Your second post of all time got me curious. I looked at your post history and your only other post is on a game that is labeled "abandoned" and yet you posted that you hope it (Thinking About You) gets finished.
I'll let you in on a secret, what you're seeing from AWAM is exactly the sort of evolution that precedes a game's abandonment. You may think people are moaning, and that everyone should just be patient, but sooner or later AWAM is going to end up exactly like Thinking About You; dead and abandoned.
People are impatient because they can feel this game slipping away.
I can think of several reasons for a game/VN's being abandoned:
1. I believe it's literally the no.1 reason for abandoned games - Lack of support , and without a thorough research I'd say that's the reason for more than 95% of abandoned games (for example - just checked and Thinking about you Patreon is bellow 160$. In it's highest it reached 305$ before Patreon's share and tax (check it
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). Meanwhile, most abandoned games has even lower support. But that's not the case with AWAM.
2. Health issues (dev or his family). I know of some devs who died, even a sad case of a dev's wife who severely injured herself while trying to commit suicide (in that case the game development only slowed down). We know L&P was in college when he started AWAM so he's probably in his late 20's - early 30's, so shit might happen, but his life expectancy has somewhere between 40-50 more years, so probably not in the near future.
3. A change of mind. In example - if suddenly he'll find god and abandoned all sins of flesh etc... That might be an extreme case, but there are more probable reasons for this - in example, he can get involved romantically with someone who will not approve this kind of business...
4. Patreon shutting of his page - that's a real threat, but I believe he can overcome this kind of obstacle. Most of his Patreons will immediately move their support to subscribestar, and eventually he'll regenerate his previous earnings.
5. Burnout - some obvious examples here like icstor and gumdrop, but that's it. I dont know of any other (allegedly) burnet out dev from the top 100 devs (according to
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) who abandoned their game. So 2 out of 100 isn't a lot, and I wouldn't lose sleep because of this small chance.
7. World war III (or any other force majeure). It's sad, but right now that's the most realistic reason for abandonment...
I guess there are a lot more reasons, but I believe these are the major ones. Right now things are looking good for him financially, and his supporters are growing more or less according to my post
here (which predicts ~2,000 supporters for the end of February. Right now he has 1,991 from Patreon and Subscribestar combined). As I see it, the chance he's abandoning the game in the next 5-8 years is quite small. That's not to say I believe this game will ever reach it's ending...