Well I assumed it because this whole "money laundry" scheme been brought up earlier in the thread. When you pledge on patreon you need to transfer the money through somewhere. Visa, Mastercard, PayPal... It's not like you can just drop some coins on a slot and then all sorted. I assume Patreon got some checks in place that would raise red flags if someone created many user accounts that would use the same credit card, paypal or something as payment method. Using "view" bots on like twitch and youtube is a whole other story. No money is involved there, its about artificial bump the traffic to mess with the algorithms. Such can get channel accounts closed though, and is being beaten down heavy on by twitch and youtube.
Also remember, patreons come and go. Some can pledge for a couple months and then stop. Meanwhile new ones will come and pledge as well, before they stop and wander off to something else. You can't look at patreons as a constant factor. At current time GD is bleeding pledges, but that is related to his lack of have something to show for more than anything.
Also remember; Patreon doesn't advertise or market a creator. How well creators does it on the patreon platform come down to how good they are at draw attention to their game (or whatever else the creator is making/doing). I see people say "this and that" creator does deserve more than other creators, because they are better and so forth. But if a creator suck at market themselves and get attention to what they are doing, it doesn't matter how good they are. If you start look around on the internet for GD's game, you will find it on a lot of sites. Someone that might come across that game today, even though no update happen in like forever, wouldn't really know or care much. They relate to the experience they get with the game now, and then might get drawn to pledge because they want to see the next episode or whatever.
If you check this @
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It give a stat of the adult game creators on patreon and how much they make. Quite a few doesn't have their income visible, but anyways.
If you take Dark Cookie, he is ranked as number 1 with 17k+ Patreons, pulling almost 49k a month. Adeptus Steve ranked 8 with 4k+ patreons and pulling 44k+. You can wonder if those pledge to Adeptus getting the short end of the stick, if you compare "cash per patreon". Or maybe Adeptus is better at sell himself than Dark Cookie? Seeing Team Nimbus pulling almost 19k+ a month for Cloud Meadow, and knowing the whole history around that saga. (and how crap the game actually is), you can question if all his pledges is brain damaged, or maybe they just doesn't know the backstory to well.
There is a LOT of creators on that list that deserve more than others on it in terms of quality of their work. But what you deserve and what you get is two different things.
Everyone can create a game or whatnot, and become some creator on Patreon. Just invest some effort and a few calories into it and you will get your flock of sheep's right?
