of development: https://yanderesimulator.com/Roadmap.png 

Since 2014, my plan has been to create a demo, then launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to pay a team of professionals to help me finish the game. However, the circumstances surrounding the game in 2021 are far different than the circumstances of 2014, and it may be necessary to re-evaluate my original plan. I'll elaborate below.

2020

2020 was a difficult year for everyone, but for me, personally, it was the worst year of my life.

In January, some guy on Twitter made it seem fun and trendy to spam images in my Discord server, so my server was raided by trolls on a daily basis for the next 12 months. Over the course of 2020, 70,997 people were banned for spamming in my server. It sucks that the Yandere Sim fanbase isn't allowed to discuss the game in peace without seeing trolls spamming every few minutes.

In April, some guy on YouTube created a video falsely accusing me of deliberately stretching out the game's development for as long as possible to prolong my Patreon income. This accusation doesn't make sense for multiple reasons, but the video went viral, and as a result, a lot of clickbait YouTubers started making similar videos, hoping to capitalize on the "Bash YandereDev for lots of views" bandwagon. As a result of these videos, I lost a tremendous amount of support, and began to received an avalanche of hatemail and abusive messages on an hourly basis.

In June, some guy extracted Yandere Simulator's assets and built a primitive game prototype with them. Somehow, a narrative was born that "Someone else is developing Yandere Sim faster than YandereDev," even though his prototype was made using my assets and lacked 99% of the features of Yandere Simulator. This contributed even further to the hourly avalanche of hatemail and abusive messages.

In July, I messaged the guy who was building a prototype using my assets, and explained to him that his project was misleading people and was having an extremely destructive impact on my life. He somehow interpreted this as a "suicide threat" and spread the narrative that I "threatened suicide" to make him stop his project. People started spreading this false narrative without question, even though the screenshot that was being used as "evidence" didn't even contain any references to suicide.

Later in July, some guy hacked my Reddit account and took over my subreddit, and it was overrun by trolls for almost a month before the Reddit admins finally stepped in and returned my subreddit to me.

Even later in July, some guy re-uploaded my streams to his channel without edits. That's an actual violation of my copyright, so I submitted valid DMCA takedowns against the videos. Drama YouTubers misreported the situation as "YandereDev uses false copyright strikes to silence critic," which - you guessed it - resulted in more hatemail and abusive messages.

In October, I thought that I had reason to believe that one of my moderators was faking a mental illness, so I removed him from the mod team, and made an ignorant statement about the mental disorder "D.I.D." Within a few hours, I learned that he was actually not faking a mental illness. I quickly apologized to him, and educated myself about the disorder. However, a screenshot of my ignorant statement was circulated, which led to more months of hate and abuse, even though my statement represented something that I only believed for a few hours.

False Narratives

It doesn't help that untrue accusations from years ago keep circulating:

"YandereDev can't code" - During the phase of the game's development when I was prioritizing frequent YouTube uploads, I put features into the game in a very hasty and sloppy way in order to maintain a steady upload schedule. The sloppy code was written for no other purpose than to allow me to quickly produce footage for YouTube videos. It was always meant to be placeholder code, it obviously doesn't reflect the quality that the game's final code will have, and it obviously doesn't represent my actual coding ability. Despite this, many people have spread the narrative that this code is evidence I'm a terrible programmer.

"YandereDev defends pedophilia" - In 2014, I received hatemail for the first time in my life, reacted poorly to it, and started arguing with the person who sent it to me. In order to feel like I was "winning" the argument, I took the opposite of all their stances, purely to be contrarian towards them. For example, if they said, "Pedophiles are evil!" I would respond by saying, "Oh, yeah? Well, pedophilia is a mental illness! Are you saying that mentally ill people are evil?" just to feel like I had slapped my adversary with an epic "mic drop moment." Screenshots of these statements have circulated, and are used to create the narrative that I support and defend pedophiles, even though I don't care about or stand by any of the statements I made during some random argument from 7 years ago.

"YandereDev steals assets" - Early in the game's development, I used assets from other games as temporary placeholders. All of these assets have been replaced, and Yandere Simulator is now composed of 99% original assets, and 1% store-bought assets. However, people continue to claim that Yandere Sim is full of stolen assets, even though it is not.

"YandereDev fired a tinyBuild programmer" - I never wanted to work with a publisher, but I signed a contract with a publisher named tinyBuild. I did this for two reasons: I thought they could get Yandere Sim unbanned from Twitch, and I thought it would make people stop sending me harassment. However, neither of these things happened. (It was a mistake on my part to assume that partnering with tinyBuild would make those problems go away. I don't blame tinyBuild for this at all.) tinyBuild hired a programmer to help me, but there wasn't much work for him to do, since he would not be able to make significant changes to the code unless I completely stopped updating the game, and everyone agreed that it would be a bad idea if I stopped updating the game, so the programmer wasn't in a position where he could do anything significant. Because the partnership wasn't working out the way we imagined, we parted ways. I did not "fire" anyone, nor did I "not understand" the programmer's code, nor did I "get upset when someone changed my code." These statements are the equivalent of fanfiction, and have no bearing in reality.

"YandereDev can't take criticism" - When people started making false accusations about me like the ones mentioned above, I instantly recognized that their misinformation was going to severely damage my credibility, result in a massive loss of support, and cause years of abuse and harassment. So, I tried to swiftly silence any misinformation that was posted. When people noticed that I was deleting comments full of false accusations, they presumed I was deleting the comments because the accusations were true, or because I hated seeing "criticism." This is false. I would never try to silence criticism, but I think it's mandatory to shut down completely false information before it spreads.

Why is any of this even happening to me?

Public humiliation is a very profitable entertainment industry. Even if you have no skills or talents whatsoever, you can quickly get millions of views by making a video where you ridicule someone. It's even easier to get views if you ridicule a YouTuber with lots of subscribers, because the YouTube algorithm will push your video to each of that person's followers.

I've been targeted by drama YouTubers who make trashy tabloid-style videos where they demonize and vilify me, because they know that these videos will get them tons of attention and money. The claims they make about me are heavily exaggerated or outright false, and it's trivially easy to debunk everything they say. However, people value entertaining narratives far more than they value truth and reality.

If I am a competent programmer, it doesn't matter, because "YandereDev sucks at code" is a more entertaining narrative. If I am attracted to adult women, it doesn't matter, because "YandereDev is a pedophile" is a more entertaining narrative. If I legally own every asset in my game, it doesn't matter, because "YandereDev steals assets" is a more entertaining narrative. 

My large subscriber count, combined with the numerous false rumors surrounding me, have made me a prime target for the public humiliation entertainment industry. The bigger the target is, and the more scandalous the drama is, the more clicks and views will be generated. So, to make as much money as possible, drama YouTubers heavily exaggerated about me and painted me as a demonic villain. I was turned into a punching bag for the Internet to harass and abuse, not because I'm actually a bad guy, but because there is a lot of financial incentive to frame me as a bad guy.

It can all be summarized by one very simple statement: Your reputation is not determined by the truth. Your reputation is determined by what people enjoy saying about you, even if it isn't true.

The Future

There are people who prank call my phone, send weird things to my house, spam me with pictures of bestiality / animal abuse, hack my accounts, try to turn my friends against me, and submit false reports to the police in an attempt to get the SWAT team to show up at my house. This happens to me not because I've actually done anything to deserve it, but because dishonest YouTubers have portrayed me as someone who I am not.

I have been harassed in various ways on a daily basis for the past several years, and the harassment has only grown more intense with the passage of time. It looks like it is safe to assume that I will continue to be harassed every day for the rest of my life, and that the severity of the harassment will only continue to intensify. There is no reason for me to have any hope for the future. The harassment clearly isn't going to stop until I'm dead.

If you abuse and mistreat someone on a daily basis for multiple years, you will severely impact their mental health. The harassment that I've been put through has made me depressed, killed most of my enthusiasm for developing the game, gravely reduced my productivity, and on occasion, caused me to say abrasive things that are ridiculously out-of-character for me.

Did you know that, at the beginning of 2020, I was actually on schedule to release Osana on Valentine's Day? The reason why she didn't come out until August is because the avalanche of harassment was severe enough to reduce my productivity to a mere fraction of what it was before. And then, when Osana did come out, my harassers said "Yay! We bullied him into doing his job!" even though Osana would have been out sooner if they had just left me alone.

It's difficult to imagine a positive outcome to the crowdfunding campaign under the circumstances that I've been placed in. Who would want to donate money to a pedophile scam artist who can't code and steals assets? Those words do not describe me accurately, but nobody cares. If people enjoy having me as a punching bag, then they're going to continue believing whatever they want about me, in order to feel justified in continuing to treat me the way they want to treat me.

With all of the above factors in mind, I have to start asking some really hard questions. Should I even bother doing a crowdfunding campaign, if I'm 99% certain it's going to fail? If it's already a foregone conclusion that I will not be able to raise enough money to hire professionals, should I drastically reduce the scope of Yandere Sim and quickly release a simplified, dumbed-down version of the game? If I cloned Osana 9 times and gave each clone a different hairstyle, then the game would instantly have 10 rivals, and would qualify as "finished." Taking this kind of shortcut would allow me to quickly put Yandere Simulator behind me, but it would also result in a very unsatisfying game, so it's not something I want to consider, even as a last resort. However, I'm going to be abused and mistreated no matter what kind of game I produce, so it's very difficult for me to rationalize the decision to continue sacrificing my mental and physical health for the sake of this game.

I know that these kind of statements probably aren't what you want to hear from someone that you're financially supporting on Patreon, but this is a "Transparency" post, after all, so you're getting the honest truth. The fact of the matter is that I've been placed into a very, very crappy situation which has made it nearly impossible to accurately predict what the future is going to be like. In a situation where people don't care about the truth and are simply going to believe whatever they want to believe, there's not much I can do. It sucks that dishonest clickbait YouTubers and sadistic serial harassers are the ones who are in control of my destiny, but that's the reality I live in.

I'm going to leave you with one final thought: If I really was a scam artist, this post would have said, "Everything is going great, guys!! Keep supporting me!!" instead of "Everything is awful, the future is completely unpredictable, and I can't give you any guarantees," which is the exact opposite of what you say to someone if you're trying to convince them to trust you with their money.

In Closing

In the coming days and weeks, I will be releasing builds with bug fixes and new content, but it's very difficult to make guarantees about what I'm going to be doing beyond that.

If you have any questions about anything I've mentioned in this blog post, you're welcome to ask in the comments below.

If you're still with me even after everything that I've been put through so far, I'm grateful to you in a way that words can't express. I regret that the most I can do for you is to simply keep working, and to thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator.