So, at which point do these games get the "abandoned" tag?
From what I can say and have noticed while hanging around here, the "abandoned" tag is implemented once a dev either:
a) stops being active on their preferred platforms or forums (Patreon, Subscribestar or similar) for a prolonged amount of time - imagine half a year without posting anything and people wondering what is going on and even wondering if they are still alive.
b) declares the project to be abandoned, finished, or on a hiatus. Then it gets the appropriate tag of "abandoned", "finished" or "on hold", though in 80% of the cases that go "dev declares a project done when updates became sparse prior" are nothing short of them rushing it to completion with multiple features axed and the actual end goal not reached, at which point the "abandoned" tag would be way more appropriate, but some just don't have the balls to come out this way. There's a couple examples of that even on here.
c) the dev just straight-up no longer updates "project a" while working on "project b", but fails to mention the state of "project a", at which point it is pretty much abandoned.
So, none of those really apply to this game.
The devs are more than willing to give out information as to what is going on and why the whole thing went down the drain, so they are extremely active on patreon - definitely moreso than some other devs when they have a delay.
At this point I'm still willing to believe that it's just a huge stroke of bad luck, given that they have been more or less consistent in the past years and managed to build up a pretty good well of goodwill: While they did try their darndest to get back to a 30 day schedule of updates, they just couldn't manage and are right now more or less on a ~45 day schedule for an update by the looks of it (current update not withstanding). Plus minus a couple days, but that never bothered me. I assume it's because of the increase in scope we see with each book and them underestimating the workload coming from that. Case in point with the coder trying his best on a collectible card game as a minigame and totally underestimating everything associated with it. Given it is called a "collectible card game" of sorts, the word "minigame" seems to lose it's meaning, as those tend to not be all that
mini to begin with.