Just had a thought, that maybe this kind of perpetual allowance of money for development of passion projects is leading to witting or unwitting development hell.
Be it massive projects like Star Citizen or smaller ero ones like Malise and the Machine, or even ones with actual regular updates but permanently stuck in early access like Trap Quest. The lack of deadlines, the security of monthly financial support, the close-knit protective community that springs around the creator/game, all of it seem to hamper development in quite a few cases.
Maybe in those cases, the deadlines imposed by either fixed budget or publisher directives are needed constraints for art to get made and not veer into cushy endless finetuning.
As I said, it could be witting or unwitting, but there's certainly a pattern.
Edit : grammar
This is actually a well-known phenomena within the creative arts industry - be that game development, comics or book writing. Some of the best/most liked stories and ideas happen because the creator(s) are put on deadlines and forced to get a finished product out there. Just like how some sags/series can end up taking over a decade to complete because the author has enough credit/big enough name/making enough money that they don't have to pump out the next book
this year to make ends meet (I'm looking at you George R Martin!).
It's also considered to be the basis of the shody development cycles of companies like EA, Konami and even SI (somewhat in their FM series) have fallen into where the people in charge turn the deadline = genius concept into 20 hour work days and barely put-together game engines that have to be patched twenty million and one times just to avoid crashing on the intro screen.
I absolutely agree with you that the constant stream of income puts a lot of the indie developers in this 'take it easy' mindset even if they don't realise that it's happened. The really annoying thing is that Patreon has a way around this where some content providers only charge when they produce x amount of content per month (and then some even have that charge maxed at y amount per supporter in order to not take the piss during productive months).
What saddens me is that there are some content makers who are legit struggling (Youtubers or fiction writers) because even in the current climate, they are still only charging their supporters for when they actually release something.
Back to the point - Yes, I truly beleive that some content creators absolutely need a way to be held accountable for dragging things out and not releasing content if they've got to the stage where supporters are funding their art. Something like that would have meant Bangkok
in some form or another would have been released months ago.
