I don't know why people need this explained, but here's a mock-up of my schedule:
If I work six hours a day, seven days a week on the main game(assuming eight hours of sleep), that gives me ten hours of non-allotted time per day.
Now, during periods where I have a lenient schedule, if I devote three of those ten hours to What Ifs? as a form of overtime, how is that delaying development of the main game?
Yes, I could spend those overtime hours on the main game. Same way every salary worker could put in 50% more hours per day for no benefit. My goal as a one-man team is to find a work/life balance that is sustainable. The What Ifs? stretch me thin but I do them because I'm passionate about exploring new concepts in my work and they are a breath of fresh air to me.
People like to throw around the term "milking", but understand that if my patrons want me to stop doing What Ifs?, then they'll just be getting less content on the same schedule because I'm not spending more than 42 hours a week on a creative job that pulls in manager at McDonald's money at it's peak. If you average it out with the first two years where I made employee at McDonald's money and the 15 thousand in computer equipment, it's laughable to expect more.
At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is my update schedule. And my update schedule of 6-7 months per chapter is absolutely fair. For the amount of content in it and compared to other developers. When you factor in the What Ifs?, you can see how much of my time goes to pumping out content for my patrons. Chapter 11 has been scheduled for January for months on my end whether the What Ifs? exist or not.
