Devs being consistent, until they are not, before the game gets tagged with "on hold" followed by "abandoned" halfway through the content, with overpromising and underdelivering, is a common pattern some people just refuse to see. Games getting updates regularly until completion is far more uncommon. I tossed games onto my watch list and it became a graveyard with page after page of abandoned titles with some of them occasionally receiving a nothingburger update to keep the hope of fans alive, with the same drama unfolding in every thread.
Yeah I just don't buy it. It may be true for this dev (though I doubt it considering past signs) but it's far too common and consistent across the board, and die-hard fans who argue it's totes realsies this time are always present making it a difficult sell.
I would even argue it's more likely. Ignoring the the reasons and motivations for why creators abandon their work and whether it's premeditated or opportunistic, there used to be three basic types of abandonment:
1. Delivers consistently until he doesn't. Just disappears forever. Might log into patreon to collect the money. People see through it immediately and start leaving.
2. Delivers randomly, sometimes every month on day 1, sometimes delayed by half a year. Then disappears. Harder to see through, because people can't tell if this is just a longer break or if it's permanent. Some patrons will justify even longer breaks and will continue paying.
3. Delivers more or less consistently, then delays start happening, but the dev makes excuses and so on.
If MLC is actually abandoned, Nef could have just invented the fourth basic type:
4. Is consistently inconsistent. Makes tons of excuses, but the game is eventually updated. Could disappear for months on end, but an update is eventually released. Until it isn't. People can't tell if it's for real this time, or if it's another delay.
I'm not going to guess Nef's motivations, but again, I saw a few patterns.
A lot of creators start their games as a work of love, but the project grows out of proportion and is too much for one person to handle. Delays start happening naturally because it's getting much harder to add the same amount of content to the game with the same effort.
Some devs grow weary. They started off strong and it's easy to see why. Imagine if you start with 1% and then add 3% of the total content every month. It's easy to see it's going to take 33 months to complete the game. If you're perfectly consistent, the first update grows the game four times, the second update grows it by just 75%, the third one is just 43%, the fourth one is just 30% and so on. The tenth update is below 11% more content. The twentieth update is just above 5% added content. It's easy to feel a sense of underachievement.
Sometimes life happens and you just can't make time to work on the game, and you promise yourself you'll get back to it. But you never do and you can't look patrons in their eyes and tell them that you can't work on the game anymore.
And sometimes it's just because of money. Money happens and popular games make absolutely life-changing amounts of money for one person. I can imagine that once you pay all your debts and just don't
need the money anymore, it's just for pleasure and you get lazy because,
hey, if people are actually paying me, that means I deserve this money, right?
And let's face it, some devs are just in it for the money. I've seen it some 6-10 years ago with blatant cash grabs, minimum effort games that released between one and three updates and if they didn't catch on, the dev just dropped it. It was pretty clear with some developers because they reused the same models, same sets and same rendering settings in different games, hoping one of them will catch on and they can milk it.