now that you have brought this up it actually raises an interesting question; could DC pull off a toby fox? (the creator of undertale, who has basically released a demo for his game and made a kickstarter, reached his goal, and then went on for about almost 3 years to make the full game). do you think something like that would work in an industry like this?
how do you think it would affect the game and the community it has if he got the initial dev movey and went AWOL till he delivered an equivalent of undertale in the adult game industry?
im not saying that the method right now isnt working but just this "what if?" scenario sounds really cool as an alternate universe and hopefully this gives people something to talk about for a while
This would all depend on one thing as it's main factor - establishment.
An already established developer with several successful IPs under their belt could potentially pull it off due to the already earned goodwill - you know said developer already managed to create beautiful pieces of work, so handing him a wad of money after seeing the initial demo, seeing him off and waiting (potentially) a very long time could turn over yet another piece.
You wouldn't do that with someone untrustworthy now would you? Obviously, if your idea is unique enough, you will find supporters, case in point undertale.
There's obviously more to it than I make it sound, but the inherent problem I currently see, and this problem is all due to the next point already on it's own (I'm obviously glancing over several things, shush) is due to the way of money distribution, namely Patreon:
Why is that? simple. You aren't being given one big pile of money to outfit your project with (setting up a dev plan, hiring staff for the extended period, coming up for all the different kinds of expenses), no, you recieve it partially, bit by excruiating bit.
This limits your options already and as a way of compensating for it, you can attract a bigger crowd by making your product as well as the progress on said product public.
This however comes with the next problem - to keep interest in your product high, you require some form of reward for the continous (this is the key to it!) support. So what do you do? You give out small parts of what is going to be in the finished product out to your supporters. This keeps the engine and therefore your development running and you repeat from see previous.
The way Patreon is handling its funding - being rewarded for supporting content creators - is the problem I see. If this weren't the case, I could see something like this happen even (or rather especially) in the adult industry. Hell, the internet lives off of porn.
Granted, I've looked over several other aspects that I didn't wanna touch, because each and every one of them would require several paragraphs of their own, but I'd just say this - the person needs to be trustworthy and able to deliver, which in turn would mean that I would definetely never hand money to Chris Roberts (CEO of Cloud Imperium Games - Star Citizen) due to his track record.