We are still here, and 2022 WAS a make-or-break year. It was the year L&P changed to event-based releases which made the story overall much worse as events seem disjointed. It was also the year where development speed became so laughable that even the most diehard fans here had to acknowledge the bullshit going on. 2022 has changed AWAM alot. And not to the better, that's for sure. I remember
GingerSweetGirl predicting in 2021 that L&P would eventually go to event-based releases, which she considered to be a make-or-break thing. Yeah, she was right. And many others who thought 2022 would turn everything to shit weren't wrong either.
Yeah, we are still here playing the game and L&P is still developing it, but it can hardly get any worse in terms of development, can it now? Can't get much slower before he's in the same realm as ICSTOR or Gumdrops, or abandonment even. So yeah, 2022 was certainly a make-or-break year if you ask me. Maybe not in the same way you thought people meant it. It's obvious that there'll be some poor souls burning their money on L&P for years to come, even if he were to release absolutely zero content.
Hardly. His raw numbers are higher than 2 years ago, but the average patron tier went down. So he's making more or less the same amount of money. You can even see that if you check his patron goal bar at the start of next month. He used to reach the 100% there with a much lower patron count. Takes several hundred more patrons these days to get it to reach 100%. And he's also not been able to reach his peak of 2300 patrons again since April 2022 (first update with Animations, where many people, even some OG patrons, expressed their frustration which resulted in dropping down tiers).
Edit:
I'd argue it's you wearing pink glasses. The amount of satisfied patrons is far lower compared to the amount of people who either abandoned the game entirely or are vocal about it's disastrous development. There's plenty pirate forums on the internet, and the general opinion of L&P and his practices are all the same. This title could easily have 10k+ patrons considering it's one of the most viewed, most demanded VN's out there. And yet L&P is stuck at a fairly low amount of supporters. Sure, he's not going to starve any time soon, but he could also be a millionaire by now if it wasn't for the constant downhill ride the past 3+ years.