You must be new to Hentai games
You missed my point entirely.
Small ecosystem with lack of competition among devs that 100% regulated by supporters/players.
Huge quality gaps between games doesn't help, so people tend to believe as long as they can, because there is no alternatives for them or at least they think so - simping mentality basically.
So, the main problem is a lack of regulation and awareness - many think that support is a tip for a work and not an investment (it's only "you name it" bucks, come on).
This can only be helped by helping small devs with less potential and good/clear work ethic much more than it's currently is now in order to make ecosystem less one-sided and scummy - but you need a lot of awareness for this.
I kinda agree with you, but at the same time, there is more to that.
This is indeed a small-ish ecosystem, but it's not without lack of competition. We see daily dozens of games being "released" at least as a tech-demo. Also, lack of regulation is not the entire point. If you look at some of Steam's Early Access games. Some of them just make a quick cashgrab, some of them takes long periods of time without even releasing a single update. That is not also a fully regulated environment and although we still see some people straight up scamming people, this kind of behaviour is not as common as with this specific genre.
The threshold for people straight up calling an adult game, a scam or something among those lines, is pretty high. If you look at one of the genre's big hitters, like for example Milf City. The game was literally tagged as abandoned and yet, people were still giving the developer money. The patreon for this dev even when it was not updated for more than 6 months, was still full of people paying for nothing.
I just used one example, and there is a plethora of games that milk their consumers and yet, people are just grateful when the dev pull off this kind of scummy behaviour, just as we are seeing with this developer.
It's kinda tough to know when a dev is a dirtbag or not. There are many people who create adult games with absolute 0 development experience, who never even touched a single line of code before and are completely clueless on how to even structure a small project, but they still have good intentions and are planning on working hard.
People should just stop encouraging scummy behaviours and giving devs money mindlessly, regardless of whether they are delivering stuff or not. If a dev goes radio silent for months, don't deliver meaningful results at reasonable periods, people should stop giving them cash. It's really simple.
