This game had so much potential...
No.
It had a good backstory. It focused on vanilla content. It promised a steady and relaxed pace.
I imagine everyone who supported gumdrop expected that he would finish the game, all three acts, in three years.
As it turns out, it promised a lot and delivered nothing.
A lot of games have even more potential. If some developers got even just a fraction of what gumdrop had been pledged, they would probably turn out more and better games that we could get from gumdrop.
I don't understand how great games that have frequent updates make 1000 or even less a month but somehow Gumdrop stays at over 8000 even though no update in almost 1 and a half year or has it even been more time than that? sometime I think it must be fake right?
It's a tricky question, and honestly, it's hard to tell. I found out something when my card expired and I didn't get around to updating payment details, but that was several years ago.
Namely, my pledge was still visible and counted towards the total, even though I wasn't charged for that given month and I couldn't see patron-only content. That was before patreon introduced up-front payments. You could literally open up fifty accounts with fake payment details, pledge $100 to a creator, and voila, you have 50 supporters pledging $5,000 to a creator. Even if their payments bounced, they were still counted towards the total.
When up-front payments were introduced, it was trickier, your payment needed to be successfully processed, but then even if it expired, you were still counted.
It's entirely possible that, out of those 900 supporters, a number of them is deceased, quit patreon or lapsed by not updating their payment details, but it's impossible to tell.
However, we might infer something from response activity. Recent posts:
Jan 21 | $5 tier | 2 comments | 8 likes | POLL
Jan 20 | $20 tier | 0 comments | 4 likes | POLL
Jan 20 | $1 tier | 11 comments | 10 likes | NEWS
Jan 10 | $1 tier | 13 comments | 13 likes | NEWS
Jan 4 | $20 tier | 0 comments | 3 likes | IMAGE PREVIEW
Jan 1 | $12 tier | 0 comments | 5 likes | IMAGE PREVIEW
Dec 31 | $5 tier | 10 comments | 8 likes | IMAGE PREVIEW
Dec 26 | $1 tier | 4 comments | 17 likes | IMAGE&ANIM PREVIEW
Dec 25 | $20 tier | 0 comments | 7 likes | SPECIAL
Dec 25 | $5 tier | 0 comments | 11 likes | SPECIAL
Dec 25 | $1 tier | 0 comments | 14 likes | SPECIAL
Dec 24 | $1 tier | 1 comment | 10 likes | NEWS
Dec 22 | $1 tier | 9 comments | 6 likes | NEWS
Dec 18 | $20 tier | 0 comments | 5 likes | PINUPS
Before releasing Act 1 Part 9 in March 2018, a developer update just prior to the release would get 53 comments and 26 likes. Final previews in February would get 44 comments and 27 likes.
The trick is, it's hard to find an equivalent or similar period because the updates were fairly regular (like every 2-3 months), so there was no time to get impatient. What's funny is that there were hardly any pinup posts or polls. It's fairly easy to find the moment in time when gumdrop switched from active development and engaging with his followers (including public posts) to milking: no more public posts, a lot of polls, many pinups and supposed previews -- around April 2018 when patreon suspended gumdrop's page (then and several times thereafter).