Breeding Season's Patreon campaign turns sour

The devs behind "Harvest Moon meets Hentai" title Breeding Season are at war, and the game's Patreon campaign is one of the casualties. After raising over $42,000 from 10,796 backers the page is now private and the Patreon has been cancelled.

"Breeding Season is over, we're never even making it out of alpha and every promise we ever fucking made is invalidated by the fact I put too much trust in someone else to do the right thing," wrote one of the developers, Hartista "HBomb" Pipebomb.

The someone else he is referring to is art director Vladimir "S-Purple" Sandler, who he accuses of taking over $190,000 worth of patron money and abandoning the Breeding Season project to launch a competitive title, Cloud Meadow.

"S had gone entirely behind our backs to spend an entire month's worth of work (for which he collected over $9,000 of patron money, by the way) working on a new project that he planned to abandon Breeding Season entirely for. Not even once had he brought up to me the notion of him leaving the project or faced me directly with his desire for different leadership," wrote Hartista "HBomb" Pipebomb.

"Because the wording of his contract let him do it, he also walked away with half the entire studio's savings, and then purely out of malice directed us to strip his assets from the game under threat of legal action. This leaves Breeding Season half stripped of assets. Effectively, this would scrap the entire project as it currently stands, forcing us to start over completely from square one. There is no way the project could actually survive the process, the game is just dead, that's the end."

He also posted personal information like Sandler's email address and directed Patreon backers to share their anger over the cancellation.

The accused responded with a blog post of his own, refuting the claims and complaining about being doxxed.

"I just wanted to let you guys know I didn't do this out of spite, nor greed, but through legitimate disagreements with HBomb's method of management," he said.

"I also wanted to say that my new project: Cloud Meadow was not made to simply steal the profits of Breeding Season for myself, but to actually save what I could of the Breeding Season Project, and deliver on the spirit of the promises made by the project. The way the actual Breeding Season game development was going, it would never have actually been finished, even if myself and the other artists worked 24/7."

It's hard to know where the truth lies in the accusations, but the biggest losers in the battle are the 10,796 Patreon backers.