We could debate on what honoring his end of the bargain actually means on a site like Patreon, since I have no idea if anything he actually puts on the pledges is actually binding or not. I always saw Patreon as a " Pay me if you like what I did ", never something along the line of " Pay me and support while I'm doing this ".
We can also have a nice discussion about whether accepting free money is actually wrong. Sure, it may be ethically wrong but if there is nothing legally binding on his promises of content, I don't know which side is more to blame though: the sheep or the wolf who just exploit them? It's 2023, and they have a choice on how to spend their money. If they want to spend it like this, meh, more power to them I guess. I do think it's not a really nice way to behave but never got in that position so I have no idea how I would deal with receiving that kind of money monthly in this kind of grey area. In any case, I really don't want to go off-topic though.
My thought process on the update is just that he needs to eventually deliver something to just keep the faithful who still cares. People who already left won't come back because once trust is broken is way too hard to actually get back. This also seems the way he wants to move by deleting the old post on his Patreon: he wishes to get some new ones and keep the ones he has. History proved that there is only so much bullshit people can take before they just quit on you and I'm sure he knows that.
So yeah, he will drop something this month for sure. He can't be that dense to not see this.
I don't disagree, but IMO it changes when you are talking about someone who constantly promises content that never comes, and then hides the evidence of all the times he failed to deliver. Ultimately, it's still buyer beware, and I'm sure Patreon has made sure they're legally indemnified from stuff like this or else the business would be imploded by now.
I think you are looking at the issue rationally, in terms of how someone would try to navigate this to keep it off the ground. The problem with that logic is it applies to the last 18 months that he could have engaged in this constructive behavior and didn't. I don't honestly believe that BD is a scammer in the sense of he has taken this calculated risk - it just doesn't make sense. A scammer would create basically a glorified demo and then move on to the next thing while teasing content for a time before going dark. WVM is too long for that in its current state.
If BD is not that, but he
is rational, he would just release content people didn't like and adjust future content based on feedback. Let's be honest, now is literally the easiest time in history to keep a project like this going indefinitely. The hard part is starting, and we're already there. He doesn't
have to be creative; every part of the creation process at this point can be automated to some degree with the littlest amount of effort comparably. This doesn't mean no effort, but honestly it's not much. Between AI tools and just literally stealing ideas from other media and his own creativity and vision, he can come up with storylines that are good enough. In all my time on here I've only ever played two games that had moments (not as a whole) that I thought were legitimately great. This is still mostly just porn, let's be honest. I don't need War and Peace, I just need something that
isn't terrible.
But this is the problem: BD is
not rational. No one but him (and maybe not even him) can say for sure what motivates him, what his vision is, or where this is going, but you can
absolutely say this guy has no idea how to get there. My personal opinion is that this game has created a parasocial dynamic that he feeds into and has allowed himself to become trapped in. His energy is spent on controlling the audience's perception of him as the artist so strongly that it has basically washed out the work that we're supposed to actually care about. He is
obsessed with telling you what he is thinking and feeling and going through. It's a bizarre inversion of how normal fame works - usually it's the audience digging into the creator and boundary checking them to varying degrees. BD's boundaries are all over the place, and he almost forces you to respond to them as part of the deal. He has shared wayyyyyyyyyyyy too many personal details that we never needed to know, in service of what exactly? Outside of the engagement itself, nothing.
Over time this has created this fucking weird Stockholm syndrome effect, where the people who really just want to engage in his world engage with him instead, with the hopes that they can steer him back on track to producing the content they wanted to see in the first place without this crazy series of interpersonal correspondence side quests. The only smart thing BD has said lately is that he plans to stop engaging with his audience. That is 100% the right move. But as he's shown, he can't help himself. Not even with the "assistant" he "hired" to force him.
Because of this goofy ass scenario, literally any actuality is possible. BD could have 100,000 renders done, or he could have none. It's far more likely in my opinion that he has 100,000 rough drafts done, and the vast majority aren't remotely usable in their current state. And since he's addicted to engagement, but also to
the idea of being engaged with, he spends 99% of his energy on that instead.
I didn't intend to write this much, but I've thought a lot about this situation since I apparently have nothing better to do with my time. This is all a very long way of saying that until this core dynamic fundamentally shifts, I don't think the behavior, the missed dates, the angst, or the backlash will stop. He could set the next release date for 2035 and not come close to hitting it.
This arrangement is configured to produce this result. You have to change it to get something else out of it, and he's the only one who can.
!
