I sincerely believe that there is a degree of fraud/shady activity within Patreon. That isn't to say that ICSTOR or any specific dev is knowingly participating in it, but there's just so much money being shelled out for nebulous returns that it makes me suspicious. We see the usual ebb and flow of patrons over the course of a month, but some devs can go many months without a new release and barely lose support; and then regain all of it (and then some) upon the next release. To some extent this can be explained by dedicated patrons who stick it out no matter what, while other patrons just pay close attention and re-up for new releases, but I doubt that explains it all. I think GumDrop games is a good example of what should happen when a dev goes off the rails. After the last "good" update in 2019, support dropped normally, but since then updates have become infrequent and incoherent/terrible. That whole time, even through 2020 when everyone else was seeing growth, GumDrop's support steadily fell. I believe it peaked at ~2,000 patrons in 2019 and is now around 200. To me that makes sense. But we don't see that with ICSTOR or L&P or any other "large" dev. There's always magically a perfect influx of money to replenish any support lost over the course of the month. It's way too convenient.
