Your name kinda suits you. Why are you guessing here? He had plenty of money through supporters. He clearly stopped because he lost interest.
Now getting sidetracked, wtf people like you are doing here?
Do you know how many devs are active here on F95? Also, many people here do buy games from steam and some even support on Patreon.
About paying money, are you going to provide a completed games to people who were paying money?? I don't think so. So, you don't have any right to criticize the other groups either as you don't have the capabilty to provide a solution.
In fact the unpaid guys complaining and you complaining about them are all the same. Zero contribution in actual area.
Math is hard, m'kay? But let's give it a go anyways.
There are just a little over 200 subscribers on Patreon. And I'm willing to bet most of the subs are of the lower tiers. That's simply the nature of the beast.
Fir Steam sales, we can use the quick rule of thumb of 20-60x sales vs reviews to guesstimate (let's be generous and use the high end figure) ~300 reviews x 60 = 18k copies sold.
Let's be extra generous and assume the sales figures is 30k copies if we include other platforms.
Don't forget the platforms and the government take a big chunk of the the gross revenue.
Patreon sub revenue is simply not high enough to make developing the game an ongoing main and only job.
Steam (and other platforms) revenue is a one-time boost. One buys the game for a one time fee, not a subscription. And sales has pretty much died off completely. That one time boost will cover a handful years of living expense. And that's it. And don't forget, we are being extra generous here. The real sales figure is probably closer to 10k copies sold instead of the 30k we've been assuming.
TL;DR - This game isn't making Hopes "plenty of money". Anybody who thinks so is a sheltered flower living off mommy and daddy and has no clue how the real world works.
Besides, there is zero evidence either way whether Hopes lost interest, or not. Claiming it as "clearly" speaks more about how unscrupulous you would be in a similar situation, than what's really happening.