I suddenly remembered how much I enjoyed The Arcana (that phone app), so I reinstalled it and found out it was sold to another company.
It is so disappointing. I remember it was created by a small company called Nix Hydra. They also have/had an itch io account, and they started a very successful kickstarter campaign to create a visual novel dating sim videogame.
The game was successfully funded, and some of the rewards for the pledges were:
A PC VERSION OF THE ACTUAL GAME
For a while the company was ignoring the pledgers regarding the artbook:
They later replied that they were working on sending the artbook, so I think that was finally shipped but not everyone seemingly received it.
And of course, the pc version...
The pledgers got a discount code for certain routes only.
The game was supposed to be a steam/gog/pc game, a full on visual novel. But unfortunately greed won:
You can see here a bit more about how much more they ended up earning with predatory mobile app practices.
Basically, they knew they had a hit, and locked all the romance content behind pay for play. When you play the game on mobile (mind you: this is a romance game, a dating sim), you will be able to play a non romance scene for free, and a romance scene only by using a coins/keys that you can win (with high difficulty) or purchase with real money.
Nix Hydra was mainly owned by:
Nikolai Ladizinsky, Dana Rune... the rest of the employees at Nix Hydra seem pretty hard to find.
It looks like a lot of people (EDIT: three of the people) went to work at Red Spring Studio just to open a new kickstarter for a new videogame.
The kickstarter is from 2023, with an "estimated delivery" set to 2023 (EDIT: apparently the release date for the game is 2025, but none of the backers saw chapter 1 till now... 2026...). The owner and workers at the company all use first names (EDIT: shortened names/names that are hard to search, but this is not important because I missed that the people who worked for mix hydra had written in the bio, so it's only three people, none of them used to be in decisional roles for nix hydra if I understand correctly) so it is hard to know who they are, but they do credit "The Arcana" among their successes, in their website.
Funnily enough one of the rewards is an artbook and the comments are...uhm... very familiar.
Luckily, this time there is a steam entry for the game but the game is still "to be announced" three years later, which is not promising. And after three years what is currently available is still Chapter 1, which can only be played on Patreon. Updates of the game are also locked behind paywall (for patreon and backers).
EDIT: The Co-director of the game is also from Nix Hydra but not The Arcana. They are the first person listed in credits and worked for the Nix Hydra mobile game Last Legacy. Two of the writers also worked for Nix Hydra (Last Legacy and The Arcana).
And what happened to The Arcana, in the meantime?
In 2022, as soon as it stopped making money (I suppose) it was sold to some predatory mobile app called Dorian, which follows the same rules of having a dating sim/romance story where the romance scenes can only be unlocked through payment of difficult to earn coins. Dorian allows fans to create their games, using AI art etc.
So yeah, pretty sad story and a very disappointing ending. Especially because The Arcana had a solid plot and quite interesting diverging romance interests. It could have gone down as one of the most popular dating sim (with queer romance) of the past years, and instead it will probably one day disappear into a blip as soon as this mess of a company called Dorian sink into the sea.
