My theory is that, like many others, Braindrop started this whole thing as a hobby, unexpectedly found great financial success, and naturally, didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to make a lot of money with relatively little effort. Based on his work ethic and self-motivation to keep his word, I can’t imagine that he had significant success in his career or job before WVM and likely earned only a fraction of what he makes with WVM now.
When it started becoming less and less enjoyable for him, that’s when the over-a-year-long break occurred, during which he didn’t upload anything at all. I also believe this is why the changes (and in my opinion, the deterioration) in the story and visuals happened. It’s as if he tried to reinvent things to find joy in it again. Unfortunately, the break in the middle of the game completely ruined it for me. I liked the old version much better.
Since then, he’s been doing the bare minimum to keep his community paying, which is why he constantly comes up with excuses as to why the updates end up being a fraction of the planned size. Just think about how many updates with 1,000+ renders he promised, which in the end became two updates combined with maybe 600 renders, months apart, as if he never actually had those 1,000+ renders in the first place. The number of renders he supposedly created and must still have stored somewhere but never released must be in the thousands.
But honestly, I’d probably also prefer to do something for an hour a day that I don’t enjoy but still earn five figures a month, rather than working ten hours a day on something I do enjoy but not earning nearly as much.
