Not 2 years. v0.20.8 came out on 25-Mar-2021 so in less than a month it'll be 3 years.
To add to your good breakdown, the highest proof of malicious intent is how DC [didn't] handle his abject failure.
He promised the Tech Update will last "3 to 4 months" in Dec-2020. That's what patreons voted on, as if they are respected and their word matters. When you promise 3-4 months and you get past 12 and you see yourself in limbo, with no release date in sight, it's more than enough for anyone who operates in good faith to fundamentally rethink what they're doing. At that point an honest leader would just say "we're 3-4 times past the promised deadline with no end in sight, things are out of control, we need a new plan".
Then, if the engine rewrite wasn't already completed, the lead dev should've been replaced with one that's actually competent. This rewrite (without piling on all the actual content) is very mainstream work for literally any half-competent Python dev. Can be done in 2 months, easily. It's not a money issue, not rocket science, just very mainstream dev work.
The hard part is reworking and adding back all the content on top of the new engine. This is hard because it's a large volume of work but it has an upside: it can easily be split across multiple releases, just like stories have been delivered in consecutive releases up to 0.20.8 over the years. So an honest leader would say "we'll release the game in 6 months with just the first 3 stories reworked and then 6-12 months later will come the rest of the stories".
Was there any regrouping and honest self awareness at any point past that 3-4 months deadline? FUCK NO! Even now, a staggering 35 months later the project is dead in the water with no credible status reports, no deadline, no direction.
This is not about an inability. At this point the failure is so monumental that to assume it's about an inability is misleading. DC is quite simply a scammer. A person with no work ethic that sees the SS project as an amoral meta-game whose objective is to to extract maximum $ from his paying supporters. THAT is his only mission.
Q: It's 2021-2022 and patreon vibe goes down?
A: Push out some side-updates with a few minutes worth of content.
Q: It's 2023 and income actually drops?
A: Start simulating activity to give the illusion the lights are on and we're WORKING. Barf out word salads as status updates. Make screenshots and call them wallpapers. Just look busy.
Q: It's Oct-2023 and $/patreon goes down as they reduce their monthly contribution to see some impact?
A: Hide your monthly income to minimize network effects from everyone seeing their discontent reflected in how monthly income drops.
DarkCookie is a scammer and Summertime Saga is by far the biggest scam in adult games and quite likely the biggest scam that happened on Patreon so far.
