When you make a promise, you have to follow through on it. They're failing on multiple promises here. The promise to release at least four major updates a year, the promise to release an update last month, and the promise to launch it simultaneously across platforms. I'd take a buggy release if it meant I actually got something when I'm waiting two months past the expected update deadline.
They won't even tell people on Steam what's going on, and expect you to go to Discord to get information that should be made as a Steam announcement.
"There won't be an update this month."
Silence.
"The update will release next month,"
Silence.
"The update will launch whenever we fix the bugs."
Silence.
"We're working towards a new major update."
Radio Fucking Silence
I actually bought the game, because I wanted the playtime tracker and better download speeds, but it's been a waste of money since they can't be bothered to do the bare minimum of what's expected from a developer on Steam, actually posting information on Steam.
I've not only seen game devs but tried it as a hobby and still dabble. I've seen studios small and big over time with varied results across them. Here's the deal.
Dealing with tech and making stuff usually by corporate standards requires having more labor power, skill, and time than actually needed so when you promise to release regularly you're pushing such overpowered resources to the deadline that you'd effectively never miss it. Yes, what I told you is a big dream standard only triple A giants with huge budgets have. They don't accept less-than-optimal workers or results, hence news these days being filled with whole studios getting closed or purged of employees in a hire-and-fire loop that's way busier than you expect.
So what do you do if you're a smallfry and you have staff that are learning as you go? Delays and bugs. Pick your poison.
So lets start with bugs. Bugs are fine to players so long as it's a "hehehe, look at the land insect flying in their air!" kind of thing. They're not so nice when you bake a bugged and useless player character and un-restorable broken quests into your game's save files with no recourse. To put it this way, releasing a week early can wipe out a month of your progress. And the amount of player progress potentially wiped compounds over time since your previous release.
So now lets talk about delays. They spawn the usual "these devs are stealing our money" kind of complaint. I get it, trust me. I bet they wouldn't want to rob you because getting press for an awesome game full of content released and complete with good reviews now is more profitable and encouraging than only have a hollow shell with lack of attention. But some people fall to the seemingly insurmountable wall of effort and the grim chance of the project's survival and wrongly choose to let it linger as they lose motivation to put in the commitment that paying customers rightfully earn with their dollar. You'd only see who is right or wrong based on the release volume versus the donor platform (i.e., patreon) stats for money collected.
It's a thing to treat with moderation and your stance on this issue usually depends on how much work you've immersed yourself in of this nature. If you've always been a pure consumer you will always speak as a pure consumer and demand what you perceive the collective money has earned right now, as promised to you. If you've done work like this you side with the creators who are probably burning out, losing sleep over this, feeling guilty and stressed over this. A person's stance in this issue is heavily subjective through relationship with the issue.
I recommend having them go about 45 days slow before you harass them, because if they promise regular updates then about 50% of the time extra between updates is a good enough time for them to struggle with their implementation before you get to tell them, "dude, you're really late, what's up"?
And about the radio silence, unfortunately it tends to work better unless someone's a skilled community manager. Game devs regularly go full-blown YandereDev if they check and reply to their own fanbase too regularly with too much sensitivity. They socialize and argue instead of do work. They take offense to criticism which may or may not be helpful, may or may not be too hostile, etc. Programmers aren't particularly good socializers in my experience and their habit of considering a lot at once is good for feature engineering and debugging but terrible for keeping track of work while they're talking to fans too. I pity everyone both fans and devs alike here. It's never pretty when you don't have the labor power to get it all done on time every time.
