Debunk

In short: 99.98% of the time, my interactions with fans are perfectly civil. The other 0.02% occured under very stressful circumstances, and it would be unreasonable to judge me for those interactions.

Before I talk about this, it's extremely important for you to understand the circumstances that I've been placed in.

For several years, a group of people have been doing some pretty screwed up things to me. They prank call my phone, they send weird things to my house, they spam me with pictures of bestiality / animal abuse, they flag all of my social media to try to get my accounts banned, they try to hack my accounts, they try to turn my friends against me, and they submit false reports to the police in an attempt to get the SWAT team to show up at my house.

For a very long time, I was hesitant to ever use the word "harassment" to describe what was happening to me, because I didn't want anyone to think that I was trying to create a "victim identity" for myself. I avoided speaking about this matter for as long as I possibly could. But, at this point, I can't keep silent about it any longer, and I think that any reasonable person would agree that what's happening to me definitely qualifies as "harassment."

If you are harassed and abused for an extended period of time, it's eventually going to affect your mood. If your mood gets bad enough, it will cloud your judgement and affect how you speak to others. There have been times when, while I was under a lot of stress due to the constant harassment, I said something rude to another person. But, this is not an indication that I'm a bad guy; it's an indication that if a person is treated like garbage for several years, it will begin to affect their behavior.

I have about 600 interactions with fans per month. Yandere Simulator has been in development for over 70 months; that means I've had more than 42,000 interactions with fans.

Once or twice per year, I have a negative interaction with a fan. This means that, over the course of 70 months, there have been about 10 occasions where I was rude towards a fan. It's possible to find screenshots and video clips of these extremely rare negative interactions. However, this does not change the fact that I've had over 42,000 positive interactions. The negative interactions account for less than 0.02% of my total interactions.

Some people have attempted to claim that these negative interactions represent how I treat people. That doesn't make sense; that's like accusing me of being an alcoholic because I drank two beers over the course of one year. It's simply not reasonable to say that I treat my fans badly, just because there were a handful of interactions that went poorly.

Every day, the anti-YandereDev crowd sends me messages like, "I hope you die in a fire," "I hope you get raped to death by dogs," "I hope your whole family gets AIDS," etc. The meanest thing I've ever said to another person is tame compared to the abuse that I receive from the anti-YandereDev crowd on a daily basis.

When someone contacts me and says, "Hey YandereDev, you said something rude to me in the past, and it hurt me a lot." I feel guilty and ashamed, and I naturally feel compelled to apologize to them. So far, I've said "I'm sorry" to every single person who has approached me and confronted me about something rude I said to them in the past.

I don't think it's reasonable to judge me for losing my cool a handful of times, after I was put through prolonged harassment and abuse for several years. With that said, I'm always willing to speak one-on-one with anyone that feels hurt by something I've said, and if I regret what I've said to them, I will apologize to them directly.

In short: No, I'm not.

Around 2015, when Yandere Simulator got popular on YouTube, I felt a lot of pressure to upload content as frequently as possible. I committed to a "new video every 2 weeks" upload schedule, which required me to hastily slap features into the game as fast as possible. As a result, Yandere Sim was developed almost exclusively in "crunch time" from 2015 to 2017. During this phase of the game's development, I wasn't focusing on optimization or long-term maintainability whatsoever; I was thinking exclusively about putting cool new features into the game as quickly as possible, in order to maintain a steady upload schedule.

My plan, which has remained unchanged since the beginning of the game's development, was to produce a cool demo, hold a crowdfunding campaign, and use the money to hire a professional software engineer to completely replace me as Yandere Sim's lead programmer. I never intended for my code to be the game's final code; just the placeholder code that would be good enough to produce a playable demo that shows off most of the game's intended functionality. I explained this thoroughly in a November 2018 video titled "What's Going On With Yandere Simulator's Development?" (However, it seems that most people have forgotten or disregarded this video.)

To be honest, there is no point in analyzing code that was written under the circumstances described above. The code was never meant to be final, just functional, in order to allow people to experience a playable demo before putting any money into a crowdfunding campaign. Reviewing the code in its current state is about as meaningful as reviewing the earliest rough draft of a novel, instead of reviewing the final published work.

I'm fully aware of which scripts are sub-optimal, and I know exactly what would need to be done in order to improve them...but refactoring dozens of scripts would significantly delay the game's development, which is a sacrifice I'm not willing to make at this point in time, when I'm less than 2 months away from releasing Osana. I intend to stick with the original plan: release Osana, hold a crowdfunding campaign, hire a programmer to replace me, and *then* go through a refactoring phase.

There are a lot of myths about Yandere Simulator's code. For example, there are people who believe that low-end machines have difficulty running Yandere Simulator because of long if-else chains. That's simply not true. The times when I use expensive operations (string comparisons, GetComponent, long if-else chains) are almost exclusively only in functions that run for one frame and never run again. A function which only runs for one frame cannot possibly harm a game's performance. People make claims about the game's code that are simply not true.

The Unity profiler tells me that the CPU is spending an exceptionally long time on rendering, physics, pathfinding, and updating the UI. Even the game's most inefficient, sub-optimal scripts are barely putting a dent in the FPS; the other factors are far more important. In January, my average framerate was 30 FPS, but in May, my average framerate jumped up to 55 FPS. This was not achieved by converting if-else statements to switch statements, but by optimizing occlusion culling and removing unnecessary physics operations.

In the end, I severely regret my decision to commit to a "new video every 2 weeks" update schedule. In order to implement major features on a tight deadline back-to-back for multiple years, I had to make numerous personal sacrifices. Remaining in constant crunch time for a period of two years put me into a state of severe burnout, and had a tremendous impact on my physical and mental health. Because I have remained fully committed to Yandere Simulator for 6 years straight, I have never truly had an opportunity to recover from that burnout, and remain in that state to this day.

In short: No, I don't.

Sometimes, when developing a game prototype, it is convenient to temporarily use placeholder assets. For example: a model from another game, or a texture that was found through Google Image Search. For a while, Yandere Simulator contained placeholder assets. It was never my intention to keep these assets in the game; they were just placeholders. I explained this in a video, back in 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLw9Ym49HnE&t=4m49s This was done purely to make the prototyping phase go by faster and smoother. Referring to this as "stealing" or "theft" would be an exaggeration.

Ever since early 2015, the majority of the game's assets have been original. 2014 was the last year when the majority of the game's assets were unoriginal.

As of now, Yandere Simulator no longer contains any assets from other games. Every single model presently in Yandere Simulator is a model that was created exclusively for Yandere Simulator, or a model that was legally purchased from an online store. (The models that come from online stores make up a very small fraction of the total number of assets in the game.)

In short: No, I don't. I work on Yandere Simulator for over 8 hours every day, including on weekends. I take a 3-hour break to play video games once per day, but I'm still working on the game for more hours than a normal full-time job.

Working "full-time" means working 40 hours a week. This requires a person to work 8 hours a day (not counting weekends). That leaves 16 hours in the day. In theory, a person could play video games for 16 hours per day, and still work full-time.

I actually work more hours than a full-time job, and I also work on weekends. I've been working "overtime" for several years straight. In order to maintain a steady rate of progress on Yandere Sim, three hours of leisure per day is all I allow myself.

It would be pretty unreasonable to suggest that I have to be a slave who works non-stop, every hour of the day, without even being allowed any time for leisure whatsoever.

Once per month, I take a day off to do a 12-hour stream. These rare streams are, obviously, not an indication of how long I usually stream for.

In short: I screwed up when I chose those words. However, I wasn't intentionally trying to be manipulative.

This is about a video from 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF-VWc3aEsE In this video, I stated that I felt pressured to work insane hours because I didn't want to disappoint the fans. I also acknowledged the possibility that perhaps I was paranoid about nothing, and that the majority of fans would be forgiving towards me if I chose to work less hours. I used the words "heated" and "chill" to describe two categories of fans; the ones who were disappointed with my development speed, and the ones who were not.

At the time, I thought that those two words were relatively neutral, and wouldn't skew poll results. However, in retrospect, I realize that these two words carry stronger connotations than I initially thought. I wish I had said "Category A" and "Category B" instead.

In short: Yeah, but you should be aware that it was only because of an extremely specific set of circumstances.

Mike Z is a programmer who has worked on such titles as "Skullgirls" and "Indivisible". There was a point in time when I put Mike on a huge pedastal; I idolized him and thought of him as a mythical, godlike figure. I practically worshipped him. So, when he criticized a game prototype that I developed in 2013, I took it personally, and felt really hurt. I felt like my dreams had been crushed by my hero. I responded by getting really upset and throwing a childish tantrum.

That exact circumstance - idolizing someone to an unhealthy degree and taking their words way too personally - only occured once, in 2013. Over the past 7 years, there has never been a similar incident. That one-time event does not represent me in the slightest.

If you're curious to know more about the situation, you can read this post: https://yanderedev.tumblr.com/post/120037118895/clearing-up-misunderstandings-part-1-mike-z

In short: That technically happened, but you should consider the circumstances before casting judgement.

After being harassed for over a year, I eventually became very angry and bitter. One day, I heard that one of the people who harassed me was receiving harassment from Yandere Sim fans, in retaliation for what they had been doing to me.

I thought, "Wow! Sounds like karma! If you preach hate all day long, you'll eventually receive hate in return. Your actions have consequences. You can't get away with being a jerk on the Internet forever. It'll eventually bite you in the ass. It's about time this person was given a taste of their own medicine."

I was asked to condemn the harassment that this person was receiving. I didn't have the heart to do it. I had been tormented for too long, and I had grown too angry and too bitter. I could not bring myself to condemn fans who were striking back at the people who had been harassing me for over a year.

It later turned out that the person who was being harassed was in fact NOT one of the people who was tormenting me - it was just an innocent bystander. I completely reversed my stance on the matter when I learned this.

You might think it's really easy to say the words, "Harassment is wrong, and I condemn harassment!" But you need to put yourself in my shoes. I want you to try and imagine something - seriously, actually imagine it, as vividly as you can:

Imagine that you are the target of a harassment campaign for 12 months. A full year of people screwing with you, trying to sabotage every aspect of your life, trying to ruin whatever projects you're working on, trying to make your friends turn against you, and trying to ruin your reputaiton. After enduring that kind of treatment for an extended period of time, you'd change as a person. You wouldn't be your current self; you would slowly transformed into someone weary and miserable - but more importantly - you'd become bitter and spiteful.

You might not be able to imagine yourself ever doing something like this, but eventually, you'd actually begin to wish harm upon the people who had been abusing you. You'd eventually reach a point where you HOPE that your tormentors would start receiving the same treatment they had been giving to you. You'd want to see them brought to justice. It's not easy to say the words "Harassment is wrong!" if your life is being shattered to pieces, and you want your enemies to finally have a taste of their own medicine.

Imagine how broken a person has to be to reach a point where they can't condemn harassment, because they are so desperate for a solution that absolutely any option is on the table.That's the point I was driven to. People hammered away at me for months and months and months and months and months until I broke, and I couldn't even bring myself to say, "Stop harassing that girl."

Eventually, I did condemn the harassment, though: https://yanderedev.tumblr.com/post/166739910330/harassment

In short: No, I don't.

There are various different types of people who offer criticism for Yandere Simulator:

1) Fans of the game who point out a legitimate problem with the game's design, and suggest an improvement. There are many occasions when I've responded, "That's a really good point, thanks!" and fixed a flaw or improved a feature based on criticism that I've read online.

2) Fans who express concerns about the game's development, but are simply asking for clarification. They ask questions in good faith, and their intention is to seek knowledge / get answers. I always respond to them and provide them with whatever clarification they seek.

3) Former fans who have become disenchanted with the game's development, and are now pessimistic about its future. Sometimes they express their disappointment in a civil way, and other times they don't. Sometimes their concerns are completely valid, and other times their concerns are a result of not understanding the nuances of game development.

4) People who have become completely convinced that I am some sort of con artist pulling off a tremendous scam. They believe that they are righteous heroes who are exposing an evil bad guy who deserves to be taken down for his heinous crimes. They are convinced I deserve no mercy or compassion because they think I'm some sort of cartoonish villain.

5) People who enjoy the act of shaming others, ridiculing others, humiliating others, gossiping about others, digging for dirt in peoples' pasts, and ruining other peoples' lives for entertainment. Their favorite activity is saying nasty things about other people. There is no component of righteousness involved; it's simply their hobby to be cruel to others over the Internet.

Categories 1, 2, and 3 are "critics". Category 4 are not "critics"; they are misguided people spreading misinformation. Category 5 are not "critics"; they are abusers who stalk, dox, and harass their targets.

In short: No, I didn't.

Yandere Simulator is banned from Twitch.tv, the biggest streaming website on the Internet. tinyBuild told me that if I signed up with them, they would try to get the game unbanned from Twitch. tinyBuild also offered to hire a programmer to help me develop Yandere Simulator. I thought that, if I signed up with tinyBuild, maybe the people who were harassing me would stop seeing me as a failure, and would finally back off and leave me alone. Because of these three reasons, I decided to sign a contract with tinyBuild.

(However, in the end, tinyBuild couldn't actually get the game unbanned from Twitch, and the harassment didn't actually stop.)

tinyBuild hired a professional programmer so that I could have assistance in developing the game. The programmer converted the game's code from JavaScript to C#, and upgraded the game from Unity 4 to Unity 5. Both of those things were a great help. However, after that, there wasn't really much more that he could do. In order for him to do anything significant, he would first have to re-write some of the game's core systems. I would be perfectly okay with that, but it would take several months to re-write those systems, and during that time, I wouldn't be able to produce any updates or release any new builds. We all agreed that it would be a very bad thing if I lost the ability to release updates and builds for a period of several months. So, the programmer's hands were tied, and he couldn't actually do anything significant. He still wanted to help, so made little changes to the game's code, but it was mostly just busywork that didn't actually improve the game, and it was kinda starting to interfere with my work. Things weren't working out.

The game wasn't unbanned from Twitch, the harassment didn't stop, and the programmer couldn't do anything significant. As a result, the tinyBuild partnership really wasn't benefiting anyone, so tinyBuild and I simply decided to part ways. I avoided talking about this for many months, because I didn't want to cause unneccesary drama. However, I broke my silence about the matter on June 10th, 2018: https://yanderedev.wordpress.com/2018/06/10/hey-whatever-happened-with-that-whole-tinybuild-thing/

In short: Not intentionally.

There are weird people who record my video game streams for the sole purpose of trying to catch me saying something embarassing. To avoid providing these people with any new material, I try to ignore any sort of drama or touchy subject that comes up in my chatroom while I'm streaming.

At some point in time, I looked over at my chatroom and realized that people were having a discussion that somehow involved the topic of suicide. I wasn't sure what they were talking about, but I knew that it was drama, and I knew that if I commented on what they were discussing, my stalkers would have new material for their channels, so I decided to completely ignore whatever conversation was occuring in the chat room.

Much later, I learned the reason why my chatroom was discussing the subject of suicide. Apparently, a girl had been expressing suicidal feelings in my chatroom.

If I wasn't constantly being harassed by weirdos on the Internet, then I never would have made the decision to ignore my chat at that point in time.

In short: Yes, I do.

Yandere Simulator has a "Credits" scene that is accessed from the main menu. As you might imagine, it's dedicated entirely to crediting people for their work.

Outside of the game, there are two reasons why I usually don't publicly mention the names of volunteers:

1. I worry that if I make volunteer names public, Internet trolls will contact the volunteers and harass them in the same way that they harass me.
2. Sometimes volunteers want to be anonymous, without telling me ahead of time. There are times when I've credited a volunteer, then received an e-mail within minutes, saying, "Please don't credit me!! Please remove my username!!" so, I usually default to not publicly mentioning anyone's name, just to avoid this situation.

But, if a volunteer asks me to credit them, I credit them as they wish.

In short: No, I don't.

Over a year ago, I wrote a post on Reddit about taking care of your kidnapped victims by feeding them: https://imgur.com/N4veApq.png

Someone photoshopped my post and replaced the word "feed" with "rape": https://imgur.com/OS1NV0w.png

In short: Yes, I delete abusive and hateful comments, as well as misinformation and false accusations.

If you visit someone's Twitter, blog, or YouTube videos purely because you want to be nasty and cruel towards them, that's awful. A good person does not spend their time doing things like that. If you post abusive and hateful messages on my blog or YouTube channel, your comment will be deleted, and you will be blocked or banned. Most people would probably respond the same way.

In short: No, I don't.

Nobody ever gets banned for criticism. People get banned for things that are completely unrelated to criticism. I'll run you through a few scenarios.

"John Smith" makes a post in a hate-subreddit, and announces his intention to come to my subreddit and troll. He announces that his intention is to pretend to be a fan at first. John Smith then comes to my subreddit and posts a harmless suggestion, pretending to be a fan. A moderator checks John Smith's post history, sees his trolling plans, and decides to simply ban John Smith outright. John Smith flips out and says, "I was banned just for making a suggestion?!" He is completely unaware of the real reason he was banned.

"John Smith" posts something on my Discord server that breaks the rules. No moderators are online to notice it. Later, John Smith posts some harmless criticism on my Discord server. At the same time, a moderator notices that John Smith broke the server rules earlier that day, and bans him. John Smith flips out and says, "I was banned for criticism?!" He is completely unaware of the real reason he was banned.

"John Smith" posts some valid criticism, but in the same post where he writes valid criticism, he does something that breaks the rules. He is banned for breaking the rules, but erroneously believes that he was banned for criticism.

Each time someone thinks that they were wrongfully banned or blocked, they take a screenshot. After about 6 years, there are several dozen such screenshots - enough to create a false narrative that I delete all criticism...even though I'm almost never responsible for personally deleting anything, and everyone who gets banned is banned for breaking a rule, not for saying something critical.

In short: No, I don't.

I was extremely surprised to learn that, when I was a teenage kid, I apparently wrote a post about being so angry with my parents that I wanted them to die. I have absolutely no memory of ever feeling that way towards my parents, but since the post exists, I guess I must have felt that way at some point in time.

That post was written when I was a teenage kid. "Grrrrr, I hate my parents, I wish they were dead!" is the sort of thing that an edgy teenage kid would say. This doesn't seem like a reflection of who I am; it seems like a reflection of what edgy teenage kids are like.

That post feels alien and foreign, like words that were written by a completely different person. I honestly have no idea what to say about it, other than the obvious: it's from over a decade ago, and it doesn't reflect how I feel in modern day at all. It seems absurd that there are actually people who judge me for it.

In short: No, I didn't.

I once wrote a fanfic set in the Fallout universe, which contains slavery. The protagonist of the fanfic was a slave who was being sexually abused. The slave's owner was portrayed as a nasty, evil, ugly person, and he died a gruesome, undignified death. The rape scenes were not meant to be erotic; they were meant to reflect the disgusting nature of sexual abuse, and also meant to villify the slave's owner.

I stopped writing the story in order to focus my time on Yandere Simulator. In case you're curious, the plot of the story was going to involve the slave becoming a vigilante that travels around the world, hunting and killing rapists and slave owners.

Even though I wrote a story that villifies rapists and was going to be about the genocide of rapists, people summarize the story as, "YandereDev wrote an erotic rape story!" which is as far from the truth as possible.

In short: No, I didn't.

This is about my "Hate and Shame" video, which features a female protagonist.

The point of the video was to ask people to imagine themselves in my position. YouTube's analytics page tells me that the majority of my audience is female. I decided to make the protagonist of the video a female character so that it would be easier for my audience to relate to her.

At the end of the video, the girl's body splits apart, and reveals me within her. This is to communicate to the audience that I experienced everything that the girl experienced in the video. This is not meant to be interpreted as a dramatic plot twist that "The girl was YandereDev all along," or anything else along those lines.

In short: No, I don't.

In my "Hate and Shame" video, I was not describing critics. I was describing a group of people who stalk, dox, and harass others for fun. I don't think that stalkers/doxxers/harassers should be portrayed with dignity, so I depicted them as grey-colored inhuman creatures. I called them "gremlins" because "stalkers/doxxers/harassers" is way too many syllables.

Around 11 minutes and 57 seconds into the video, I depicted the protagonist receiving feedback from a critic. The critic is depicted in a neutral way; not as an inhuman monster.

In short: No, I don't.

In early 2016, I was receiving an overwhelming amount of e-mail from very young children. The majority of these e-mails were very cringey and annoying. I didn't bother replying to them; I only used e-mail to speak with volunteers, have business discussions, and review bug reports. However, it was still irritating to see my inbox always filling up with cringey messages from little kids.

Eventually, I decided to try and do something about it. I tried to convince all the young children to leave me alone by making a video depicting stupid e-mails as the worst threat to Yandere Simulator's development. Unfortunately, it didn't really work; it only increased the amount of dumb e-mails that I was getting. It also caused a lot of people to develop the misconception that I spend every day doing nothing but replying to stupid messages.

The last time I complained about e-mails was several years ago. I shouldn't need to spell this out, but: E-mails are not a problem for the game's development.

In short: No, I'm not.

I rarely mention my Patreon. I've uploaded over 150 videos to my YouTube channel, and I think I've only mentioned my Patreon about 3~4 times in total. If my intention was to milk the Patreon, wouldn't I constantly be mentioning it in my YouTube videos?

I don't mention the Patreon in my video descriptions. I don't mention the Patreon in my blog posts. I don't put a link to Patreon on the main menu of the game. If my intention was to milk the Patreon, wouldn't I be trying to draw more attention to it? I think that most people are actually completely unaware that I even have a Patreon.

If my intention was to make lots of money, I would:

• Not make a game with controversial content
• Promote my merchandise at every opportunity
• Already be selling the game as an early access title

However, I'm not doing any of these things. I'm actually doing the direct opposite of all of these things.

It doesn't make any sense whatsoever to conclude that I'm intentionally prolonging the game's development. There is no person on earth who wants Yandere Simulator to be finished more than I do; nothing would make me happier than to see this project reach completion. However, I refuse to rush the project, because I don't want the quality of the game to suffer.

The game is taking a long time to develop for several reasons:

• Yandere Simulator is much more ambitious and complex than an average indie game. The premise itself may seem straightforward, but the number of features and depth of mechanics is comparable to that of AAA open-world sandbox titles. It's unrealistic to expect a game like this to be completed in less than 6 years, simply due to the unusually large scope and deep complexity of the game, coupled with the fact that it's mostly being developed by a single person. Nobody can accurately estimate how long it should take to complete this project, because there isn't a pre-existing project it can be compared to. No solo developer has ever attempted to build a social stealth school simulation sandbox game before. The length of time that it takes for a single man develop a game like this has simply not been established yet, so it's not reasonable to claim that it's being developed "slowly".
• Early in the game's development, I adopted an unreasonable update schedule - one major feature every 2 weeks. As a result, the game was developed under "crunch time" for several years straight; 15-hour workdays, no vacations, constantly sacrificing physical and psychological health, etc. This caused me to become "burned out", which severely reduced my productivity. Due to my ongoing obligation to devote most of my time to Yandere Simulator, I have never had an opportunity to recover from this burnout and return to normal levels of productivity.
• I have been mischaracterized, misportrayed, misrepresented, and character assassinated by drama YouTubers who financially benefit from producing content where they ridicule, shame, humiliate, and vilify their target. Going through this experience has caused me to feel like my life and career are permanently destroyed, which has killed my motivation to work on the game, reducing my productivity further.
• I have been harassed and abused on a daily basis for about 5 years, and the constant mistreatment has compounded the problem of lost enthusiasm/motivation/productivity.

All of the above factors - ambitious scope, solo developer, burnout, character assassination, constant harassment - have slowed down the game's development. The burnout is my own fault, but the game would doubtlessly be much further into development by now if it wasn't for the constant slander and mistreatment.

In short: No, I don't.

Pedophilia is a disorder. It's a mental illness. It's a defect of the mind. Your brain isn't supposed to work that way. If you're a pedophile, it means something is broken inside of your head.

Personally, I don't feel comfortable ridiculing people who suffer from mental disorders. Nobody asks for a mental illness. A mental condition is something that happens to you without your consent. Nobody develops Alzheimer's Disease on purpose. Nobody asks for Schizophrenia. And likewise, I don't think anyone actually wants to be a pedophile. If you have Dementia, you can't just snap your fingers and get rid of it. Likewise, if you have pedophilia, you're stuck that way, and you are forced to live with it forever.

If you're attracted to redheads, that's harmless, as long as you never kidnap a redhead. If you fantasize about robbing banks, that's harmless, as long as you never actually rob a real bank. If you are forced to have sexual thoughts about children because you are afflicted with a mental illness that you never asked for, that sucks. It's going to interfere with your ability to live a normal life, and it might cause you to feel so much shame that you eventually commit suicide. But obviously, it's absolutely no excuse whatsoever for you to actually touch a kid.

No adult ever has any excuse to do anything sexual with a child. As soon as you touch a kid, you have crossed the line from being someone with a mental disorder to being the worst scum imaginable. Having a mental illness is involuntary, but touching a kid is a choice. If you have a mental illness, I feel bad for you. If you violate a child, I feel disgust and contempt for you, and I think you deserve the death penalty.

Because I have stated that there is a distinction between "pedophiles" and "child molestors", there are people who have somehow developed the impression that I advocate for the normalization of pedophilia, or that I am trying to defend child molesters, even though that's literally the exact opposite of everything I just said. It boggles my mind.

I once had a conversation where I compared pedophilia to sexual orientation. I made this comparision to communicate the fact that you can't snap your fingers and remove a mental illness, in the same way that you can't snap your fingers and change your sexual orientation. Obviously, I was never attempting to state that pedophilia is a valid sexual orientation. But, unfortunately, numerous people insist on spreading this false narrative, anyway.

In short: No, I don't.

In short: No, I don't.

Recently, I stated that I never see my framerate drop below 30 FPS when I play Yandere Simulator. Somebody looked through my YouTube videos and found a moment where the FPS was less than 30, and accused me of lying about my framerate. However, there is a lot of information that they aren't aware of.

Whenever I record footage for a YouTube video, I record the footage inside of the Unity editor. The Unity editor has a lower framerate than an exported build; the framerate is actually about 15 FPS lower when playing the game inside of the Unity editor. When I play the game in an exported build, the framerate never goes below 30 FPS. That's the only time when the framerate actually matters, since that's the framerate that other players will see when they play the game.

In short, the framerate that I get when I'm playing the game within the Unity editor is irrelevant, and the only framerate that matters is the one I get when I play an exported build of the game - which is always 30~60, depending on exact circumstances.

The person who accused me of lying is spreading misinformation, and it's depressing that there are people who are actually taking him seriously.

In short: That's not true at all.

Over the course of Yandere Simulator's development, I have accepted assistance numerous times, and it's very common for me to mention it on my blog when another programmer has assisted me in a significant way. In some cases, volunteer programmers aren't mentioned because they specifically requested anonymity.

I have always welcomed, and will always welcome, suggestions from fellow programmers. Most of Yandere Simulator's biggest breakthroughs were only possible through the assistance of other programmers. I am absolutely delighted and bursting with gratitute when a fellow programmer is able to help me solve a problem that I've been struggling with.

Currently, I am not willing to share Yandere Simulator's project files / source code with anyone, and I am not currently seeking a programmer to work on the game alongside me, for the reasons described in this blog post. However, I am always delighted to hear suggestions or words of wisdom from other programmers.

In short: No, I didn't.

Many people have difficulty pronouncing the word "Yandere"; the most common mispronunciation is "Yan-Deer", leading many people to refer to Yandere Sim as "Yan-Deer Simulator".

During E3 2019, a trailer was shown for a beautiful game called "Way To The Woods" about a deer and a fawn. Seeing a game about a playable deer made me think of the words "Deer Simulator", which reminded me of the countless times I've heard Yandere Sim called "Yan-Deer Simulator".

I decided to Tweet a screenshot of Way To The Woods with the caption "Deer Simulator" in the Yandere Sim font, knowing that long-time Yandere Sim fans would get the joke. A lot of people responded positively to the tweet, but, unfortunately, there were also people who mistakenly believed that my tweet was an attempt to throw shade at the developer of the game.

This was completely baffling to me, since there was absolutely nothing ill-natured about my tweet. It was a pun; an especially silly pun, on par with a "dad joke". I know, firsthand, how difficult and time-consuming it is to make a video game. I would never hop on Twitter purely to fire attacks at other developers. It doesn't make any sense at all to assume that my tweet was malicious.

This is actually pretty ridiculous, and one of the best examples of how the Anti-YandereDev crowd will freak out at absolutely anything I do or say, no matter how harmless it is.

In short: People get banned and blocked, but not for the reason you think.

First, it's important to mention that it's exceptionally rare for me to personally ban anyone. I'm too busy working on the game to spend my time doing that. If someone gets banned from my subreddit or my Discord server, the ban came from a moderator or a bot. Second, people don't get banned for what they are posting; they get banned for why they are posting it.

If someone is being a dick towards you, the mature and intelligent thing to do is to block them and move on with your day. This is common sense on the Internet.

Likewise, if someone shows up to a Discord server and immediately announces that the purpose of their visit is to be a dick, they're obviously going to get banned right away; this shouldn't be shocking. If you walk into a bank and immediately announce that your intention is to rob it, you'll be tackled to the ground by security guards pretty fast.

Again, it's important to keep in mind that nobody gets banned for what they post; only for why they post it. I'll provide you with a metaphor.

Imagine that someone thinks you hate kittens. They want to harass you, so they spam you with pictures of kittens. The pictures don't bother you, but you still understand that this person's objective is to offend you. Even though they are failing miserably, they are still clearly communicating that their intention is to harass you. They are revealing themself to be the type of person who enjoys abusing other people. Even if they aren't actually succeeding, blocking them is still the only sensible choice, because there is no reason to interact with a person like that.

If you enter any community on the Internet and immediately start spamming stupid images, you're pretty much guaranteed to get banned almost immediately. It's been this way on the Internet for decades. My subreddit / Discord server are not special exceptions.

In short: This did actually happen, but there is context that you are probably unaware of.

First, it's extremely important to acknowledge that there is a massive difference between sincerely telling someone to commit suicide, and simply saying a rude phrase in a brief moment of anger. Those two things are not even remotely comparable.

In order to understand what happened, you need to remember what I stated at the top of this page: a group of people spent more than a year harassing me on a daily basis. You really need to keep this in mind; it's extremely important. Being subjected to that much abuse had an extremely negative impact on my mental health.

One time, when I was streaming a video game, someone came into my stream and started harassing me. I figured that it was one of the trolls who had been tormenting me for more than a year. After more than a year of daily harassment, I was fed up with being abused and mistreated. In a spontaneous moment of anger, I said "Kill yourself!" to the troll.

I've only said "kill yourself" once in my entire life. I am not the sort of guy who normally says this sort of thing. However, if you torment, abuse, and mistreat someone for long enough, you will eventually break that person, and cause them to say things that they wouldn't normally say.

I later learned that the person I said "kill yourself" to was actually a fan of Yandere Simulator who was inadvertantly being annoying and obnoxious. I had accidentally mistaken them for one of the trolls who had been harassing me. I actually said "kill yourself" to an innocent person, and I feel bad about that. If that person ever contacted me, I would apologize to them. However, the fact remains that this situation never would have occured if I hadn't been harassed for over a year.

In short: No, that's ridiculous.

On the Internet, everything gets drawn as an anime girl. The planet earth has been drawn as an anime girl, dish soap has been drawn as an anime girl, and the Ebola virus has been drawn as an anime girl. No matter what, the ultimate fate of anything is to be drawn as an anime girl.

Predictably, the COVID-19 virus has also been drawn as an anime girl, just like everything else. She is named "Corona-chan". Because the virus was first identified in China, Corona-chan is depicted wearing a traditional Chinese dress called a "cheongsam", also known as a "qipao".

There is a massive difference between a racist caricature designed to ricidule and degrade Chinese people, and a cute anime girl designed to personify a virus. Equating these two things with one another is completely stupid. Additionally, Corona-chan is often depicted as cute (or sexy) so it should be obvious that she is not in any way meant to ridicule or degrade an ethnic group.

Saying that Corona-chan is "insulting to Chinese people" because she is wearing a Chinese dress is just as stupid as saying that Corona-chan is "insulting to beer" because she is often depicted holding a bottle of "Corona Extra" beer.

I put the Corona-chan easter egg into Yandere Simulator because I love her design, not because I think it's funny to ridicule Chinese people. If anything, it's an indication that I think Chinese dresses look amazing.

What's next? Will I be accused of being racist if I play chess and use the white pieces? The "YandereDev put a racist easter egg in Yandere Simulator!" controversy proves that the Anti-YandereDev crowd chooses extremely trivial and petty matters to ridicule me for.

In short: No, I didn't.

In 2014, I was a freelance programmer doing short contract jobs for money. I started developing Yandere Simulator as a hobby.

When Yandere Simulator started getting popular, people started begging me to give them a way to donate money to me. I was hesitant about this at first, but eventually I gave in and made a Patreon.

I stated, "If I can earn at least $1,000 per month on Patreon, I will make Yandere Sim my full time job." I was able to reach that goal - however, 1k per month is a very small amount of money, less than minimum wage. It simply wasn't sustainable. I kept my promise and turned Yandere Sim into my full time job, but I made it clear that $1,000 per month did not qualify as a living wage, and I hoped to earn at least $3,500 per month. And, only 2 months later, I reached that goal.

3.5k was my only goal, and I didn't need any more money than that. So, once I started earning beyond $3,500 per month on Patreon, I started putting the surplus money towards Yandere Sim. I stated this extremely clearly in the "Goals" section on my Patreon page.

I logged all the money I earned and how it was spent in a series of "Transparency" posts.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/2019-32882029?cid=31915344
https://www.patreon.com/posts/2018-23800861?cid=23532596
https://www.patreon.com/posts/2017-16179684
https://www.patreon.com/posts/2016-and-polls-7685057
https://www.patreon.com/posts/transparency-6085972

In short, I "capped" my salary at $3,500. I only allowed a limited amount of money to go to myself, and have always put the rest of the money towards Yandere Sim.

If we divide my money into categories, it looks like this:

1. Money I saved up from before I started working on Yandere Sim
2. Money I earned through Patreon as payment for working on Yandere Sim
3. Money that is reserved to be used exclusively on Yandere Sim

Whenever I make a personal purchase, it comes from my personal savings, not the Yandere Sim budget.

In short: No, I don't.

First, let it be known that I do not intend to say anything negative about tinyBuild, and nothing below is intended to be interpreted negatively.

tinyBuild and I decided to part ways in December of 2017. On March 21st, 2019, we signed a termination agreement that dissolved our original contract. The reason why it took so long to sign the agreement is because I wanted to negotiate some of the terms. There are people who believe - erroneously - that I signed an agreement which put me in debt to tinyBuild. That is not true. The final draft of the agreement did not involve a debt to tinyBuild.

In my final e-mail to tinyBuild, I stated that I had no grievances with them. In tinyBuild's final e-mail to me, they wished me good luck with my project. We parted on amicable terms.

In short: Actually, I've been physically incapable of posting on 4chan for several years. Even if I wanted to, I can't.

When I moved into my new house, I started getting this error every time I tried to make a post on 4chan: https://i.imgur.com/ormWzjt.png

It was right after the website got a new administrator - "Hiro". Around that point in time, a lot of people were suddenly IP range-banned. Some people have theroized that Hiro banned a bunch of IP-ranges as a method of reducing server costs. I don't actually know if there is any truth to that theory.

Regardless, I'm physically incapable of posting on 4chan, even if I wanted to.

In short: No.

Midori is a ditzy girl who asks silly questions with obvious answers. If anything, Midori represents the type of person who doesn't read the FAQ before asking a question, frustrating the people around her. Midori does not represent "the audience". At some point in time, it became a running gag for me to kill Midori in my videos. This is a slapstick comedy gag, and it has nothing to do with how I feel towards my audience.

In short: No, I've never done that, and would never do that.

The only times I have ever submitted a copyright complaint were times when a YouTuber re-uploaded my content without making any changes to it.

This is actually what copyright was invented for; preventing people from copying your work and profiting from it.

This is the correct use of a DMCA; stopping people who are illegally re-uploading your content.

In short: No, that isn't true.

Over the course of Yandere Simulator's development, countless people have said "I can do better than YandereDev!" and started developing similar projects. All of these projects lasted a few months, sometimes weeks, sometimes only days, before collapsing.

It is extremely easy to use the Unity engine to quickly produce a simple game prototype that superficially resembles Yandere Simulator; to quickly replicate the surface-level aspects of Yandere Sim, such as "Schoolgirl walking around a school" and "Student turns into ragdoll after being stabbed." These are beginner-level tasks that anyone with access to the Unity engine can do without any effort.

When someone says "I re-created Yandere Simulator in two weeks!" what they are really saying is that they copy-pasted a bunch of my game's assets into a Unity project and then made a character walk around a school environment, creating the flimsy illusion that they are developing a game. And, sadly, there are actually people who are gullible enough to fall for that illusion. The situation is actually pretty ridiculous.

Needless to say, it's a problem for me if thousands of people get tricked into believing that it's possible to re-create all of Yandere Sim in 2 weeks, even though these "imitation" games don't even have 10% of Yandere Sim's functionality. It's a depressing and demotivating set of circumstances to be in.

Aside from that, though, it's worth mentioning that anyone building a Yandere Sim clone using assets ripped from Yandere Sim is treading in very dangerous legal territory.

First, it must be mentioned that anyone can purchase Unity Asset Store models and use those models to make a game. There's no legal problem with that. Anyone can go to the Unity Asset Store, purchase the Aoi character model, and gain the legal right to use that model in a video game.

However, if a developer simply rips the characters models from Yandere Sim and starts using those models to build a game, they are violating the law, because they obtained the character models illegally, without paying for them.

Furthermore, there is something else to consider, aside from the Aoi model. Numerous environment models were created specifically for Yandere Simulator; those models are NOT unity asset store models that anyone can purchase and use. Those models were created and given to me, to be used in Yandere Sim only. Stealing them and building a game with them is asking for legal trouble.

When a volunteer creates an asset, that asset is the volunteer's copyrighted content. When a volunteer gives the asset to me and says "My work now belongs to you, you are now the owner of this asset," they have transferred the copyright to me. Sometimes an actual written contract and signature is involved. Someone who is using these models in their game is, in fact, violating my copyright, and I have the legal right to take action against them. If they are in denial about this, it's an indication that they do not understand how copyright law works.

(An extremely small amount of Yandere Sim's assets - like, less than 1% - are from the Unity Asset Store. The vast majority of the game's assets are completely original, and the copyright is either owned by me or the volunteer that created the asset for me.)

In short: No, I didn't.

Someone extracted Yandere Simulator's assets and used those assets to develop a simple game prototype. They created an announcement trailer showing off what they had done. Despite the fact that their prototype only contains a fraction of the functionality of Yandere Simulator, their announcement trailer gave hundreds of thousands of people the false impression that it was possible to "re-create" the entirety of Yandere Sim in only two weeks.

The only reason that their prototype looks even remotely presentable is because they simply copy-pasted all of the assets that were created for me over the course of 6 years. (Not store-bought assets, but Yandere Simulator's original, copyrighted assets.) They created nothing original, and simply stole all of my material. It's the most blatant theft I've ever seen in the history of the game industry.

Because hundreds of thousands of people were tricked into believing that it's possible to re-create Yandere Sim within two weeks, my work has been completely devalued, I have begun to receive a massive amount of harassment, and I have started to lose all of the support that I had spent 6 years building up.

This is not a case of "another developer is making a superior game!" but is a case of a con artist pulling a scam that is tricking hundreds of thousands of people into hating me.

If it truly was a "fan project", and if the developer truly was a "fan" of Yandere Simulator, then he would acknowledge the damage he was doing to me and my project, and he would take action to avoid threatening Yandere Simulator's existance.

I reached out to him to discuss this. During the discussion, I expressed my feelings honestly. I told him that I felt his project was "ruining my life," "destroying my life," "ending my life," etc.

He posted screenshots of our discussion. People used those screenshots to create an untrue accustion that I contacted him to "threaten suicide", even though I never actually said that.

What the actual fuck.

This is the screenshot that people use in order to push this false narrative: https://i.imgur.com/sjz6RfN.png There is not a single sentence there where I "threaten suicide". It simply doesn't happen.

In case you need me to spell it out for you, the meaning of the last sentence is, "If Yandere Simulator would ruin/destroy someone's life and end their career, I would cancel Yandere Sim."

In short: No, I didn't.

This is an event that occured in 2019. To save this "developer" from too much humiliation, I don't want to say his name.

A "developer" started uploading videos to YouTube of a game that he was supposedly developing. A lot of people felt justified in harassing me or dropping their support for me, because they were tricked into believing that this "developer" was creating a superior game, and he was doing it faster than me.

However, was not actually developing a real video game. He was just creating footage for YouTube to give the impression that a game was under development. He was a con man; a scam artist. I learned this from his former partners, who abandoned his "project" when they realized he had simply been using them to make his scam look like a legitimate video game.

Because his fake game project was having a lot of negative consequences for my real game project, I confronted him and told him that he should stop being dishonest and confess the truth. I explained that if he kept tricking people into believing that Yandere Simulator was being surpassed by a new game project, I would eventually have to make a video defending my project by explaining the truth: that his "game" was not actually a real game at all, but was an illusion created for the sake of YouTube videos. This was not a "threat", but was a simple, factual state of affairs.

Later, in 2020, another developer (who is also a con man for completely different reasons) showed screenshots of my conversation with the 2019 developer, and spread the false narrative that I "threatened" a "competitor" into ceasing his "development", even though all I was really doing was telling a con man to stop scamming people.

In short: I never said that.

This is a perfect example of how people spread out-of-context screenshots and misinformation.

On the Yandere Simulator Discord, I was involved in a conversation with several other people. Somebody made a false statement, and I responded "I don't agree with that." In the time it took me to type that message, someone typed "Criticism is how a game improves..." and sent their message before mine. As a result, my message showed up directly under their message: https://i.imgur.com/jiee7OU.jpg

Someone took a screenshot, cropped out the message I was actually responding to, and then began spreading the false narrative that I don't think games improve from criticism.

This is exactly the sort of thing that people are doing to me all the time. Don't allow yourself to be manipulated by the people who do these things.