Delay : There are many kind of delay. Deliberate, Forced & Unintentional.
a. Deliberate : Getting stress & goes offline without notice. Or, ransoming your own product if the requirement aren't met. This are a no-no, bad dev.
b. Forced : Miscalculated funds weren't delivered, so the productivity had to stop or postponed.
- Some of developer aren't multi talented, so they hired another artist on their specialty. In example if the developer is Coder + Story Writing, they paid other some money. When there's down in patreon donation, the money that should funding his own production & paying their co-op artist must forced to pick one at a time. So either funding his part first, or pay the hired artist first.
- Let say you get $500/month. Pay own bills for $300 then pay artist for $200. Then sudden drop in Patreon's donors, became $400. So the dev still have to pay $300 for bills, then save $100 now to next month so can paid the hired artist in full $200 next month.
c. Unintentional : IRL Main Job became busy, Sickness, Disaster, Patreon's witch hunt. You must have 2nd platform to inform your backers when this is happening. Luckily & already did by some developers, discord channel can became the independent developer community channel. Just notice everyone when something happen.
Piracy : What's wrong with it ? ... wrong Thread title I guess. Should be, "Developer & their Delay problem".
Donating on Patreon (& Similar like Kickstarter) : You know the risk when you sign up & donate.
Abandoned Tag : There's a lot of reason, but to make it simple, they ditch the developing world & chase another job IRL. In the beginning, making games is hardly equal to office job salary, let alone hoping your life support on Patreon's donation.
- Another half reason is, many creators are opportunist who think they can making games & interesting plus gain easy money, but they aren't talented & must face the harsh reality, no one/less funding their game. Then they quit.
There are enough hobbyists on patreon too, sure. But there really are a lot who want to do it for the long run and not for a bit of fun on the side, besides the costs for assets if you can't create them yourself (which takes a lot of time most small scale devs don't have) are quite high... Look at @Philly_Games i.e. he only made $12 by now, all the money he got before that time was gone even before he got it....
