I don't fault anyone for wanting to make money. I respect what game developers (including games like these) do and I want them to be well compensated for their work. Patreon is just so damned inconvenient, for the player and the dev. Patreon's rules are nebulous, inconsistently applied, and frankly pretty fucking stupid. I'd just rather be sold a game so I can play that game, and I'd rather the developer get paid a fair amount for their work. That's all.
That model has come and gone out of favor in many industries, though: developers have an easier time managing their finances by predicting subscription patterns than offering a single purchase of perpetual license software less frequently.
The piracy per release in both cases will likely be about the same, and I'd wager that the numbers of purchasers for infrequent, major releases would not be significantly higher than subscription levels which are achieved across a series of smaller releases. With the latter, Devs can be paid on a monthly basis - not with the former, though.
If anything, the Patreon model - which is hybrid perpetual/subscription model in that the releases you obtain as a subscriber will not time out after you stop paying - happens to be something between the Adobe Common Cloud model and one-time perpetual licenses, which (as mentioned a handful of posts above) seems to have practically made the adult game/VN cottage industry more viable for some Devs in this day and age ... because they can look forward to a certain, predictable level of constant income for their expenses (at whatever level of popularity they happen to attain). I've seen a number of Devs on Patreon who decided to quit their 9-5 jobs because their monthly take from the patron model was enough to cover living expenses and whatever else they might need beyond.
