Hello,
I would like to make two small announcements today. If you’re a current (or former) volunteer who has been trying to contact me, or if you’re an adult-aged fan of the game, these announcements will be relevant to you.
Click “Continue Reading” to hear the news.
“Too many words, I ain’t readin’ allat!”
Please scroll down to the bottom for a summary.
Contacting Me
As part of my effort to live a healthier life, I’ve been spending less time online, and less time working on the game. This means that I haven’t been using Discord very much lately. So, if you’ve been attempting to communicate with me through Discord DMs, your messages have probably gone unnoticed.
If you’re a volunteer who has decided to remain on the development team, and you’ve been trying to get in touch with me to show me the latest progress on your tasks, please use e-mail to contact me instead of Discord DMs.
If you’re a former volunteer who would like me to remove your assets from the game, you’ll have to e-mail me and tell me directly. I won’t “hear it through the grapevine,” and if you tried to inform me through a Discord DM, I probably didn’t notice. (I anticipate that people will attempt to impersonate volunteers, so if you’re an ex-volunteer who wants to speak to me about the removal of your assets, you’ll have to present proof that you’re the creator of the assets when doing so.)
Despite recent events, there are still people who have been kind and generous enough to contact me and offer me their assistance with Yandere Simulator. I’m immensely grateful to these people – but I need to let you know that if you want to volunteer, you need to do it through e-mail, not through Discord DMs.
My e-mail can be found on this page: https://yanderesimulator.org/contact/
New “Adults Only” Community
Most indie developers would be absolutely thrilled to see big YouTubers expose their game to a massive audience. However, there was an unexpected side effect when huge YouTube superstars played Yandere Simulator: a lot of very young children joined the game’s community. Many of those kids have grown up and become adults by now, but there are still a lot of minors in the Yandere Sim fanbase.
I don’t want to make any fan of the game feel unwanted, unwelcome, or disliked…but I have to admit that I have always felt uneasy about the presence of children in the fanbase. Although Yandere Simulator is not an adults-only porn game, it does contain a lot of violence and dark themes that aren’t appropriate for kids.
I’ve always put forth a lot of effort to reduce the number of young children in the Yandere Sim community. The purpose of my infamous “Yandere Simulator’s BIGGEST Problem” video was to discourage children from contacting me. I made an entire video titled “This YouTube Channel Is Not For Kids” to emphasize the fact that my game and YouTube content are not meant for a young audience. I even went as far as to add a bunch of “conduct guidelines” to my Discord server to strongly discourage habits that are common among children. However, despite all these efforts, Yandere Simulator continued to retain popularity among a young audience.
Being able to have positive interactions with fans of my work is incredibly rewarding; I’d even say that it’s my main source of motivation to work on the project. Up until now, the primary way that I interacted with fans was through the Yandere Simulator Offical Discord Server, a community with over 100,000 members. When I look in there, I see people who genuinely love Yandere Simulator having a great time talking to one another – sharing fan art, speculating about the game’s plot twists, assisting each other with gameplay, etc. I’m really proud of the community that we’ve built.
That Discord server has always been a place where all fans of the game are welcome, regardless of age. We never made a deliberate effort to remove children, nor did we aggressively kick out any member of the community purely for the year that they were born in (unless they were violating Discord’s TOS). However, after recent events, I’ve decided that I would prefer to spend my time socializing with adults only. I need to make more friends my own age. But, in a community with a large population of children, it would be incredibly difficult to do that.
I don’t want to rip apart the current Discord community by instating an 18+ rule, but I do believe that a separate Yandere Simulator community needs to exist that is reserved for adults only. So, I’ve decided that it would be a good idea to create a new community, separate from the Yandere Simulator Discord server, which is meant to be a space for adult fans of the game who want to interact with one another without the presence of any children.
Instead of creating this community on Discord, we’ve created a server on the chat platform “Guilded.” If you want to participate in the new “Adults Only” community, you’ll have to create a Guilded account and then use this link to submit an application:
https://www.guilded.gg/r/zzld97mr6E?i=mb1kpoEd
I understand that this might make younger fans of the game feel hurt. It might feel like I’m abandoning you or excluding you. But, given recent events, I’m sure you can understand why I would prefer to socialize exclusively with adults from now on. Please understand that I’m not doing this because you’re unwanted or unwelcome or disliked; I’m doing this because I really need to make more friends my own age.
“How are you going to keep children out of the new community?”
All methods of forcing someone to prove their age – like demanding to see a government-issued ID – are pretty extreme, and can violate a person’s privacy. Most adults-only spaces just have a warning screen that says “Click here to confirm that you’re 18,” and anyone who clicks “Confirm” is let in. We’ll be doing something similar, with an “Application” process that asks you to state your age (among other things) before you’ll be allowed into the server.
Obviously, people can lie about their age. A few kids will probably sneak into the server by doing so. However, a person’s behavior and speech are the strongest indications of their age. If anyone consistently acts like a little kid, they’ll be kicked out.
“Why did you create a community on a new chat platform instead of continuing to use Discord?”
There were a lot of factors that influenced this decision, but I don’t want to type out a giant essay about it and make this blog post more bloated than it already is. For now, please just trust me when I say that there were several reasons for it.
“If it’s going to be an Adults Only community, will pornography and NSFW content be allowed?”
That’s not really the purpose of the new community. It’s about providing a space for adult fans of the game to interact, not about providing a space for adult content.
In Closing
If you’ve sent me a Discord DM over the past 2 weeks, it has probably gone unnoticed. If you’re a volunteer, an ex-volunteer, or someone who wants to become a volunteer, and you wish to communicate with me, please contact me through e-mail.
If you are at least 18 years old and you want to interact with other adult fans of the game without the presence of children, please join the new Guilded community.
Although I won’t be spending as much time online as I previously was, the best place to find me from now on will be the Guilded server. If you have feedback on the game, questions about the lore, etc, feel free to speak with me in the Guilded server.
(For the people who have been waiting for me to make an announcement about what I’m doing to live a healthier life, I’ll briefly mention two things: I have been leaving my house more often, and I’ve recently started using an online therapy service. I might share more details in a future blog post.)