I read someone's analysis on r/AVN reddit.
"
ou’re seeing a boom in AVNs, especially incomplete ones due to Patreon and other platforms making this income model viable.
AVNs preciously weren’t really sold on Steam and sold poorly. Most were Japanese VNs and were called Eroge and it was really a niche genre outside of Japan. They were sold as completed products and produced by a company.
Then huge hits like Summertime Saga and Being A DIK shows the Patreon model working…it’s like how Onlyfans changed the porn industry. Lot of copycats making US college based games with lots of sex scenes where the games are now called AVNs rather than just Eroge. It’s become its own genre.
But with Patreon, you have one or a few a devs working on the game as a part time job. And because there’s recurring payments, there’s financial incentive to stretch out a game’s development.
Why finish the game and kill the cash cow? If they complete it, would the next thing they make even be as popular?
You see these huge popular games take longer and longer to make updates, some taking more than a year to make significant updates to progress the story.
AVN stories are more akin to a soap opera or long running manga like One Piece or Naruto now. The longer it runs for the more money it makes.
And like most manga, most won’t ever finish properly and get cancelled or dropped by the dev.
Sadly, it’s the nature of the beast."
