But if we are not ready to give them a chance, then what exactly are we doing here?
We are not doing anything here. Games here are not financially-supported directly from us and only little amount of developers actually have the balls to listen to critique from this site. So all we do here is just discussing the game. Having positive or negative thoughts is absolutely fine and voicing your opinion is abosultely fine, but it would be great if people could inform themselves a little bit more before throwing shit at developers.
What
can we do to influence the project? Here? Nothing. If you want to engage with the project, people should go to the team's open deiscord channel and try communicating with the team. Otherwise nothing will change.
Patreon is risky because almost every project is started out of passion instead of a business decision. Before starting a project the patreon developers don't usually make a full road map from start to finish with time tables and they don't sit down and discuss the key roles and jobs they will require to make everything work. If they did they wouldn't be on patreon, they would just start a normal company.
Thats not quite how it works. There are both situations happening: some projects start out of passion, some out of buisness ideas.
What is Patreon? Its a system that allows people to show their idea to the public and get continueos help from the subscribes - basically a pay check that fully depends on how many people are interested in the content that will be created. Whether you are billionare or a hobo that has connection to the internet - it allows you to dedicate yourself to do stuff that you want to do and not to be too much dependent from big bosses that big companies have and from other bullshit that companies need to attend to. But if you would want to create a full-time company you would have a whole sea of troubles that will come with it: obligatory official software usage, different lawyer bullshit such as minimal paycuts, different stuff insurances, office managing and all other stuff that is needed to be called a company according to the official needs of the country.
Patreon doesnt need all that official bullcrap, but it doesnt mean that people who start patreon cant be professionals with AAA game development expirience who know their stuff. If you ever worked in the industry, you know that things such as pipelines and deadlines are a thing and that they are needed to be somewhat sucessfull. They are also needed for the communication with the community part of the project, since Patreon is fully community-dependent and community loves it when strict dates are in order. So people with expirience can make assumptions, roadmaps and deadlines at the very start of their project - it all depends on them and on them alone.
Tl;dr - Patreon allows anyone to start their project, whether its done out of passion or buisness idea. I could start Patreon to make my dream come true without anything. Company on the other hand requires at least some sort of a financial start or supporters to deal with all of the lawyerish mumbo-jumbo. So Patreon works both ways. You could even start your dream with nothing on Patreon and then grow into a full-time company if you have the guts and funding.
From me personally I would say that if I would've started Patreon, roadmap and estimated deadlines would be the first thing I would've dealt with, since it gives you a certain goals and time limits to deal with. Without them workers procrastinate and project may as well prolong for years without any significant updates.
Now, is Patreon risky really? Patreon doesnt require one to sacrifice anything at all - nor money, nor documents, nor labor. Only subscribers risk their investments into the projects, but developers in case of a failure dont loose anything at all, since Patreon doesnt have any kind of "punishment for failure" feature. Maximum punishment that developers may get is their reputation being stumped and their time that they have waisted on the lost cause. So in terms of risk Patreon is extremely develoepr-friendly, which is exactly why there are so many projects that lead nowhere.
You can't have the experience and stability of a large corporation with the passion and risk taking of a small team.
True.