Game development is hard - anyone who ever looked at game telemetry were piracy is easy, will see that 99%+ of the people playing and enjoying games won't pay. It's incredibly frustrating.
Ads, DRM, loot boxes, micro-transactions... all are techniques to tap that market with varying degrees of success. As the adult market matures, I can see all of those and more being tried out.
I use this board to discover content and support games I like. As such, I'm probably part of the audience you'd like to convert. I play them in a no-network sandbox system - so DRM, ad, mining, etc. strategies won't work.
A few thoughts:
- Calling people dicks for skipping ads may not be the best long term PR strategy.
- You might want to reintroduce a 1$ tier - 2$/m USD is steep in many parts outside the US. (Note: your Patreon's overview page still has a "Short Games - 1$ patron" reference).
- The criteria I use to support a creator: content I like, timely delivery and communication style.
I wish you luck, and hope you find a way to sustain the development of your games. Google's empire was built on ad revenue, so perhaps... this is the way forward.
-T-