Hey guys, we're sorry to have to tell you this.
Due to the devastating effects of the incident that we caused on September 30th, 2022, the development studio has gone bankrupt and we're unable to continue the development of "Novastella Island" and "DancingSim"; the development of the subsequent chapters of "Mirror 2: Project X" will also have to be suspended indefinitely. We hope that in the future, when we have the opportunity, we will complete the development of the subsequent chapters, and the game will remain in the current Early Access state until development is completed.
After communicating with some very helpful people at Steam, we've extended the refund policy to all users who purchased Novastella Island and DancingSim. Please click on the "Help" button in the upper left corner of your Steam client, then click on "Steam Customer Service", find the product you purchased, and click on "I would like to request a refund" (users who have played more than two hours and have more than 14 days of game time are also eligible for a refund). These two products will also be removed from the Steam Store within 4 weeks of this announcement, so please make sure to request a refund before the game is removed.
As a side note, the refund process for "Mirror 2: Project X" is going smoothly, we've already processed about 30% of the refunds, so please rest assured that we will continue to process all refunds.
As of today, "Mirror 2: Project X" (including DLCs) has sold a total of 4.2 million copies, with a pre-tax profit of about 18 million yuan, accounting for only 37% of the development cost. It takes about 3 months to develop one chapter with a team of about less than a hundred people, and the initial cost is about 6 million yuan, and the later production pipeline is mature and the cost is about 4 million yuan.
Since we can't meet players' expectations, the negative reviews are indeed our fault, and we should bear the consequences. However, we must make it clear that "illegally increasing fraud" and "illegally collecting and selling players' private information" are false accusations.
At the beginning of the "Mirror 2" project, our intention was to put the player's experience first, to make significant improvements in gameplay, story, graphics, music, etc., and to keep the price low. The development cycle of "Mirror 2" is very long, from 2019 to 2022, there are 4 versions: LIVE 2D version, U3D PBR version, UE4 PBR version and UE4 NPR version. Every time we throw away a version, we throw away a lot of time and money. All the details, such as the music, we are also trying to do our best: each character has a custom-voiced theme song according to the story, in addition to Japanese, we also add Chinese and English versions, not only is the production more difficult, it also adds a huge amount of extra cost.
We launched a crowdfunding campaign in 2020 to make the U3D PBR version. Although the crowdfunding campaign failed, we were touched by the encouragement of more than 3,000 players, which is also the source of our motivation to overcome difficulties and continue. A few days before the release of the EA version, we sent a free game key to all the people who participated in the crowdfunding campaign as a token of our gratitude.
January 21, 2022, the release of the EA version of "Mirror 2: Project X" was our highlight: 600,000 copies sold on the first day, 2 million copies sold in the first month (including paid DLC; COSPLAY and Artbook DLCs are free for the first period). The pre-tax profit of the first month is 8 million yuan, which recovers one third of the early development costs. However, at the same time, the popularity of the breakthrough brought us great trouble, we kept receiving warnings from relevant government departments - there were anonymous reports that we were operating illegally, and the reports have not stopped to this day. We had to make changes and omissions in the first chapter and subsequent development contents under the close attention. Then in August Steam Workshop was temporarily closed by Steam, our last way was blocked.
On September 30, 2022, we posted the infamous announcement. We did something really stupid: we didn't tell you everything that was happening and we didn't think that it might be better to contact Steam first to ask if they could help us with the refund. We spent 3 weeks building a refund website, and the information needed to transfer money to strangers via Alipay was mistakenly considered stealing and selling private information...
Everything started to fall apart from that day, we knew that we would get a lot of negative reviews and we knew that a lot of you would be really upset. But what we didn't expect was that our honest refund policy would make some of you think that we were trying to "sell your private information", and some even said "my Steam account was stolen, it must be those bastards". The development of the incident took us by surprise, from some people venting their emotions to a cyber-bullying party of the century in just a few days. Some team members continued to receive harassment and personal threats; we found that some team members playing with their children in public places were photographed and posted on the Internet; some team members' WeChat, phone numbers, and home addresses were also posted on the Internet...
Anyway, things will calm down eventually. However, we would like to take this opportunity to apologize to our team members scattered all over the world: we are sorry for letting you down.
With the consent of our former colleagues, we will now release the list of the production team. It has been a pleasure to work with all of you, and we hope that our former colleagues have a bright future!
The following list is not in any particular order:
