I was wondering about that, but didn't mention it as I didn't dig into it. It takes time to find all the needed info if that is even possible, so I was leaning on it being a made up number. If I won't bother investigating, why would I assume a random person did it. Show us where the number comes from or we will assume it to be made up.
Let's not forget taxes takes a cut too. Generally speaking once you get more than a certain (small) amount from online activities, for tax purposes it starts to count as salary. However paid work (like say paying somebody for custom clothes) can be paid before calculating taxable income, so pay attention to your local tax laws. Then we start to say something like a new GPU can be tax deductible and excluded from sales tax if it is an investment for increasing productivity, through if that is done, using it for playing non-work games becomes tax fraud.
In short even if we can figure out the income, there are so many unknown factors to determine what profit/salary Altos and Herdone ends up with that I will say anybody claiming a number for that probably made it up.
It's my understanding that payments aren't linked to releases. Some people set up patreons without ever releasing through Patreon, so apparently that can be a thing. There is probably a delay in payments like on youtube, twitch etc. The reason being that if a stolen credit card is used and the owner objects, the money will be pulled back. If that happens after Patreon has already given the money to a user, then it's their loss unless they file a civil lawsuit. However if they delay the payment for a month or two, the money being paid back will be in the poll of money not paid yet. While not a concern if the monthly income is stable, it does mean making a good release, which creates a spike in patreons will probably have a delay before that spike reaches the bank account. The place it hurts the most is if some youtuber or something starts collecting because "I need more money. Can't pay rent at the end of the month". That probably won't work due to the delay.
At some point the story is used up and starts repeating itself. You see that in TV series where they start to reuse jokes because making new ones, which doesn't look like something already used becomes impossible. I don't think we have reached that point and it's probably not within the near future either. There are unexplored characters, new characters and a setup, which allows for adding future characters without it feeling out of place for the story. There are a lot of material to work with for making new content, which truly is new. Sure at some point the core is used up and then adding new characters or something like that won't help, but that's not something, which will happen in the foreseeable future.
