So, here’s the thing.

Due to the itch.io agreement that allows me to be here in the first place, I’m not allowed to discuss numbers. You know, “revenue.” x number of sales for $y amount of income, and all that. But I think I am allowed to quote trends and the overall divisions of your participation.

The button that you have to press before you could download my hard work said “Name your own price.” Not “For free.” Well, belay that. I guess it does say “free,” but in context:

Evidently, “what you think is fair” meant “absolutely nothing” for 99.96% of you.

And let me elaborate on that phrase “hard work.” I’ve been working full-time on Confusion for over three years. I don’t have another job. I’ve been living off of my savings from the start. The project consists of 153 source code files, 4,704 images, 166 animations, and 60 choices which affect the story overall. The project represents multiple thousands of hours of effort. In the beginning, I had two developers helping me out on a part-time basis, but for the last year I’ve been doing it all on my own. Coding, designing, rendering, testing—all me.

My original itch.io strategy

I get that sometimes money is tight and you might think “I’ll catch it next time.” Or that you want to see a project go on for awhile until you commit anything, because lots of times these types of games just, you know, disappear. But it’s been three years, and this will be the final release.

My initial rationale for the “Name your own price” strategy was to allow for people to enjoy my hard work but not feel committed to pay for each and every release. Confusion was a work in progress, and (repeating what I said above) most often these types of projects just go away. And you’re left having paid for a product you’ll never receive. But that’s not the case here.

Why I’m here

Confusion is, and has always been, a passion project. Even when it wasn’t making money, and everybody was advising me to do what every other dev creating adult media does and just abandon the project, I decided to stick it out and finish it. Aside from it just being my nature to always finish projects that I start, it was also important to me for get this out to try to normalize the lives of trans people, and to educate about and garner empathy for how many of them have to live their lives. It’s a subject that’s important to me, especially in the God-awful environment we’ve been forced into recently by MAGA.

But…

I wasn’t kidding about that 99.96% figure. To be precise, only 0.0353% of the people who have ever downloaded my hard work have paid anything at all. Not even $1. That’s just a bit more than 3 payments per 10,000 downloads.

I’ve gotten angry messages chastising me for not releasing the finale here sooner than to those patronizing me on the Patreon and SubscribeStar services. Those are the kind souls that have been supporting me month-to-month over the last three years, in most cases for more than whatever retail price this story will ever finally sell for.

I could have posted this on Steam as an Early Access title, forcing you to pay for every update.

Once, I posted a plea here asking for people to support me that month because I had a ton of medical bills show up and could have really used the income. Not one response.

So, really? I have no way of checking, because itch.io won’t supply me personal information about payees, but I’ll bet that none of the supposedly aggrieved here ever paid a cent to begin with.

The other shoe drops

So, for that reason, I’m specifying a price of $14.99 for the finale when it’s posted here on Friday, 2025 Jun 27. If it doesn’t sell here, I’ll have to consider ever participating on itch.io again. I assume it won’t, but prove me wrong. I have another game in the works, and unless this one sells here, it’s not worth my time and effort to continue to maintain yet another distribution site. Especially when I don’t get anything in return for my effort. Confusion will be available on Steam and GOG before the end of the year, which is where I believe most of my income will come from for the next year. I’d love to do this kind of stuff for free, but my landlord and Publix don’t seem to like the promise of payment in goodwill.

As I understand it (I don’t know for sure, but this is what the interwebs tell me) if you’ve already paid anything in the past, you’ll be able to download the finale. So if you only donated $1, then you got a bargain. Unless you want, of course, to top off your donation to match the difference.

So…

I imagine there will be three responses to this announcement:

• Sucker!!!!!

Yeah, perhaps. You’re certainly entitled to your opinion. I try to believe in the best of people. Silly me.

• It’s not fair!!!!!

It’s my work, and my art. I came up with the story, wrote the entire script before beginning to program, and did most of the work to realize the end result. I, and I alone, get to decide what that work is worth. Just because you’ve been able to download it in the past without paying due to my generosity and faith in the human spirit doesn’t entitle you to anything.

• I didn’t appreciate your situation.

If you are into Confusion for the story, and not just to fast-forward to the juicy bits, then I hope you can justify supporting me by purchasing the finale. Thanks.

By the way, if you want to hold off on purchasing the finale here: an enhanced version will hopefully be available on Steam and GOG sometime this summer. I’m already hard at work on that version, which will have additional scenes and features not avaiable in the version released here. Achievements, character profiles, additional animations, a “super-secret” gallery you can only get to by finishing the game, etc.

I’ve turned off comments for this post. If you feel like you really need to reach out and attack me somehow, please feel free to email me at itch@avnsnax.com. In any event, if this decision angers you, or you don’t understand what’s led me to go this way, I’m sorry. I mean, I’m not, really, but you probably wouldn’t miss it one way or the other anyway. I continue to believe in the best of people, and hope this will spur some of you on to actually support my work. 😊