Patreon is very much about supporting the artist rather than a particular project. Yeah, it sometimes gets advertised as a bit of a pre-order, but that's very much not what it is. It is about giving a creator the means to, you know, keep creating. Trying to sue an author for changing their mind on a project would either be laughed out of court (like suing a writer because you didn't like the ending of a novel series--or because they dropped the series after you bought the first few books) or, in the one-in-a-million chance that you found a judge insane enough to rule against the author (likely an ex-supporter of MILFY City), it would just force the entire ecosystem to make things incredibly hard for the other authors.
And no, I'm not talking about holding them "accountable," but about having to implement hoops to jump through that, in the end, would still not guarantee a finished product. Being a creator is hard, hard work, and it's impossible to guarantee anything. When multimillion-dollar corporations keep making flops or disappointing sequels despite having hundreds of veteran and talented employees devoted to a project, it's bewildering to think that a single, sole person in charge of a project can always be on point and never do anything other than perform at 100%.
Honestly, from my own perspective as somebody doing this just on the writing side of things? While the current state of the game is very disappointing, and I disagree with how it's been handled, for a first try at this, what was accomplished was near a miracle. It is highly praiseworthy, and I wish the best to Velminth in recovering from whatever it is that caused his loss of perspective.
I understand the shaky ground such a case would make, but at the same time I don't think it would be laughed out, similarly you can't say it's like an abandoned novel or hating the ending. A better comparison is "Expecting a hard sci-fi novel and instead you get a very fast and loose fantasy novel because the author decided to scrap the whole original book." There was financial backing under the expectation this game was going to be made in the way that it was originally, and this is where a significant portion of his patreon revenue came from—but the dev, out of obvious apathy and possibly to an extent, malice. Decided to completely change the game, this is different from making a flop or a disappointing title. This is giving money to support the creation of a product with the expectations of the general road map going forward—only for him to completely bait and switch it. Again, I'm not arguing if such a case would lead to a plaintiff being victorious, but a judge letting it actually come to trial.
The few issues I'm seeing with a lawsuit is, "Is the financial loss large enough to warrant?" Because no matter what, if
hundreds of thousands of dollars were gone to waste, then I think a judge would more likely taken the time out of his day to look at it. Yet I don't think Velminth was necessarily making large enough bank.
The second issue; I don't think anyone wants to have their name publicly exposed to represent being scammed for a porn game unless the guy really
didn't care about his public reputation.
In my brain, I'm seeing this similar to how the small Kickstarter scams from the mid-2010's wound up. The cost for a lawyer, mixed with a relatively paltry sum would either make it not worthwhile to seek any kind of litigation, but I think if someone attempted it, a judge would give a half-hearted hearing.
Again, I'm not saying it would be
good for this to happen, because making new precedents in court usually only end up bad in most cases and you don't want single man or small teamed content creators to have the government breathing down their necks, like you said.
If something were to happen, I think this would be around the first time someone's actually sued over something like this.
