Cultcow EvaXephon / Yanderedev / Alex Mahan / Alexander Stuart Mahan / cannotgoogleme - Edgy weeaboo coomer with pedo tendencies and 15+ years internet history as a lolcow, now known as a disaster developer behind eternal debug build called "Yandere Simulator", confirmed groomer and dollfucker

The end of EvaXephon?


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I have a suspicion he's kind of broke, he NEEDS to finish this game, or starve.
Wouldn't it be the other way around? He needs to drag out the grift as long as posible, or starve. If he ever actually finishes the game, people will stop donating for him to make the game. And obviously no one is going to buy his garbage game.
 
Wouldn't it be the other way around? He needs to drag out the grift as long as posible, or starve. If he ever actually finishes the game, people will stop donating for him to make the game. And obviously no one is going to buy his garbage game.
His donations have gone down and the ship is sinking. But he's really fucked either way. If he releases a crap game, people will find out quickly and it won't sell, and he will be poor.
But also, when a lot of your fanbase are already younger people, it only takes a few short years for them to change exponentially and for their tastes to move on, then he has to find new donos and generate new hype (which is hard when your rep keeps getting worse).

It's possible to stretch the donos, but it's unlikely he can stretch out the tugboat of donations for another 10 or 15 years, with no game. His best hope is to eventually shit or get off the pot. As for selling the game, the best case is probably just riding a short-bus hype-train that still exists, and catching the few remaining impulsive-buyer fans as soon as possible before they leave, because he knows he steadily is falling from grace.
 
His donations have gone down and the ship is sinking. But he's really fucked either way. If he releases a crap game, people will find out quickly and it won't sell, and he will be poor.
But also, when a lot of your fanbase are already younger people, it only takes a few short years for them to change exponentially and for their tastes to move on, then he has to find new donos and generate new hype (which is hard when your rep keeps getting worse).

It's possible to stretch the donos, but it's unlikely he can stretch out the tugboat of donations for another 10 or 15 years, with no game. His best hope is to eventually shit or get off the pot. As for selling the game, the best case is probably just riding a short-bus hype-train that still exists, and catching the few remaining impulsive-buyer fans as soon as possible before they leave, because he knows he steadily is falling from grace.

This is somewhat false. His number of patrons is decreasing, but he's still getting about $2,000 a month in donations. This doesn't factor in twitch and youtube revenue.
And theoretically, if he does the kickstarter and depending on how much he gets from that, he could possibly ride out the rest of his life (if enough suckers give money)
Patreon page
 
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On the subject of Alex's YouTube, the downward trend continues.
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This dip did start after the reddit hack, but I'm still unsure how much of that drop is people seeing the writing on the wall and abandoning all hope or YouTube just automatically unsubscribing accounts like it has been claimed to do. If I had to guess, I'd bet on more of the later based on how relatively consistent the decline is (this is assuming Alex didn't pay for a service to boost his subscriber count and payments have ceased/YouTube is nuking said accounts, but that seems somewhat out of character for Alex so it's a safe assumption to discount it).
 
This is somewhat false. His number of patrons is decreasing, but he's still getting about $2,000 a month in donations. This doesn't factor in twitch and youtube revenue.
And theoretically, if he does the kickstarter and depending on how much he gets from that, he could possibly ride out the rest of his life (if enough suckers give money)
Patreon page
Riding it out for the rest of his life would either require suicide when this finally goes south, or for him to become competent enough to create a "perpetually in development" game with lots of tiny releases like Star Citizen does.

also I just lol'd at the thought that he has less individual supporters, but who also individually fork over more of their hard-earned money than ever.

If he does Kickstarter it could go either way. There's a long list of video game Kickstarter scams where either the team over-estimated their skill and devs just ragequit (no refunds), or they did the bare minimum to look like a real game, and then they take the money and run. And they both get nerds extremely pissed, I wouldn't bet on the sustainability route if he tries kickstarter.
 
I would like to draw attention to the fact that Alex released Osana before Love Letter was even in a prototype stage. Is it still total shit, coding wise? Yes. But let's not ignore the sheer butthurt that DrApeis must be feeling right now.

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"Alex released Osana"

I'll be honest, this was the first thing I saw and I did a double take.

And of course it's not out just yet. It'll be in the next build and he has to make a few tiny adjustments to her, he promises! For real, this time! He swears!

Jokes aside, I do think that the build with Osana is going to be next, assuming the trello he posted is true and he's not just dicking around as per usual.

It's a bold announcement, especially for someone like him.

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Found another old forum account, idk if it's been posted yet https://www.pokecommunity.com/member.php?u=113666 (archive)

He also posted a GameMaker game called "Darkex" here: https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=155584 (archive)
Unfortunately both download links are dead (tried fixing the typo too). Has anyone heard of this?

Here are all of his other posts from there if you feel like reading
 
His publicized plan, anyway. But what I expect will happen is he will "be unable to find people who can do the work at an acceptable quality level, so I have to do it myself" and walk with the kickstarter money if he somehow succeeds.



The average gaming kickstarter makes less than $20k USD last I checked, and asks for about $12k USD. Knowing Alex's ego, I figure he's aiming for the high end of the spectrum, tempered with the budget thats been discussed with publishers as per the leaked emails.

I figure he'll be asking for at least $500k USD, and will probably have stretch goals out to $1.5m USD. He's already discussed stretch goals as being part of whats displayed in the end of the kickstarter demo, so they are part of the plan.

Kickstarter should fucking ban stretch goals. They are always the death of a project that goes massively over the amount of money asked for,and suddenly the develops has to put a ton more complicated coding that he never intended to do until well after the game was completed if at all. Dev either freezes, hires a bunch of programmers, throws them into a 'development team' and watches the money drain away, or tries to do it all, and can never complete the original project at it's original planned scope because of all the code he has to keep adding, the game is never released, the dev does a flip or just takes the money and runs.

Stretch goals BAD.
 
Found another old forum account, idk if it's been posted yet https://www.pokecommunity.com/member.php?u=113666 (archive)

He also posted a GameMaker game called "Darkex" here: https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=155584 (archive)
Unfortunately both download links are dead (tried fixing the typo too). Has anyone heard of this?

Here are all of his other posts from there if you feel like reading
Can't get it, unfortunately. The post is from 2008, and Wayback Machine's first snapshot (of the source code) is in 2009, already with a 404. Not cached on Google, can't find anything searching through 4chan archives. Probably lost to time.
Edit: I tracked one guy who commented there and certainly downloaded the game back in 2008 (Josh1billion) to an active Twitter account https://twitter.com/Fordesoft (from https://twitter.com/josh1billion). Definitely him since his subtitle is "Game Developer" on the forum, and he also has a GitHub: https://github.com/Josh1billion. If one of you is autistic enough you could ask him if there's any chance he still has it, though I'm not too sure if it's worth the effort. The other 3 people have very generic names and little identifiable info.
 
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Kickstarter should fucking ban stretch goals. They are always the death of a project that goes massively over the amount of money asked for,and suddenly the develops has to put a ton more complicated coding that he never intended to do until well after the game was completed if at all. Dev either freezes, hires a bunch of programmers, throws them into a 'development team' and watches the money drain away, or tries to do it all, and can never complete the original project at it's original planned scope because of all the code he has to keep adding, the game is never released, the dev does a flip or just takes the money and runs.

Stretch goals BAD.
Stretch goals are as good or as bad as their execution, not the concept itself. A developer saying "I need $Y to finish the project as described, but if I had an additional $X I could add four new levels and two new weapon types that I had to cut out of that estimate because they weren't essential" is a good and proper use of stretch goals. But what you usually see happen is developers partition half the actual core project into stretch goals, that are poorly planned an analyzed, with the numbers just pulled out of their ass. Usually described as "To complete my full vision of the project" type crap. You can tell a project is going to get rough if they start addition additional stretch goals mid-campaign, as opposed to drawing the line and saying "That's all we planned, designed and architected for, I can't promise anything else regardless of the funding".

Considering the quality of Alex's planning to date, I expect it to be a mess. I would have no idea how to level of effort estimate anything in his project, with the code being the way it is.
 
You can tell a project is going to get rough if they start addition additional stretch goals mid-campaign, as opposed to drawing the line and saying "That's all we planned, designed and architected for, I can't promise anything else regardless of the funding".
Just about every failed or shortfallen kickstarter I've backed, it's been for this exact reason. Starry-eyed creators see that unexpectedly huge number (by their standards) and say "I owe the backers more since this number has so many zeroes in it."
 
Apparently some Lunar Scythe art was added to evaxephon.com in September 2019. Really didn't expect him to still be updating the site (the last time anything was changed before this was in 2016, when he set the robots.txt to block all crawlers)
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(working on an archive of what's left of the site too, 'ts when I noticed this)
 
Apparently some Lunar Scythe art was added to evaxephon.com in September 2019. Really didn't expect him to still be updating the site (the last time anything was changed before this was in 2016, when he set the robots.txt to block all crawlers)
View attachment 1525110
Now why would he be adding Lunar Scythe art to his site in recent years? Don't tell me that he's still hanging onto that abortion of a game idea...wouldn't surprise me though if he still is to this day.
 
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