Misread your comment, I thought you said the update (0.17) which came out in February was free, sorry for that. I would still question about whether or not giving patrons a "free" February is something to be praised though. February only had one poll about new game for $20 patrons and a few preview pictures.
Am I reading this correctly?
So taking a huge paycut (as much as $20,000, if what I've read is to believed), isn't worthy of any praise??
How many other devs would do this? None of them I'd bet.
Devs deserve to be paid for their work (amounts decided by no one else but those that pledge), and they don't deserve anything if they don't provide a service.
So by rights, he could've posted nothing for the entire month of February if he wanted to.
Yet, he still did. And he still put v17 out as promised, albeit a couple of weeks late.
He suspended payments because he knew that there would be no immediate continuation of DMD on Patreon,
that v17 was going to be pushed back by a couple of weeks after it's original release date (Jan 25th), again because of Patreon's timely intervention the week of it's release, and that new game Melody wouldn't be released for a further six weeks (March 23rd).
Doing something like this just shows that MrDots cared more about the future of the game than the money.
It would have been so easy to just let the fans still pay the money and give them nothing in return.
And he still did this at a cost, losing 25% of his total fans, despite the gesture.
He should get massive praise for that but I'm not surprised in the slightest that he hasn't...