Haven't checked in a while but about like a year ago he decided to restart the entire game scrapping all development and then he basically did nothing after.
I supported the Developer for a year or two when it first came out. Even back then he was milking people.
Personally, I think he was a first-time developer who had half a plan and got bogged down by scope creep and inefficient code but wanted to keep the gravy train rolling. He was making thousands a month for basically no work.
Started innocent, got burned out / common failed Dev to bad road map and being unable to fulfill a vision, decided to rip people off instead.
The worst thing of all is that people don't learn anything. I can totally understand why they hope the game will be truly updated (after all, hope is the last thing you lose). I can understand the expectations that there will be some real content despite the psychedelic craziness (after all, DF was one of the first games I found, leading me to discover this great forum), but more than 4000 people subscribed to his Patreon account (and not knowing what they might have on their own website, where it seems to be cheaper than on his Patreon) is another example of how infinite human ingenuity/stupidity is (and if I remember correctly, at the time he started milking after its last update that we could call normal, it had about 700 patrons).
The best thing that could happen with this story is that some talented dev but without his own story decided to be "inspired" by it to make their own version. Even if someone copied it (almost) completely, surely we would have real content in the copy rather than in the original made by Don Milking.
By the way, someone could say what those games or spin-offs titled Waveform, Dollhouse, Pool and Lesperienza. The only thing I can think of is about Pool, which I imagine must refer to the pool that the Son's date about where his cousin went when he asks her. What the hell is in each of them?