I don't want to complain and bitching about piracy in general. For me, it all started with about a year of experimental coding. As it now has grown in complexity, the boring work of testing and eliminating bugs has grown exponentially. The life as a puppeteer may come to an end sooner than you think.
I apologize for my long post but I think this merited a response:
I feel for you, I really do. But I think you and I well know that piracy are impossible to completely prevent. And, frankly, I doubt shaming others for it will accomplish anything except to get hostile responses. To be blunt, it is just a waste of your time.
I should also note that not all pirates are pure pirates, as some of them may be already a Patron for other creators but would be unable to afford additional creators. I suspect that is true in the case of many other creators as well. As a matter of fact, I already have pledged over $100 a month on Patreon to several creators (you can see three of them being shown as my pledged creators in my forum profile here) and that is as far as I can go (though, if it make you feel any better, I have not pirated your works to date), considering other regular payments I must make outside Patreon on my limited income. I suspect a significant number of pirates are also Patrons for other creators and have already hit their own limits on pledging. Even if lowest tiers for many creators seem very affordable, they can all add up considerably in addition to existing pledges.
This is an issue vividly made clear by
Percocksu in his
post above regarding the multiple paywalls. In fact, what Percocksu described is similar to the situation that we are now seeing in streaming services industry that have become overly fragmented where you now have to subscribe to many services in order to watch all your favorite programs (ironically, a study warned that this unsustainable fragmentation, if it continues like this, may lead to increased piracy). I don't know if a single subscription service for Virt-A-Mate creations, as suggested by Percocksu, will solve the problem while continuing to provide a level of income proportionate to their time and effort spent on creating these works. But it could be something worth looking into.
Please note that under no circumstances am I defending piracy, even if I participated in them as I will openly admit. I view it with a distaste but, unfortunately, I cannot financially support everyone even if I want to (and I do want to). It is, indeed, a regrettable situation. Nevertheless, while I am not familiar with your works as I have not used any of them to my knowledge (though some of them may be already part of the megapacks that I downloaded from this thread but I would have to check), I would urge you to not stop creating your works in spite of the piracy since you have almost 270 patrons from what I can see, which is impressive. $2,300 monthly is actually also impressive compared to most of the Patreon creators that I am pledged to at this time. Not bad, considering, and I think you should focus on that positivity as a reason to continue.
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POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
I think your best bet in securing the continuing compensation for your time and effort to create these works are things that cannot be pirated. For example, polls on what to create and such. You appear to have already done polls on your Patreon page so that is a start. I would suggest exploring options where you could establish exclusivity and which could not be pirated.
But sustaining and even increasing income does not necessarily always have to be about establishing exclusivity. For example, it is well possible that some of your Patrons had pirated some of your works before pledging, effectively providing a demo for themselves to try out. In fact, I recall being told by someone that they would actually pirate a game before buying them. In a way, piracy could serve as an indirect form of free advertising/marketing. With that noted, you might also consider the option of making some works the timed exclusives so that they become free eventually and permit some to get feel of it before considering a pledge for your Patreon. A small selection of your works for free download is suggested, if you haven't done that yet. You may even consider offering a Christmas gift of making a work or two available for free download.
Another option is making older versions of your works, particularly plugins which I understand you make, available for free download. You may also consider having free basic version and paid advanced version as well for your plugins.
A further possibility, though perhaps unorthodox, is to consider trialing a sale by temporarily reducing the pricing on all tiers for a specific period of time as a discount and then assess the impact of this on your income if that is feasible. But I would only advise that course of action if you think you have a safety margin to afford that, assuming that you depend on income from Patreon significantly enough to impact your living (I would strongly advise against being too dependent on Patreon for your living and I would also consider diversifying to other subscription services, where possible, to avoid being too reliant on Patreon as well).
And, of course, adjusting tier pricing and adding new tiers is also another option to consider but I think your tier pricing structure is fine as it is since $2 tier, the lowest, seem quite affordable, methinks.
All in all, the importance of marketing and building the brand loyalty cannot be overstated.
