Guys, let's try to tone down the animosity a bit. Hang in there, like the Discord folks are as well.
All I gotta say is, as frustrating as the delays are, the interlude is actually on its way. The game is not abandoned and it's not a "stalling strategy to milk patrons while no progress is being made".
October is actually a very promising month for this genre. It might compensate the limbo, all the waiting & suffering so far.
I agree that we should all tone down the animosity, but that doesn't mean that we can't have a calm discussion about the morality of what Bo and Koda are doing on Patreon. And I don't know how you can be so confident that whatever they're cooking up for this month will be worth the wait, especially when it's been roughly 10 months since the last piece of ToT content.
You don't create a singular 2$ tier on patreon if your goal is to make money. It's more like bare minimum obstacle for discord access.
I hope you aren't making the claim that making money isn't one of Bo's goals with ToT. That's objectively false, if someone doesn't want to make money off of something then they don't create a Patreon page for it, plain and simple. If you're making the argument that making money isn't Bo's
main goal with ToT, well, even though it's a much more reasonable claim, there's no way any of us can know for sure what Bo's intentions were when he made ToT, or what they are right now... But that shouldn't stop us from speculating! (WARNING: WALL OF TEXT AHEAD)
So your main reason for saying that making money is secondary to Bo is that he only has one Patreon tier, which is pledging $2 to get discord access... but you're already wrong, because what pledging $2 actually gets you is access to ToT and Bo's other games. There seems to be a misconception here on F95 that ToT is a free game that's being generously handed to us by Bo and Koda, when in fact we're just pirating it. Someone could argue that the fact that Bo doesn't make an effort to take links of his games down means that they're effectively free, but that's just not the case, and in my personal opinion the only reason why Bo doesn't even try to do that is because he's lazy and probably doesn't think it'd work.
And this here is why I think it's completely fair game to talk about the morality of Bo not giving his Patreon backers content, because technically they're paying for it monthly. As it stands right now, you're not paying 2 bucks as a way of showing your support regardless of whether you get anything in return, or to get access to the discord... you're paying 2 bucks to get the game and its updates, everything else is just an added benefit. If Bo stopped making the $2 tier the "all games" tier and made it just the "discord" tier, while making download links to all his games available regardless of whether you're a patron or not,
then people like me would have a lot less ground to criticize him on in this matter.
Implying that $2 was the bare minimum Bo could ask for is false aswell. And why does there need to be an obstacle for entry to the discord in the first place? If what they're worried about is trolls flooding their discord channels, then all they'd have to do is have decent moderation.
If you want to look at a developer who does everything I mentioned better than Bo (and more), all you have to do is look at Threshold, the Monster Girl Dreams developer. His game is free, updates frequently and everyone gets the same content at the same time. Everyone gets unlimited access to his game's discord server, lowest Patreon tier is $1 for participating in polls, the guy literally uses the money he gets from Patreon to commision art for his game, whereas we have no clue where the money people give to Bo ends up going. To
this guy making money seems to be only secondary.
But enough shilling for the dev of another game or this might get deleted, my point in bringing that guy up was that Bo's "generosity" seems like a calculated effort on his part, a way of casting a wider net, when compared to the real deal.
"I can't cancel my pledges so other people shouldn't donate to a guy I don't like". Is a statement you can assume other people know before you make it.
People should spend their money any way they please. Someone could make the argument that it is immoral to financially support a plagiarist, but I'm not so morally righteous to make it, if I was I would've tried to get his Patreon taken down or something. Make no mistake, plagiarizing the way Bo does
is immoral though...
So no, I'm not trying to tell you that you absolutely shouldn't support Bo on Patreon, but I do believe that as things stand right now, and given the kind of guy he seems to be, it's not exactly a bright investment
And if you're so sure that it is, then you shouldn't care what other people say about it.
This post got too long already, but there's more stuff to discuss, like how they used to advertise 30-45 day wait periods between updates long after that estimate was way off, how some people may not even be aware that they can get the game for free, how some other folks may have chosen not to back Bo if they had all the info about him we have in this thread, etc.
TLDR: Bo
is trying to make money. The $2 tier is for the game, not for discord. Everyone would be able to get in their discord anyway if profit wasn't a motivator. $2 is no "bare minimum".
People can spend their money any way the want, even the dumb ways.