The truth is: It doesn't matter. Those who don't pay anyway should not care.
Currently the whole game insudstry is in trouble, there's not enough people to finance everything and with all that's going on people are not as willingly to pay even small amounts as they were three years ago. Why should it be any different for games and VNs financed through Patreon?
Hopefully with this change all these interpretations and speculations about who earns how much by milking whom will finally come to an end.
Lately that whole thing took a bad turn as if the devs would actually work for the supporters. But there never was a contract or anything, in most cases not even a plan of how the finished product will look. All the donations are volountary.
On the other hand some devs started projects hoping to make quick money and then dropped out once they saw actual work was involved.
This is hopefully a step back to how it was in the beginning: supporters support while others don't.
Me? I don't support ongoing projects without plan or end with subscriptions.
It's a different thing if one says, that he's making an adventure game, has a prototype to show and asks for 60k on Kickstarter. Then I look how much he's asking as support to get a copy for the game and then I decide. If he was convincing enough, me and others payed for it, then he gets financed. If he doesn't deliver, all that was lost was the money I payed for the final version (But so far everyone delivered, even if in two out of ~35 cases it was sub par).
That's not a episodic "see how it goes" production, but a plan, a storyline with a beginning and an end. No stupid supporters come up with more nonsense (I need heels/Eric/yelow flamingos!!! Why did you ignore that character for so long!) every month which he has to include in order not to lose support. It's up to the dev to calculate his needs in advance and not just hope for the best. And even if most kickstarter devs do it, I don't even expect status updates every month. And I don't need regular updates to play. All I care is that they try to finish what they were payed for and get the final product in the end. If they don't, then they probably won't find supporters for their next project.
Sadly, this whole AIF and AVN business is currently completely episode based. In other game categories episodic releases have proven desastrous for quality and most of the time also for the developer. That trend ended some time ago. Only very few games outside the adult sector are still being released in a episodic format. And I am glad that happened.
