An update from the Aethon Collective team regarding Patreon and the game

Good day to all of you. It’s been a bit of a weird year so far for all of us. We know you haven’t been hearing a lot from the team, so in this update we want to address some things and give you an update on what’s going on.

Don’t worry, we’re not cancelling any projects or splitting up or anything like that.

When we expanded our Patreon back in January, we were expecting steam to be thoroughly picking up on SCP Sigil. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly how things went. We severely underestimated the time and energy that was going to be taken up by our day-to-day lives and jobs. As a result, we haven’t been able to deliver what we were promising, and with each day that passed by, the weight of that feeling continued building on us.

In addition to this, despite what may have been portrayed in the reveal teaser video, the game is still in the early conceptualization stages as we are trying to figure out how exactly we want to translate the ideas that we have into reality. Because of this, anything running in the engine is at this time very visually underwhelming and unfinished. As a result, we refrained from showing anything publicly because we were worried about the expectation that we have set with what we have produced so far and not living up to that expectation.

In retrospect, the decision to expand the Patreon was likely one of the worst things we could have done and the way we have been portraying ourselves thus far has been misguided and potentially misleading. For this we wish to apologise. After SCP Unity’s shutdown it felt to us as though we had to get hype for a big project going as quickly as possible, which inadvertently lead to us setting frankly unrealistic expectations of the game and ourselves. Now we’re going to be taking action to set this as right as we can.

1) Downsizing the Patreon

We’re going to be reverting the Patreon back into as small a form as possible. We just do not feel comfortable continuing with the way it is currently set up. Every current patron will keep their Discord roles for the case that we bring back the expanded format one day. The existing Patreon Discord channels and posts will also still be accessible to them as a “thank you” for their support thus far despite the lack of open activity from our end. We will be seeing to utilise these channels more openly and hang out there more casually.  Any patrons that wish to be refunded for up to the past 3 months can file a request with us in order to facilitate that. We have paused the billing cycle for this month so that you are not charged for a tier that doesn’t exist anymore.

The new Patreon will be limited to a single tier at $1. New patrons that sign up will get access to the existing posts on Patreon and a visual role on Discord, but no other guaranteed benefits until we can absolutely ensure that we can indeed deliver on them to full capacity.

2) About the game and our team

As mentioned above, the team is still sticking together and we’re still going be trying to develop the game as we wanted. Through making these changes and giving this update, we hope that it will take some of the artificial pressure we’ve been putting on us out of the equation so that we can just develop in order to make a game we enjoy rather than to live up to the same expectations of SCP Unity. We shouldn’t be treating this as an obligation, but rather as something that we want to be doing with our available time. So that’s what we’re going to be doing. Overall, we just want this to be more casual and a fun experience for everyone.

Also as mentioned above, the game is in very early conceptualization within the engine and our focus right now is setting up the essential mechanics and systems that will heavily shape how the game feels. So don’t be surprised if we post something and it doesn’t look like much - all development starts at a point like the one that we’re at right now, and though we wish we were farther along than we are (and god, we really wish we were), this is just what things are like right now.

Our service model from this point forward will effectively be “best effort”, meaning we’re going to be trying our best to provide content, but with no guarantees for the frequency or depth of that content. That sounds like we’re not going to be trying at all, but rest assured, that is not the intention.

We know this might come as a surprise and look very dramatic, but we’re doing this in order to become more realistic and honest with all of you, our direct supporters and ourselves. We hope you understand. Thank you so much for putting your faith in us and sticking around. If you have any further questions, we’re not afraid to answer them. Again, thank you and we hope you have a good day!

Love, Corvus on behalf of the Aethon team. Thank you for everything so far.