Farewell to the Game

As of the upload of this updated announcement, the WTTG2 assistant will be permanently disabled. I apologize if you came here looking for help understanding the game, but you've missed your chance to do so using this tool. Regardless of whether you know the situation regarding Adam, I kindly ask you to read further anyway, as I believe more people deserve to know what kind of people they are supporting with their money. For those who don't want to read this entire explanation, I no longer wish to support Adam, and I don't believe anyone else should either.

Welcome to the Game II is a survival horror game developed by Adam Flatau and released in 2018. The game had ideas and mechanics I enjoyed, which eventually led me to create various projects for and about the game such as the assistant site that used to be publicly available here, a board game adaptation of Welcome to the Game II, and a variety of projects related to a modding project called Welcome to the Game II+. I enjoyed the game he had created, but as time went on I eventually became aware of things that made me question Adam's integrity. This page is dedicated to bringing light to these moments for those who care to listen.

To begin, I will bring up an older situation that was the first situation I was aware of. During the time that Welcome to the Game 2 was Adam's main focus, there was an incident that involved a streamer playing the game who decided to make a comment criticizing Adam. During this time the game had a feature that allowed Adam to control various mechanics in the game remotely. After the streamer made his comment, Adam quickly began to abuse this feature heavily. Over the course of the next several hours, he tampered with their game rendering it borderline impossible to play until the end of the stream. Chat messages by Adam from later in the stream make it very clear that it was a very deliberate attack due to the comments the streamer made towards Adam.

Moving forward, Masks of Deception was announced and began development. This was another game with an interesting concept that a lot of people were interested in seeing, myself included. Because of this, I applied and was accepted into the game's private beta. During the beta, I held the same opinion I hold today... "I think the idea is good, but the mechanics need to be improved and more effort needs to be put into the player experience." However, regardless of my opinion of the game, it did not end up as successful as originally hoped due to various issues. Unfortunately, the same goes for my opinion on Adam around the release of MoD. During the private beta, Adam expressed that he was pissed off at a popular streamer who had played his games in the past for not playing Masks of Deception. On another occasion, Adam and others also made several comments in the beta test channels against the developers of Phasmophobia for using store assets and making "tens of millions upon millions of dollars".

Another interesting trend was the polls Adam conducted during the time that Masks of Deception was his main focus. The first poll prompted members of his discord to vote on whether they enjoyed the experience of playing Welcome to the Game II more than Masks of Deception. In the poll, he threatened to ban users who voted and had not played both games. He later pinged several Discord members who voted, demanding to see pictures of their Steam libraries to prove they played both games. By the time the poll was settling down with Welcome to the Game II as the most-voted option, Adam chimed in with another message and said "Odd, I don't think half the people here voting for WTTG even have MoD" effectively ignoring the result of the vote. A similar event happened in a later poll on Twitter where he asked if players would check out an upcoming patch that included major updates to the game. In the end, 42% of voters stated they didn't intend to try the update. Adam responded to this by stating "[...]the 42% who voted nope just want WTTG content" instead of considering other possibilities.

As the excitement around the game began to settle, Adam stepped back and decided to place Masks of Deception on the back burner in a discord announcement where he stated he was disappointed with the game's launch. He announced plans for a new edition of the Welcome to the Game franchise and said he would continue supporting and updating Masks of Deception while people were still playing the game. At the time I took this as a sign that the improvements Masks of Deception needed to thrive would likely never happen and that the game would never see its full potential.

I think Masks of Deception is a perfect example of one of the issues Adam has had with development; he often does not think through what the final result of his design decisions will be for the person playing his games. Masks of Deception has a killer role with practically no strategic play except trying to kill everyone before they figure out the demon type. It is a deception game with no actual interesting mechanics for deceit. There is even another key example in Welcome to the Game II that can prove this isn't just a one off occurrence due to Masks of Deception being a multiplayer game either. In Welcome to the Game II, going out of bounds will result in you immediately being teleported to the elevator with no way to continue the game. This mechanic was made specifically to mess with players who decided to use out-of-bounds glitches discovered by the speedrunning community. However, this change also regularly results in actual players being softlocked due to this protection system being poorly designed. Masks of Deception is a much worse case of bad design, but the addition of anti-speedrun systems in Welcome to the Game II shows that this is not just an isolated issue.

At some point, after Masks of Deception stopped active development, I was looking back at the game and decided to look at the more critical reviews the game was receiving. There were a variety of negative Steam reviews that reported different issues including poor interactions with Adam, questionable balancing of mechanics, and matchmaking issues. One of the reviews I ended up reading discussed negative interactions with Adam regarding potentially removing or limiting friend lobbies. Out of curiosity, I decided to search for them on the discord to see if any messages from the user still existed. I ended up finding some messages left on the discord that were similar to what was discussed in the review and I made a comment saying as much. After some time Adam discovered my comment and decided to ban me from the discord which I discovered much later. The discord was later deleted sometime after my ban.

The last issue I will briefly mention here is regarding how Adam handles fan mods. Specifically one called Welcome to the Game: Versus. The mod was in development for only a very short time before it was brought to their attention that Adam had made a lawsuit threat in a random Twitch chat when the mod was brought up. Not only is this unprofessional behavior, but this also contradicts their previous statements that they were fine with mods as long as they were not sold. Threatening to take down mods as he did here is well within his rights, but it shows how he is willing to neglect and actively tear down some of the most active members of his community. Welcome to the Game II: Versus was ultimately canceled which called the eventual fate of Welcome to the Game II+ into question as well despite it being a more established project.

Unfortunately, this is where I need to make amendments to my original statements to include the events of today and the current future of Welcome to the Game II+. In more recent times there have been people reaching out and asking if there were channels where they could provide monetary support for the Welcome to the Game II+ development team. Due to it being an ethical gray area, Nasko reached out to Adam via Twitter. This eventually led to Adam posing the question publicly in a way we see as disingenuous when he states the mod is built off of his game's popularity twice. Shortly after he also repeated his trend of downplaying supportive comments towards the idea of donations with a later reply stating that "[...]a lot of replies to this tweet are from accounts that don't even follow me[...]". After some time he returned with an offer to allow donations if he could prepare a contract that could be signed. He asked for Naskos full legal name and address to prepare the contract and requested a 30% cut in donations for anything regarding the mod. This offer was quickly declined due to a severe lack of trust in Adam due to previous incidents such as Welcome to the Game II: Versus. Despite this ending amicably, this situation has finally made us come to the decision to cancel the mod. As of writing the exact plan is not fully decided, but at the very least, the mod will no longer be receiving feature updates. This is ultimately a result of the negative attitude Adam holds towards us and WTTG2+. We would like to make it clear that the mod is not being shut down because we and Adam did not agree on how donations should be handled or because he is forcing us to shut down the mod. It is being shut down because of a loss of respect for Adam as a developer.

• We no longer want to benefit his game with sales because people want to try the mod.
• We no longer want to develop the mod when Adam publicly regards us as people trying to rip him off when we ask a question for the sake of courtesy.
• We no longer want to worry about a narcissist breathing down our necks because we gave some of his existing fans something new to try out.
• We no longer want to build on top of a game made by someone who actively dismisses their community and past games by leaving them behind.
• We no longer want to follow a developer who immediately threatens fan projects with lawsuits instead of taking a moment to send a polite message.
• We no longer want to support someone with such a fragile ego that they think that harassing a streamer for hours after one offhand comment is okay to do.