It's understandable that you feeling salty about the piracy is likely to make your fund backing efficiency being jeopardize. If I'm a dev, or even simply an artist, trying to make a living out of fund backing and patronages, I'd be salty too. But I also seen them as in inevitability. Especially when your works becomes highly interest among the communities, or even small niche group of interests.
From the POV of someone who valued my own hard earning income from 9 to 5 job. It feels very hard to compel to spending them on a recurring charges even toward my favorite artist just so I can see their exclusive arts gated behind a paywall. Unless I feeling so damn addicting, or heart-struck, fallen head-over-heel over some work, it's very unlikely for me to becomes someone patronages. Because my income in this 3rd world country is that much tight, I can feel every little $ I spend aboard where I lives.
My point is, it's still a thing that not any average joe will do on a whim. Those with capability to supporting your work are someone that you can tug their heartstring and having no pressure on making a choice to spending their money, so they head straight there to supporting you on patronages platform. It's more of a subjective matter than a materialistic one.
I really like your work, but it's still not special enough for me to help boost into your endeavor, apart from waiting to buy out your final product. Which will also be one long agonizing wait, with the absent of the change I either have to wait month(s) before I can experiences something new, or just forget about it entirely altogether and maybe someday I'll stumbled back to rediscover them later. If only there's something can pull my heartstring in your work, I dare say that I won't even hesitate to boost you monetary support without a second though.
I'm not glorifying piracy to be the best thing ever, but it becomes one of the very few way that I can enjoy something new without suffocating myself with the feeling of staying put until the full releases, or paid $20+ for the luxuries of entertainment that I instead, can saving those for emergency, or even possible medical bill and debts. When it does released, I buy the product I really, REALLY like anyway, as long as it's within the platform that I can legally supported. Like your SCH for example.
As a matter of fact, the game with so much high effort like the works of Eromancer, Pure Onyx, is pale in compared to yours regarding my personal interest. I feels indifferent about that game, I didn't even feels like engage in discussion. I might even never know of its full release or even care to pirates it in unforeseeable future, hack, I didn't pirates its updates for at least 3 to 4 years now cuz I just don't care about that game anymore. No matter how high the quality it has, if it not catching someone interest, worst what can happen with them is just being ignored.
So TL;DR as someone engage in piracy
- Free game update, testing something new, me happy. (Dev might sad bcuz leakage)
- No free game update, playing same old stuff that it already burnout, me sad. (Dev not sad, maybe indifferent, dev carry on)
- Really like the game, me buy full product on release anyway.
- Me don't like spending money on recurring charges stuff unless it really THAT special to me.
Sry for a long yap, hope you have a great day.
Edited: I forgot to mention a little cherry on top that, PayPal becomes absurdly restrictive regarding the options I can use around here. I usually use Digital-credit card, a pseudo one, to do online transection, now they don't accept that anymore, and I don't have enough credential information capable enough to make a physical one, because the banks or agency I consult with lack human logic and only do thing by-the-book or some shit .... Sometime I can't even freely spending my money how I wanted to, it's irony.
