Hey everyone, Hallows here. You may have noticed we've changed the Sanguine Rose build on Itch for a demo of our Steam build. I wanted to touch base and talk a little about why. 

The biggest reason is probably the most obvious one. We're releasing Sanguine Rose on Steam (you can read more about that here) and having a free version of the same game on a different storefront is both bad business and against Steam's ToS. The second reason is to advertise some of the differences with the Steam build. There's several pieces of art in the Steam release (and by extension the demo) which have been touched up by Duski, and an in-game hint system to help you unlock art you haven't seen yet. There's also a scene gallery, so you can replay entire scenes once you've played through each version of them. Finally the art is uncompressed 1080p, without any encryption, meaning you can see Sanguine Rose's art in higher quality than ever, and enjoy it both in game and out. The scene gallery and art pack have been two of our most requested features since the release of 3.1.0, and we wanted to put a preview of that here for anyone itching for a new wallpaper. As for the full Steam build, it contains epilogues previously only available to our patrons. Followup scenes which reward (or punish) you for the choices you've made. 

The third reason is more of a personal one, and maybe something would-be devs will have interest in. Creating anything can be a nebulous and taxing process. I don't think anyone is more critical of a project than the people working on it. It becomes very easy to think that the project is too incomplete, or not polished enough, to be worth paying for, and if you never put a price on something it becomes hard to value it yourself. We gravitated towards Itch's "Pay what you want" process, because it took that decision out of our hands. It took us preparing the game for Steam to properly appreciate Sanguine Rose's strengths, and realise there's no harm in wanting to be paid for something we poured so much work into. We have to eat too. And so do other devs. As adult games gain legitimacy, part of that has to be seeing them as a legitimate product with a price tag, if for no other reason than the industry and the people in it can't survive on goodwill alone. That said, goodwill is what kept the lights on, so if you gave us $10 or more for Sanguine Rose before this post went out, then we'll be emailing you a DRM free copy of the game when it releases on Steam. Neither of us wants to charge people who already paid when they didn't have to.

With all that said, there is one more thing to discuss, and that's the giveaway we're currently running. There's ten free copies of Sanguine Rose's Steam release up for grabs! Just follow this link here for your chance to win.

That about wraps up everything I wanted to say about the Steam Demo. If you have any questions regarding the Steam build, the demo, our other projects, or what we had for lunch yesterday, leave a comment below! - Hallows