Winged Cloud

Winged Cloud is a British visual novel developer. They are known for creating the Sakura visual novel series.

Winged Cloud began releasing games on Steam in 2014, under publisher Sekai Project (who also published the Nekopara series by Neko Works) Their first title, Sakura Spirit was released on July 9, 2014. After publishing several of Winged Cloud's titles, Sekai Project and Winged Cloud ended their partnership.

Following this, in 2015 Winged Cloud partnered with publisher MangaGamer and released Sakura Santa. However, in 2016 MangaGamer ended their partnership with Winged Cloud citing "intractable creative differences."

After leaving MangaGamer, Winged Cloud returned to their previous publisher Sekai Project to release their next title, Sakura Dungeon. Winged Cloud continued to release titles under Sekai Project, but in 2017, Sekai Project ended their partnership, and later released a statement stating that it was due to Winged Cloud's "unprofessional behavior". After separating from Sekai Project, Winged Cloud began publishing their titles independently.

In June 2018, almost every game Winged Cloud published on Steam was delisted by Valve during the "Adult game purging" campaign. Though they came back shortly after Valve had changed their "anti-porn" policy.

Why They Suck

 * 1) With cooperation with Sekai Project, Winged Cloud (along with Neko Works) started to dominate the Steam marketplace with their hentai games. They're also one of the first hentai game developers to use the "adult content patch" method to get around Valve's anti-pornography policy, leading to various hentai game developers adopting these tactics and causing Steam to be flooded with pornography/hentai games (including shovelwares one), which continues to this very day.
 * 2) Much like Activision and EA, Winged Cloud milked the Sakura franchise (which is what that made them famous) to the point that they released 22 Sakura games in less than four years, most not even showing any difference between their "plots".
 * 3) Their "games" have little to no gameplay or interactivity whatsoever. Not even choice-making cutscenes (a standard feature in many visual novels) exist in most of their games.
 * 4) Since the release of Sakura Dungeon, Winged Cloud's games keep getting smaller and smaller compared to previous entries. Some of their most recent games had only five hentai CGs after being patched.
 * 5) * To rub more salt into the wound, Winged Cloud occasionally releases "free games" during various holidays (Valentine, Halloween, Christmas, etc.) but the hentai CGs are locked behind a password which players can obtain by donating $30 to Winged Cloud's Patreon. The most notorious case of this paywall scam is the Sakura Maid sub-series, which featured a grand total of three hentai CGs behind a $30 paywall.
 * 6) Their visual novel games suffer from lack of story developments with terrible dialogue since they use pornographic content as a selling point and don't care whether the product is actually good or not. It works, because of the weeaboos constantly getting addicted to the low-effort porn. This shows that not only does Winged Cloud not care about the content they produce, they are able to succeed in spite of it.
 * 7) While the artwork in their games (drawn by Spanish artist Wanaca) is of decent quality, the character art is somewhat generic since many characters lack any differences.
 * 8) They sell their games at roughly the same price regardless of their file size (they sold the games with only a few hentai CGs at the same price as Sakura Dungeon which features more than 100 hentai CGs).
 * 9) They are also infamous for plagiarizing various artworks and game mechanics (tracing other game's art, for example). The most infamous case is Sakura Dungeon (the only game made by Winged Cloud with actual gameplay) which were copying almost everything from Nyaatrap's dungeon crawler game Demon Master Chris, ranked from game mechanics, character design, and in-game CG arts.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) People who are looking for fan service will get lots of it with their games.
 * 2) It's pretty easy to tell if the game has any creative effort put in making it: if it has lesbianism as the focus, it's usually decent at worst.
 * 3) Their earlier games had decent stories, but that changed after they replaced their writer Liberty with Waffle (who is infamous for lazy story writing and overusing of the "ehehe" laughter).
 * 4) Popular YouTuber Lost Pause made some entertaining videos on their games and incorporated Machiko from Sakura Spirits as a regular character on his channel. His playthrough of Sakura Spirits helped elevate him to where he is today. He was unfortunately forced to remove them due to some drama with YouTube in 2016. They also helped create his mascot Lily the Fox Mechanic, and according to a stream he made on Twitch, they gave him permission to use Machiko for his webcomic.

Videos
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