hey chris, i appreciate the message! let me give you a response that i hope will satisfy you.
cruel world had a very clear intention from day 1, and at the time i decided to allow people to continue buying it, it was done out of greed and excitement. it wasn't true to what it was supposed to be, or who i want to be now - or even who i wanted to be then. there was a lot of cool stuff that came out of cruel world, but continuing to sell it was, in my eyes, a mistake.
any external criticism was unrelated to my personal judgement; it catalyzed my decision but was by no means the cause of it. in this case i would say that removing my game is something i did because i wanted to own up to that mistake, to learn from it, to become better, as you say. it has been a long time coming and i'm happy to have done it.
regarding having demos for paid products: cruel world was... i never thought of, or never wanted to think of, it as a product. to approach it in that way is too much of a shift for me right now. if i revisit cruel world for some reason in the future, i ought to consider a demo, if my goal is to sell more copies.
i like demos for commercial games! i remember lots of people saying that demos were a "bad idea" for indie games, 5-10 years ago... i don't know if that advice still holds or if it was ever even good advice. there's opinions on both sides.
i look forward to releasing a game with a demo someday. it's intimidating. i make small games, and i worry that a demo for such a game would be so small that the paid version would be almost nothing by comparison.
anyway, i'll figure it out.
love, droqen.
p.s. please check out Gentle World. you can still check it out. i hope you enjoy our videogame.