Confession (Patreon)

Hi guys, BigB here. I've a little confession to make, after being called out on this online.

The graphics from our first release, "My Housemate is a Maid", is mostly (almost entirely) made with graphics lifted without permission from a 10 year old little-known Japanese-only game called Enmusubi.

It's a really shitty excuse, but I had at the time no idea this Patreon would end up so successful. I was being risk-averse, and after having talked to a couple of Japanese VN artists, the costs of getting started was quite daunting (we found other ways to offset this for "Crusoe Had It Easy"). My idea, then, was to contact the developers of any old defunct Japanese-only game I could find and buy the assets off of them cheaply. However, this particular game was almost too old - after several weeks, they still hadn't responded to our e-mail... so I figured, well, suppose I just... use the graphics anyway? What's the harm? They've obviously disbanded. They probably haven't made a profit in forever, and they're not selling the game any longer (actually they are, but I missed this back then). 

This was extraordinarily shitty of me, but it's what went down. I didn't let this on to Taxcup (who wrote the completely original script) or anybody else on the team, which was also very shitty.

Obviously this is not something I'll ever do again. Actually I regretted it as soon as the pledges started coming in (and fast) after "Crusoe Had It Easy", not necessarily out of guilt but because I was worried it would come and bite me in the ass (if I'm being completely honest here). I've now contacted the original artist and hopefully I can make things right by him. I owe all of you guys an apology, as well as one to my team mates. Obviously this doesn't change what we, Marble Syrup, are doing right now, at all - all the scripts and games we're working on are still being worked on, and all graphics are original commissions. We're still aiming to do a sequel to "My Housemate is a Maid" with original HD and HQ art, and possibly re-make the original too with new graphics too, depending on what the Japanese artists wants us to do.

Sorry about this fuck-up! I hope you don't lose your faith in us.

EDIT: So I got a hold of the original illustrator (Luna) who was very gracious indeed and accepted my apology and basically said he was only flattered I liked and used his art. However, since he has signed over the the copyright to Haikara Kissa (who remains unreachable), he suggested it might be best to take down the game, which we've now done. We've also e-mailed those of the other couple of sites that have uploaded it that have an e-mail address listed, and requested they take it down. We've contacted a couple of artists though and we hope to have the game re-made with HD graphics very soon. We'll also take this opportunity to switch over the game to our upgraded engine, making it among other things easier to implement cheats, which we aim to do much in the same vein as we did for Crusoe Had It Easy.