That's a fair question, and perhaps you can help me understand your perspective on it better.
Feral, as a product, has thus far failed. That's not the audience's fault, it's very clearly our fault. We failed to deliver a product that enough people were willing to pay for, and we reached a point where we didn't have more capital to put into it. Happens to a lot of games, especially with indie studios trying to serve niche markets. We didn't shut it down because we still believe in the game and hoped to find the capital to continue development. But we scaled back the resources devoted to it and focused on other projects, including AJ and various prototypes. One of those was a thought experiment that became Cinder.
Now, if our intention all along was some Machiavellian plan to pretend we're making a game for one audience but actually just use them as beta testers for the REAL game we're making for a totally different audience, then I could see why the Feral community would be angry. The whole thing would have been a big lie and a giant Dr. Evil conspiracy against them. I don't know any small game studio with the resources to waste precious capital on some Agatha Christie business plot like that, but I know we couldn't afford to do it even if we were inclined to, which we're not.
We took a big swing with Feral because we saw an unrecognized, poorly served audience that we thought we could serve well. I could write at length about the mistakes we made and areas where we fell short, and I accept all the criticism the community has levied at the product itself and at me as the person ultimately responsible for the product's shortcomings. However, I do not accept the absurd notion that we committed 2+ years of our lives and millions of dollars with any intention but delivering on the plans we outlined for Feral at the outset, to serve the audience we specified.
The idea when Cinder was conceived was to leverage assets created for Feral in a different product-market fit, such that we could further development for both games. And here is where perhaps you can help me understand your perspective. We built Feral, every bit of it. Cinder utilizes assets we built - not, in any instance, assets that players built. Feral players lose nothing and are not diminished in any way by WildWorks using assets we created in another game. If reuse of game assets in another title is somehow deleterious to players of the original game, I should think the developers of Halo, Angry Birds, Counterstrike, Candy Crush, etc etc have a lot to answer for.
You "presume" the mechanics of Feral are also being reused, but you have no idea what the core mechanics of Cinder actually are or will be. But even if it was the same game released under a different title (which it emphatically is not), how exactly are Feral players made to suffer by this? By seeing people they don't like interacting with this art in a different context? By assuming without any evidence that bugs won't be fixed as quickly? Is it that they feel some exclusive claim to every polygon in a game 97% of them never paid anything to play?
To your point about messaging to the community being a disaster; well, obviously it has and that's on me. I've asked a few community members how they think we could have handled it better; thus far the only responses I've heard have been 'don't make an NFT game in the first place.' Fair enough, I understand their perspective. But if you have any ideas to offer on how we could have better announced that we ARE doing an NFT game, I'm always grateful for feedback.
