What about shifting supporters to free memberships? Is that new?
They're not free memberships. They have been paid up by hopeful patrons over the last 2+ years.
And Kyle hasn't shifted to free memberships. He's offering a free month or so to people who paid him money between part IX and part X release.
And it doesn't feel very sincere after lying over the years. Kyle simply finally acknowledged he was getting free money all that time and oh so benevolently offered part X for free to those that pledged money to him in the period between part IX and part X. If he was sincere, he'd have switched to a pay per release model and/or would have suspended payments on Patreon.
He also hid his Patreon income. Hard to pin down the exact reason for it. My hypothesis is that he finally started looking for help with this project in April and hid his budget from all so that his potential hires wouldn't realize how much they can ask for. Another possibility is that he expected that patrons would start lowering their pledges and that others would see this lower revenue and would follow.
If you're wondering whether it's worthwhile to support him now to get a free membership, don't. Every bone in me screams "don't do it." Since Gumdrop has lied his way through the last two years, there's absolutely zero proof that he's working on part X.
If you feel like you want to pay for part X, feel free to do so —
if and when it's actually released, not before. There's literally zero gain for you in supporting early. No game, no reward for you, and the images he's posting are apparently recycled from earlier (before you claim they're new, I didn't check them myself, but others in this thread researched it and say they're recycled old content).
Looking at his Patreon campaign, it looks like this worked out quite well for him:
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You'd expect he'd lose tons of money for that since May, but that didn't happen.
Just to clarify: the drop on the 1st are the declined or delayed payments from banks. Once they get cleared up or manually retried, the number of patrons grows to the actual support level which peaks between 20th and 30th.
There's a larger drop in the beginning of June than any other typical month, but he actually regained patrons in July and the larger drop in August three days ago can be attributed to summer vacation period.
Until and unless there's a part X, you know, the thing you're supposed to be getting for your money, don't throw money at him.