Yes and no. I believe it might give some interested people that really like the game the final push towards the subscription. But as a freeloader here, of course, I absolutely hate it.
It also pushes people away from supporting devs. If you're in a spot, either financially or because of how it could impact your your credit report that you can't be supporting a dev every single month or every single release then you might decide to support someone who doesn't take away content from you every second update.
It also usually tends to lead to games getting leaked earlier once a good support base has been established. People will sub just to leak the extended game and they often won't respect release dates if they do.
You can always start a new game. With the skipping system, you can get to the unlocked content in just a few minutes with more complexly intertwined games than this one. Just for fun I tried it, this one takes ~4 minutes to get to the end with skipping. If the game had the quickbar to do the "skip to the next choice", it would be less than a half of that.
Ya punishing patrons. It's one thing when a mechanical rework forces you to restart a playthrough, that's just life sometimes. When you're forced to do it because it's the only way to watch 12 renders and 9 animations worth of content it kinda becomes a waste. It's shitty but less so with sandboxes but for VNs it's just frustrating.
Am I the only crazy one here that makes a save at every choice screen?
No, the crazy ones are the ones who don't keep lots of saves. I do the same but you'd be surprised at how many people don't.
Also depending on how the game's files are coded and structured adding or removing content retroactively can fuck with saves too. For people who get the extended edition a few updates in I wouldn't be surprised if their saves broke, or people who've played it one update extended and then the free version the next update.
