The 'Splendid Ostrich is a lazy thief' narrative crops up a lot here. I've poked through the de-obfuscated code in the past and have been able to (crudely) compare a couple of versions from the past and present. From that I think it's feasible that planning and writing the code & content I see takes the time between releases, and there's no evidence there that SO puts less effort into versions now than in the past.
Newlife has a very - I'd argue overly - expansive game design, which means that, even by interactive fiction standards, an unusually large volume of content has to be written and coded for each short piece of gameplay. It's implemented in custom code that's difficult to refactor, which means almost all new content can only realistically be written by SO, not commissioned, and that content generally has to end up being sort of awkwardly bolted on to the existing content.
Either of those issues alone would make it a project I'd never consider supporting on Patreon, because the extra resources I give are unlikely to result in extra content, but that's just my opinion. To me it's a messy and inefficient game, but that's different from lazy, and a long way from criminal.
Another non update from the lazy thief Splendid Ostrich.
