Here is an idea:
Have a budget ready, in simplest way, it covers your life expenses. Set up a patreon or whatever and continue working. You can work full time, draining your budget. If a patreon works and starts covering your life expenses, your initial budget gets frozen and converts into "in case of..." money (so a money you should already have on top of your initial budget, so you don't get fucked if your budget reaches 0 and your project was a flop).
"But where I can get all that money???" Dunno, get a good job, make some, save some? Take a loan? There are options... But every single one is covered in possible risk and that's a big no-no for some fucks, ain't it?
It's a nice possibility to get back money you are investing if your idea was good enough. If not, you lost money.
And I am sorry, but normally you pump money into a business, if it flops, you lost majority of that money. That's how it works. If there is no risk, people don't give a fuck, mix it with mindset that doesn't account any problems and have only shiver of imagination to plan ahead one week... This is exactly why patreon can be easily abused, possible risks are close to zero.
Such makes it a perfect platform to scam and milk people and amount of dickheads doing that is just disgusting. But both sides are to blame. Patrons themselves don't question and aren't harsh enough towards people they are giving money to, because they are not aware.
That's why steam would be a better platform for this, as it was mentioned way earlier. Environment is much harsher and demanding, most of patreon creators wouldn't survive.
If I were to change something on Patreon, it would be a reminder sent to people every 2 months, reminding them who they are supporting and how much they spent on each creator in total. This would force people to think more about it, but wouldn't be as aggressive as other methods. You would see a lot of money going down and down, which would force creators to start working to keep their income.
But that would mean a lost money for Patreon, so not going to happen.
For me "free" games that are made as a hobby, should be an extra to already established market of paid games and not other way around. Generally if I see the game that will be "free", I am assuming it's never going to be finished. Most of the time I am correct (no idea if it's the same for ones that have 3dCG made in daz3d as I avoid them).
Paid titles are a different story... If a creator wants to make money, they need to invest money, create and sell. Since patreon is not a thing in Japan, that's exactly why their adult games market works.
In case of the west, it started in a weird mix of paid crap and free crap, so no one gave a fuck and people continued to translate moonspeak. Then crowdfunding came screaming like crazy.
So right now, we have a case of creators that take no risks, don't really care, get money and everything is fine and dandy.
Luckily, at some point people will start being more harsh toward adult games, no-effort-gib-shekels developers will hit the wall and west game porn industry will be seen as inferior when compared with Japanese one. I already mentioned that way earlier. The funny thing is the reason for this comparison. People will have higher demands and they will start looking... And they will find something better.
So while I do shit a lot on patreon and developers, I know that there is an upper limit to everything. No clue how many years, but it will come, always does.
Also, I am aware that an argument of "high horse" could be used here and probably that's the vibe people can get from it. Fine, maybe I am sitting on one, maybe not, don't really care because time will tell and judgment will be made then.
