Accusing a game dev of wanting to make money with their game, as if it were an outrageous thing to do, is one of the most nonsensical things I've ever read on this site.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion about how good or bad this game is. In any case, the dev is actually working on the game and releasing content, so of course he wants to get a reward for his work.
I'm not a paying subscriber, so I can only analyze his decision to go online from a practical point of view. I just had a look at his Graphtreon stats and it doesn't look like this decision did him much good so far.
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This graph covers the last 12 months. As you can see, there are three peaks coinciding with the January, March and July releases. The bump after the March release wasn't that high (it peaked at 85 patrons), but the other two are really sharp and surpassed 100 patrons from the 60-something he had right before the release. This means that Icarus has a number of loyal subscribers, but he also gets a bunch of temporary subscriptions from people who just pay when a new version is out.
Now, if you look at the right end of the line you can see there has been hardly any variation in September, when the fully online version was released. So much so that he's only gained 5 new supporters after the release and currently sits at 65.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong; maybe some people prefer to subscribe only after every other update, and that's why the March release was't as successful as the January and July ones, so the same was expected to happen in September. Maybe it's still soon and some people subscribe when the update is available for certain tiers. I don't know, but my initial impression is that the online-only version hasn't been a success.
hoshin0119 btw did you mean that the online version goes public after 3 weeks?