- Jul 21, 2024
- 22
- 36
Supporting a creator on Patreon is charity. That's all it is. Someone's making a thing you enjoy, so you give them money in return for neither partial ownership of the project, a cut of any eventual profits, or any obligation. That's tossing money into a busker's hat.I dont like that attitude as it contradicts the common sense: You pay money with the mindset that it will be used in a certain way. What you expect on patreon is a developer working on the game. Yes there are people that dont have that expectation, but the majority surely does. So taking money from patreon while you are not working on the game feels like theft no matter what bullshit patreon writes into there tos.
Your perspective is of course valid aswell. But what you describe is general charity and you would be an idiot to use patreon for that as they take a huge ammount from it. Another problem with it is that you are fine with other people being scammed. And no, the argument "they can cancel there payments anytime" isnt valid for aslong as the developer isnt transparent with wether he is actively working on the game or not.
So to summarize it: a paused patreon isnt a lose-lose situation. It is a lose-win situation. The devs loses money and the patreons win money to spent on other things. To call it a loss because less income for the developer will maybe lessen the motivation to work on the game again is pure bullshit, as the developer didnt have this motivation while he still had a higher income due to a much higher supporter base. It is also not a loss because it is a sign that people reward active developers and that will lead to more games being made. It does harm developers in general if limited money on the market is spent for games not being made.
The developer can't lie about releasing updates. They either come out or they don't. If they stop, or if you're dissatisfied with the amount of content in each, you cancel your support. If you can't be bothered to do so, that's not theft, it's incompetence with managing personal finances.
The real scam is site's use of tech-sector gobbledygook to make charitable giving seem like it's some kind of investing. Though Patreon actually takes considerably less of a cut than most nonprofit charity organizations, which typically spend 80-95 cents of every dollar they receive on things like "administration".