It's a messy situation, for sure - and, for people who just want to play and enjoy Forager, it's a potential disappointment, especially as the announcement that the Multiplayer Update had been cancelled was only posted to Patreon, and not Steam or Twitter. In an update, Vadim reveals more issues, including the fact that anyone criticising the handling of the Multiplayer Update is likely to get banned on Steam or the game's Discord, and that one of the Discord's moderators reported being kicked from the server for 'mental issues' after coming out as trans. As to whether anyone had learned anything from this, time will show.' 'Big tragedies often come from series of small issues that were neglected for long enough,' Vadim says in the conclusion, 'and it is really unfortunate to see the game end up like this. Vadim places blame on HopFrog for not creating a more stable codebase from the start, and planning ahead for future additions, as well as relying on contractors (who can leave at any time) for large portions of the game's code. Gaziter notes that HopFrog's reasoning for the low wage was that 'you're not a founder' and therefore 'the success of the game will probably never matter for your salary,' despite having made 'most of the game's art' for two years. In a post of their own, programmer Vadim detailed some issues that weren't mentioned in HopFrog's post, including the fact that the artist, Gaziter, was working for just above minimum wage after the update, despite the game selling thousands of copies and making money on HopFrog's Patreon, and the fact that HopFrog said that the entire team quit, despite the fact that at least one person (Vadim) was booted off the team after asking repeatedly for a contract.

As the main artist who worked forager from the start up until release I also had a very bad experience with the main developer.Īfter the release (when the game was already a success) I was offered to keep working on it for under minimum wage. The developers that HopFrog mentioned in the post were not happy to see that they were being blamed for the failure of the Multiplayer Update, of course - and a couple of them took to Twitter to tell their side of the story. In the post ( which you can read here), HopFrog blames:Īs a result, HopFrog is offering refunds to anyone who had paid for it already, and giving out all the remaining Multiplayer Beta keys for free. Recently, HopFrog posted on his Patreon, saying that the planned Multiplayer Update - for which he had hired more people - had been cancelled, due to a host of different issues. It reminded me of that GDC talk he was planning to make in 2020, claiming he was a 'solo dev', dismissing everyone else who worked on the game /P08F3eBHqJ- DeadKat - AVM owner April 13, 2021 The way the patreon post is worded and its overall tone, what YAL had to say about it. Everything about this is absolutely horrendous. Still, you'll find that many of Forager's reviews call it a solo project, developed from Cavallero's own Game Jam idea. Perhaps, for the majority of the development period, it was mostly his work - but HopFrog hired multiple programmers to help out, and had an artist named Gaziter creating art from the beginning of the game's development.

The game was hugely popular, selling 600,000 copies in its first year on Steam, and became another success story for a single developer working on a passion project.Įxcept Forager was not a solo project. Don't be fooled: some of the cutest games out there have a dark side, and it seems like Forager - a 2019 'solo dev' project by HopFrog, real name Mariano Cavellero, that fuses Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon - is no different.

Forager game reviews