Imo the Patreon isn't strong enough to survive a whole year without an update. He needs an update this year, otherwise there may not be an audience left to buy it. Truth be told, I don't think he cares one way or another.
Yeah, he's gotta release something soon. That said, I doubt his Patreon will collapse even if it were to take him another 4 months, making it exactly 1 year for this update. He'll still have 400-500 patrons happily throwing their money at him for absolutely nothing.
It might not be as much as ~$1900 which is what he's currently making per month, but considering that there's been a bunch of patrons who (no shit) literally requested for stoper to keep charging them money the month he paused pledges due to his "illness" back in May I believe, it is quite apparent that there's some actual lunatics trying to burn their money. There's seriously been people commenting stuff like; "Don't stop charging us money".
I think the reason for that is quite simple. Believe I made this comparison before, but it's like a junkie trying everything possible to get their fix. Even here on F95 you see people like that. "I'm gonna subscribe in the hopes that the game may continue.".
These people don't realize that they're only reinforcing stoper's behavior. It would probably take another whole year without any update before even the most diehard fans start dropping like flies, but I'm pretty sure stoper knows how to feed them little breadcrumbs aka the next 300+ render update so that this does not happen anytime soon.
It just is mindblowing how little content a developer has to provide for people to keep paying for this crap. In comparison, developer Lewdlab from "Midnight Paradise" took more than a year for their latest update, and they're sitting on 1700 patrons. Difference here is that their update had more than 2000 renders, bunch of animations and a massive script with decent story progression, whereas stoper will probably provide only a fraction of that with his 300+ renders and 2-3 animation updates. Both games are being shat on in their respective threads, but they're not dying out either.
And so I believe this will go on for a couple more years unless stoper decides to straight up abandon his game, but even then he'll still make a decent amount every month as can be seen with abandoned games like Milfy City. It's complete idiocy.
Edit: Oh, and I'm certainly not trying to say that stoper is bulletproof or anything incase that's what it sounds like. It all comes down to, well, time. He is constantly losing support, slowly but surely.