I offer myself up as a case example.
I didn't abandon this game, but I did wrap it up early than originally planned.
My goal is to earn a living. After about a year of working on my game full time, I was earning around 80$ a month after patrons cut, and that number was decreasing every month, despite me working everyday on it, all day long. Living in the U.S. it wasn't sustainable. I have limited savings with nothing to fall back on, and I was burning through my savings, I still am.
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I let my patrons know my plans, and spent the last four months getting the story to the point where there were good sex scenes with the main characters and then wrapped everything up with a few different endings. The ending still, I'm sure felt more abrupt then the general pacing of the game and many people were mad, although some were happy with the endings.
The Time Costs
I think people don't realize how much work goes into making some of these games, especially if the Dev made mistakes in planning. For Kingdom Harem, I originally planned to render everything in Honey Select 2, but after realizing that HS2 scenes didn't look the greatest for the fantasy setting I wanted, I decided to 3D model all of the backgrounds, objects, and items separately from scratch to retain a consistent style, and have every setting and object I wanted. After spending around 80 hours trying to get my 3d models through to HS2 I realized this was a waste of time, and they would look better rendered in blender anyways. So I was rendering the backgrounds from a bunch of different angles, for the hand crafted scenes I made then moving them to HS2 to line them up, and then fixing shadows and other issues in Gimp after that, as well as using photo/image editing to try and make things look better than they did in HS2.
After all of this people said the backgrounds looked like crude placeholders. The entire project gameplay, story, and graphics was compounded mistakes on top of mistakes, which is why it wasn't earning a survivable income on patreon. Only 837 of 4715 adult games are earning what I would consider a livable income in the united states (700$ a month or more). so 17% are earning 700$ or more a month, possible less than that if graphtreon hasn't listed many of them. So it certainly isn't easy if that's a creators goal.
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Opportunity Costs
My belief is that I could earn a livable income, with high enough quality art/story/gameplay. Which is why after that I'd been grinding hard all day everyday to learn to draw at a high level, and I'm still currently doing that and putting together my next project, which is hand drawn.
But basically, for those of us living mostly off of our savings with a limited savings, way we have to make the best decisions that get us to a massively popular V/N (survivable income) in the shortest amount of time, and sometimes that means wrapping up a bad project (keeping our patrons in the loop of course for everything).
