And if they are working on story and gameplay behind the scenes, why not show that to the public? Let people know what they are really working on. Let people try it out and experience it. Surely they would have done something with the feedback they got from their last "gameplay" build?
Because the vast majority are like the person I replied to. They don't care about all that other stuff, they only care about what they can get their rocks off to. You offer your patreons what they want, and for the majority it's something they can masturbate to.
That's why they've chosen to hold off until they can show a decent chunk of the experience, over a single testing phase of questing like one of their previous builds that cost them a lot of money for simply showing people what they were working on.
It's cool, I get that many don't understand what they're doing. But when you step back and take notice of everything you can easily identify why most people play these games. They could release every single quest/story build they could and they would simply lose money if it didn't involve some form of sexual intercourse.
The overwhelming majority simply want masturbation material. If you don't cater to the majority, you risk losing the funding they now have to pay the entire team they just hired.
No ifs, ands or buts about it.
Like I said above, they have only released builds that serve as animation galleries, and nothing more. I know they have much more planned for this game. Steve has said so multiple times on their streams. But at the (perceived) pace they are going at right now, they won't get to that point in less than a decade of time.
The estimated completion time is roughly 2 years from now as he said in a post. Which is still pretty good given they just got an alright sized team. Again, most games that are of this caliber take anywhere from 2-4 years with twice the manpower they have or more. So our expectations shouldn't be like they're some company with hundreds of millions of dollars and scores of devs at their fingertips.
The beginning of a gaming project is always the longest stretch. Just look at how far they've come over the past few years. He was working on the beginning of something wonderful way before this and finally got around to going for it. Got someone else to tag along and pushed through all those roadblocks. Now they've got a full fledged team and enough funding to truly grind out content.
Not fair to judge the work of 2 people and I assume some outsourced work from the previous years to what they will be doing with all the extra talent that now works for them. Nothing ever looks pretty when you first start it and very few actually make it to the point they have.
And part of their making it this far is catering to their majority... which don't care about questing or story.