The more time and experience I have with these games and developers, the more I see that the trend is to increase production time and "milking" fans more and more to extend the game's lifespan.
I can list several developers who do this sort of thing.
Hm, i think this is where you and those others are wrong, because "milking" implies malicious intend, promising patreons and fans a product, which is or was never planned to be delivered. Whereas being caught in a writers block, or being lost on figuring out in which way to continue the story or writing content and dialogs which are getting scrapped, because they don't meet the quality the author tries to achieve, is
not malicious but very often an undesirable part of
any creative work. Double that if you are working in a small team, where every other contributor is prone to hit a roadblock (life happens, you know?) also.
Is there an obvious delay in ORS updates? Yes, i think so.
Does that entitle you and your fellows to call this specific Dev a milker? No, i strongly disagree.
It is my understanding, that EvaKiss is from Spain, and while this country may not pay the best wages in the world, they have better ones than alot of other countries
and a rather good social security system.
So tell me, why should a Dev, who established a remarkably strong brand and reputation, who has a completed game, which still rates high on F95ZONE, under their belt and an ongoing project which is quite unison considered as one of the better games here, why should this Dev throw their achievements out of the window, for the paltry sum they may gain from 5 or 6 months of "milking" their supporters?
The potential loss is so much bigger than anything they can gain with this.
Granted, some patreons support creators, because they wanna have a bang for their buck, but others understand that they are supporting a project which very well can suffer major setbacks while in development. But the charm is you can of course suspend your patronage.
No, i believe nobody suffers more than EvaKiss in this situation, because you don't undertake a project of this scope, if you weren't serious about this business.
Being from Europe myself, i understand and strongly support the need for recreation and vacation, to fuel up your internal batteries and return fresh and perhaps with a new perspective to your work. There is nothing
lazy about that.
So we have an author, who is maybe struggling at the moment or in the past few months to deliver new content, for whatever reasons. In this situation, revisiting and remastering the work done so far, is not as sketchy as you depict it. Perhaps not as desireable as new content, but the enhancement of old content will lead to an overall better game. In the end, it is not your project, but the Devs one, and they have to be satisfied with it.
In any creative process, any author, developer or creator -unless they are masochists or crazy- needs to have at least a little bit of fun with what they are doing, else that creative energy will dry up.
Accusing EvaKiss of basically fraud and declaring this game dead is
not helpfull in regaining motivation and inspiration and fun.