The key word is "artificial". In 2017, most games updated monthly. Things were in sync : one update in return for one monthly subscription fee. This time-frame is also the most common IRL for most larger money exchanges for the average Joe/Jane.
The other most common big-organization IRL wealth-exchange is quarterly, or every 3 months. Next would be yearly.
Without a hard-and-fast timeframe for VN production, the average interval between updates has probably drifted to at least 6-7 months (more if games like Polarity are counted). But payments have remained on a monthly basis.
The payment system, pioneered by Patreon, is broken badly for paying supporters. But for Devs, especially, the present situation is great. Less work for more money.
Not one of the several shill-posters that post in this thread will admit that supporters generally get a raw deal. In their view there is no problem to fix. Dev paradise.
Meanwhile, what is almost certainly the main cause of Dev burnout, blow and hookers or somesuch similar, is NEVER mentioned.
Losing the discipline of regular work by stalling/milking, and somehow still getting paid, is not viable for most people even if they laughably call themselves "Creators".
Well said. The only part I don't fully agree with is expecting every dev of every game to be able to put out updates every three months. I mean, sure, it's possible, but I'd rather have an update stop at a logical place in the story rather than in the middle of a scene.
I think there are more reasons for updates taking longer on average to release than just lazy devs too. The average game looks way better now than they did even a few years ago. That raises the amount of work devs need to put into their game if they want to have any chance of gaining attention, much less money, from people.
Games like Radiant probably ruin things for everybody though. When the entire business model is reliant on people trusting you to actually work on your game and it becomes obvious that you aren't (as is the case with Radiant), people are less likely to want to donate their money to any AVN devs. The big names that reliably put out big updates for their games will be fine, but I imagine it's difficult for new devs to break into the AVN market when a bunch of games feel like scams.