After earning more than $500k, game developer for Tales of Rein Ravine vanished from social media, leaving the game abandoned and us with the question: what happened?
Let me set the stage for you. The year is 2021, and horse gamers are starving for a good game. The only real options for them are limited: you can either play Star Stable Online (which at the time had many furious at their treatment of players, but that’s a story for another day) or Rival Stars: Horse Racing. Maybe you could get away with role-playing on Red Dead Redemption 2, but that’s only if you had a pretty beefy PC and were over the age of 18.
So, along comes Maia, posting “NEW HORSE GAME IN DEVELOPMENT… First Look!” on a brand new YouTube channel. At the time, she had not decided on a name yet, so she named it HorseGame.exe. This video blew up and today sits at almost 100,000 views. This meant it hit the radars of most horse game YouTubers and players, spurring on the excitement for the game.
Over the course of three years, Maia, a solo indie developer, ramps up production, offering a demo to paid subscribers on the Tales of Rein Ravine (TORR) Patreon, posting TikToks and YouTube videos, as well as constantly improving the game and her skill set as a developer.
Demo and Gameplay
The demo released in September 2022 and was a huge success, with many people still playing it today. While the graphics are stylized and the horses aren’t modeled exactly to real-life standards, what really stood out was the beautiful lighting and, most importantly, the gameplay and controls.
What set the whole experience apart from most games was how involved the player was while riding. Instead of your usual WASD to go faster, turn and slow down, Tales of Rein Ravine incorporated rein and leg aids in-game. A and D pulled the left and right rein, while left click and right click on the mouse applied pressure on the horse through the rider’s legs. To someone outside of the equestrian sphere, this might sound confusing and strange, but this is highly accurate to how real riding works.
This meant that by using A and D alongside right and left click, you could perform tighter turns, collect and extend the gaits, and even help guide the horse over a jump. I could gush for days about how clever and intuitive the controls were; it really was a standout feature in the horse game world.
By this point Tales of Rein Ravine was probably one of the most highly anticipated horse games of the decade.
Early Access Launch
In June of 2024, just three months before the Early Access launch, the TORR Patreon boasted over 6,000 paying members, ranking 10th on Patreon’s Top Supported Games, and 140th overall.
Then, on September 30, 2024, the game was released into Early Access (for free!) on Steam. It was a pretty big step up from the demo—you now had a setting and backstory, at the Rein Ravine Equine University International to study and train.
You get on a bus (yes, I’ll talk about the bus in a moment), which takes you to the University. Here you meet the few school horses and have your first lesson. The lesson itself is very akin to real life, with an instructor’s voice sternly directing you through the exercises and occasionally sounding disappointed if you need to repeat them.
You learn each horse has their own personality, and usually the more capable the horse, the trickier it is to ride. Most of the game is structured around these lessons, but you do get to try jumping and cross-country once you’re done.
Now this is the perfect start to an Early Access game that could really flourish under the paid support on Patreon and with Maia, a skilled developer and equestrian, at the helm.
Then… nothing. Six months go by. A year. Almost two. Radio silence. No updates to the game, no posts on Patreon, no movement on social media. Maia just… vanishes.
What happened?
So what happened? How could this game, with a cult following and hundreds of thousands in revenue, just get dropped out of nowhere?
I left out a few key details in the overview, but there are plenty of rumours and misinformation floating around that we can debunk.
Something worth noting—when the Early Access launched, there were a few key problems that people ran into. Firstly, the bus to actually go to the University was almost impossible to find and figure out how to trigger.
I myself (hello, Abigail Pinehaven here!) played the intro of the game twice, once for a video and once for a stream, and I am still not entirely sure how I got it to work. Unfortunately, it may be glitchy or bugged. People really struggled to get the bus schedule to trigger and take them to the main part of the game, which is not ideal.
A few players had more technical issues like graphics card compatibility crashes, glitching through things, and performance issues. There was a patch note on October 16, 2024, fixing some of these issues, but this would be the last and only patch the game would receive. This is relevant because in a Patreon post on April 8, 2024, Maia talks about why she made the game free:
“A second reason for this decision is the issue of time and technical support. Releasing a paid game on Steam would be guaranteed to cause an impossible amount of requests from players needing help, that I simply would not be able to handle. When the demo first launched, and the massive interest it gained, I started receiving thousands of messages from players needing help to get the game running. During the first few months I tried helping everyone, but it was taking hours a day, which was not sustainable in the long run.”
This indicates that she may have been overwhelmed with trying to do everything herself after launch—social media, tech support, and being the sole developer. This may be one of the reasons she decided to disappear, but it’s not the strongest case, as surely making the game a one-time purchase would actually reduce the number of people needing help (as paywalls prevent many people from accessing the game for various reasons). However, it does indicate that she didn’t want to feel obligated to be tech support for every single player, which is largely expected from games you pay for.
As you may have read in the title, it is estimated that Maia made around 500,000 USD over the course of about three years on Patreon. This is an incredibly impressive feat and was certainly not undeserved. Until June 2024, the Tales of Rein Ravine Patreon stats were public (and then were privated after that point). CloakTheLibrarian compiled all known information into a table so we can see how many people were paid subscribers and how much they were paying.
In total, before tax and Patreon’s 5% cut, we can see that TORR’s earnings were $536,161 between April 2021 and July 2024. That is a pretty admirable achievement for a first-time, solo indie developer. However, when this information was put together and published, there was an outcry from players.
Many felt like they had been scammed. That maybe Maia had kept TORR going for as long as possible, delivered the Early Access for free, and then dipped, running away with her earnings and leaving free players and paid members high and dry.
However, this doesn’t make much sense. Patreon is a voluntary monthly donation, and she delivered on her promise of giving paying members access to the demo, and then delivered the game. Whatever you think of the game in its current state, Maia is either a very bad conman, or not one at all, considering the fact that she did indeed deliver on her promise of a game. I’d understand it more if people had to purchase the game on Steam and then it got abandoned, but it’s available to anyone at no cost, and Patreon supporters know they are paying to support the developer, not paying for a game. While it’s totally understandable to be frustrated and hurt by her disappearance, it’s not plausible that she was just in it for the money, as it would have been much easier to fake screenshots and videos of the game rather than actually make it. Hot take, I imagine I’ll get some flak for that.
Another popular rumour is that Maia is based in Ukraine, and that is why we have not heard from her. I’m sure I don’t have to explain why that’s significant, but Ukraine is currently experiencing an invasion from Russian forces which is displacing its population and putting millions at risk. While I am in no position to deny this claim as I do not personally know Maia, I have reason to doubt this. Her YouTube channel is listed as being in Canada, which you could argue is no real evidence as people can easily use VPNs to set their location. Another thing to take into consideration is her accent while speaking English, which you can hear in an interview she did with Rattle.
She did mention in this interview that she was experiencing issues with withdrawing her Patreon earnings.
“It’s a problem of like, being from a very small country, so basically I’m guessing that there’s probably just never been a Patreon Creator from my country so the tax administration doesn’t know what to do about it, they’ve never heard about this kind of thing” (45:20)
“My country just doesn’t know what kind of taxes I’m supposed to pay out of this kind of income.” (10:21)
That does suggest she is not based in Canada; however, there is very little evidence to back up the claim that she is Ukrainian. If she is, and that is indeed the reason why she disappeared, I hope her and her family are okay.
Since then, there have been no updates to speak of. An incident occurred when the price of the Patreon was raised by $0.50 on all tiers between May 23, 2025, and July 12, 2025, which many people were incredibly frustrated by, as it seemed she was increasing the price to squeeze more out of paying members who were still holding out hope for the game. However, there is a good chance it was an automatic rise by Patreon, likely the platform adjusting for inflation.
As there has been no word from the developer herself, or people she was in contact with, I cannot in good faith make any assumptions about what happened and why she never returned to TORR. As a paying Patreon myself, I don’t feel like we were scammed or taken advantage of. I think Maia was just one person with a lot of weight on her shoulders, and I just hope wherever she is now, she is happy and safe.
So long, Tales of Rein Ravine. I thank you for being a diamond in the rough. Hopefully more will follow in your footsteps.
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