Developers are just people. Sometimes they get burned out. Sometimes they have their living arrangements disrupted and can't have the privacy to work on adult material any more. Sometimes their countries are invaded. There can be many reasons why they can't find the time, energy, or interest to keep working on their project.
But maybe they still like to see what other games are new, or what zany witticisms have been dropped in the General-offtopic section. Not every moment of their life must be dedicated to making the game that their fans want them to continue. That would explain why they *dared* to log in to F95 instead of feverishly working on the game some more.
"Wait!" you might say. "I signed up to pay a few dollars a month for the game! I'm angry that I don't get what I expected". If you are one of the very few on this site who actually contribute something back to the developers, then there is a small level of injustice. Although not many would think that exchanging the monetary value of one cup of coffee a month for dozens of hours of work is a good deal.
The truth is that the rewards of making a H-game are, on average, not much better than the warm fuzzy feeling of grateful commenters. Based on the truth that developers spend 100s to 1000s of hours per release, and on the actual revenue estimates of adult game creators on Patreon (hat-tip to
Count Morado and his annual informative infographic), the average dev makes $0.10-0.20/hr.
It is a hobby. One that maybe, if you keep pushing for long enough and market yourself enough, you might get enough returns to buy a new video card every two years.
There are dozens of new wannabe developers appearing every month. maybe a 1/4 of those make a first release. maybe half of those make a few more releases. maybe 1 in 100 keeps going and becomes a long term game dev hobbyist. And maybe 1 in a 500 of those hits the jackpot and gets to the point of income that allows them to quit other employment.
Regarding the "Onhold" tag: Site rules (
https://f95zone.to/threads/game-uploading-rules-2024-02-29.524/) say that a game is changed to Onhold if the dev makes a public statement that the game is paused but they intend to continue dev later. It is then changed to abandonded if there is no significant demonstration of progress within 6 months. (note that these rules are enforced only when a mod notices or someone reports the issue, there's no specific system to keep track of the status of the 1000s of games).