February 18 Update: Well, This Sucks (Patreon)

It remains to be seen if the issues will be insurmountable, but I am having problems with Steam for the release of DoW. A more complete explanation follows, plus some misc stuff at the end.

Steam says it takes 2-3 days to review games, so on Monday I submitted a final version of DoW, thinking I was plenty early. No response for five days, then at the very end of the workday on Friday, I got a rejection.

Why? "Pornographic depictions," despite the fact that I sent in a censored version. No further information, no way to contact anyone for clarification.

To add insult to injury, I was also rejected for a number of minor reasons that were objectively false. Apparently my screenshots don't look like real gameplay. -_-

I rushed to upload a version utterly scoured of any adult images (and changed the minor things). At which point, it became clear that there was no way to resubmit the game to Steam as had been requested. I'd already been through this once with a minor issue related to Crimson Gray, and the options simply weren't there.

So I sent a support ticket. All of that happened within an hour, but of course Steam is off for the weekend. I have no way of knowing when I'll receive a response or if it will do any good.

That is the situation as it stands now. It's possible that DoW won't be accepted on Steam at all, worst case scenario. More likely, I will have to go back and forth tediously, and the release date is now completely up in the air. The relatively simple patching system I had hoped to use has been killed and I'm going to have to use a much worse one. It's not great.

I was already feeling tired and not inclined to make a trailer. This has made that 99% certain. Hopefully that won't harm the game - though it won't harm it at all if Steam doesn't allow it onto the platform. >.<

Anyway, I can end this on a more positive note. If I was just a developer trying to get by on game sales, this would be pretty bad. Thanks to everyone's support on Patreon, it's not devastating. I still hope to get DoW on Steam to help secure my future as a creator, but I'm moving toward that goal regardless thanks to all of you. ^-^

If you haven't been following TLS fanart, a week of it has been posted (though HF is always laggy due to manual approval):

http://www.hentai-foundry.com/user/SierraLee/profile
https://sierraleensfw.tumblr.com/

Some of those have never been featured on Patreon, so do check them out! I have also been working on a new short story over the past two months as a form of stress relief, so I may polish and post that up eventually too.