Too bad the dev screwed up with the game trying a remake, the story was being well written
No, he screwed up by not completing the old game when he got to part 9 of 10 in the first act. He had a proven track record of delivering updates roughly monthly and even if his schedule slipped, he still could have completed the game. Maybe slower, but at least complete.
He didn't even need to change the format or anything, it was enough to just keep working on the game as it was. No extra assets, no animations, just plain old visual novel format.
Given how many patrons he lost over the last three years and how many he could potentially gain if he kept working on the game, I'd say he lost at least 75% of the money he could have made over that time.
When he was still releasing, he got up to about top 50 among adult game developers with 1000 patrons and was making about $10k per month.
He quickly went down to $7-8k when he stopped delivering updates, so that's already 20-30% money lost.
50th spot now has 2200 patrons, so with average $10 per patron, he could have been making $22k per month. That's 63-68% money lost ($20k vs. $7-8k).
Were he to release actual r-rated content, he'd probably get many more patrons, and even a modest increase to 2500-3000 thousand patrons would make him $25k-30k (68-76% less money than he could have been making).
There are some developers who make obscene amounts without delivering any content and just living on past glory.
The thing is, he dropped the game before it was even close to completion. If he dropped it while deep in act 2 or in the middle of act 3, he could even be raking in around a hundred thousand bucks per month without doing anything. Just see Dark Cookie who got to 25% progress on a maintenance release (what he calls a tech update) in two months and lost hardly any support, making over $150k without doing much in that time.
