On another note, how do people even get milked on patreon? I supported Arvus games on patreon for $60 total cause I thought thats what their games in total was worth then I cancelled my support, why do other people not do this too? Its not hard. Honestly if you let yourself get milked for that long, or dont do research on the dev beforehand thats on you to some extent.
Roundscape was finished many years ago and all Kal does now is release a mini patch every few months that adds a negligible amount of content to the game. Make no mistake, he is doing this specifically to justify taking money from patreon. If Kal was employed in a company, it could be said that he does just enough work to not give the boss a good enough reason to fire him. This is called
"Milking patreon".
Let's take a look at Kal's achievements over the past 11 years.
2012 - Roundscape adorevia development was started
2017 - Uprising was released (short experimental game that was never quite finished)
2017 - Arenus was Announced (release date was set for 2019)
2018 - Roundscape adorevia development was fully finished (at this point there is no need to add anything to the game)
2019 - Below Sunshade was released (extremely short game)
2020 -
Nothing
2021 -
Nothing
2022 -
Nothing
2023 -
???
I think it's pretty reasonable that some people are getting fed up with the fact that Kal hasn't released anything in quite a few years that would make people feel like he's not just taking their money for personal use.
Like you said, development takes time, there's nothing wrong with that.
But if the release date is moved several times a year every year, it
REALLY tries our patience.
If he is not
100% sure that he will be able to live up to his promises, he should have avoided announcing release dates.
Once or twice it could be understood and excused, but he did it about a dozen times...
And as someone who has already been directly involved in the development of adult RPG maker games, I know that every developer faces one more dilemma. When your monetary income from Patreon gets over a certain amount, you have two options.
1) You can (sometimes just temporarily) expand the development team. Not everyone is equally capable at everything. There are people who are able to do a job that takes you months in just a few weeks. Hiring such people will cost you money, but it can drastically reduce developmend time.
2) Or you can intentionally keep the team small. This will get you a lot more money and will put a lot less demand on your creativity because you can stay with one game for many years. Of course, development will be
MUCH slower...
You can guess what the popular choice is…