itch.io

Enforcement is inconsistent on several sites - being largely driven by third-party reporting and AI scans rather than the site spending money to filter themselves properly. A given project surviving so far is just evidence that it hasn't been noticed yet, not that it's actually acceptable. Or, in some cases, it's a sign of which manual reviewer it landed in front of (and possibly what mood they were in that day).

Also, in the case you mention, season 2 is not season 1, and the precise content of the two will differ - depending on precisely how the line is crossed, something in season 1 that isn't in season 2 may be the difference.

When it comes to Patreon, it's not a shop, and it's up to individuals to decide whether they want to support an individual creator, in the hopes of enabling them to produce more of what they like. Use it with that in mind, and you'll avoid a lot of disappointments.

A number of platforms, including Itch, have had to choose between being able to take payments (and pay for servers), and refusing to accept Mastercard and Visa's prejudices about content. That crackdown, driven by the payment duopoly, means some content has to be paywalled, some content gets shadow-banned (there are a bunch of games on Itch that don't show up in searches), and some gets outright purged. Even Steam doesn't have the muscle to stand up to this non-government censorship, so blaming individual creators, or even Itch, for this is blaming the wrong people.

If anyone is still wondering about this, having both %appdata%\RenPy\{game name and GUID}\* and {game folder}\game\saves\* is a standard Ren'Py thing, not something individual developers do. It means that saves automatically carry over between versions of the same game despite the game folder often changing name to reflect the new version number, but you can still transfer the game between systems without losing your saves just by copying the game folder, without having to dig into your Windows files.

The %appdata% saves let you get the advantages of all Windows' built-in features for handling individual apps' user-generated data (including automated backups) and means that game series have a standard place to find saves to import from earlier games without needing the user to show them, nor do anything else to put the saves in the "right" place.

The \game\saves saves let users who have some idea what they're doing do the things they want to with the game for the most part.

The one downside of the dual saves is that it makes manually deleting your progress a little trickier - rather than just deleting the saves from the game folder, you also need to delete the ones in %appdata% otherwise Ren'Py will just recreate the deleted version from the other (more generally, it will synchronise both versions by copying the newer version, so if you want to manually edit your save, you should only need to edit one of them).