A) If Patreon receives enough complaints about a creator - they will make inquiries with the creator. That is what I was meaning - and there was a period where there appeared to be a concerted effort to report the developer to Patreon at the time you see the blank spots on Graphtreon reports.
Patreon cracked down on incest and other forbidden content in 2019. Tons of projects were closed, with many moving to subscribestar or publishing totally-not-incest "landlady and co-tenants/tenants" instead of mother/aunt and sisters/cousins/daughters. Complete with dialogues that make zero sense unless you apply the patch which restores the original family relationships.
Gumdrop was reported twice. First for incest (which, with a game called "Dual Family" and being a successful highly paid project, was inevitable), second time for rape (aunt).
After that time, Dual Family version 0.98 was up in this thread, and Gumdrop was offering 0.99 for download which, as I believe, was a version with the rape content removed.
We actually argued about this back and forth around January-March 2020 which ended with some people reporting Gumdrop to Patreon in late February 2020 with zero results, even though Gumdrop was producing virtually no content back then. I asked one of the posters to post their report to Patreon so others could use it as a canned statement and use it to report Gumdrop to Patreon, but he didn't respond with it, so we don't even know if Gumdrop was reported or not after all.
Since that back and forth actually led to name calling and erupted into a flame war, some people on both sides of the debate being banned from this thread (some even permanently), let's not go back to arguing about it again.
As per Patreon's Terms of Use, there's nothing that requires creators to actually release anything. It's entirely up to them.
Look here:
You must be registered to see the links
The guidelines changed since then, but there still isn't anything in there that makes it mandatory to release content.
It seems like there are two things which you could argue say the opposite, but not really, I'll go over them:
One is this heading: "Be safe, be respectful,
make stuff" (emphasis mine)
Even though it sounds like a requirement, you can see that it's only encouragement in the paragraph under that heading.
The other is under the heading "Authenticity", especially the last point:
"You also can’t use Patreon as a prank or to fund non-activity. For example, a creator cannot collect funds for *not doing* something, such as, “I will stop tweeting videos of playing the harmonica badly if I reach $200 per month.”"
But it's worded to only prevent collecting funds specifically to stop doing something, not collecting funds and incidentally not releasing content.
It was about 4 months after that empty space that the developer announced new content was coming soon. 5 months later (just before the big jump), the developer announced that everything they stated was coming was actually NOT coming because they lost heart in the whole thing and would be changing to the new style. The month after the big jump, in February 2021, started this whole postmodern 3 piece Part 2 stuff.
Look again, the gaps are actually early 2019 and late 2019.
B) You said "rebound" and none of those numbers show a rebound outside of statistical noise. They, in fact, show a steady decline.
Fair enough. I just think this decline is slowing down, so at least some people are pleased with his progress. It's sad and unfortunate, this thing should have been left abandoned.
