I kept accidentally supporting this developer at a higher pay tier.
Sometimes I get lazy and just forget to stop supporting lazy developers, a few years back I did the same with School of Lust's devs...
This is apparent to a lot of people, but I'm gonna hit y'all with a harsh reality of the 50/50 nature of good games that get funded through Patreon.
You get developers who release consistently, I think the best example I've ever seen was Waifu Academy's dev (Irphaeus), he would consistently release updates every 2 to 3 months, and they were approximately 2 to 3 in-game days worth of content, and that wasn't just sex, there was somewhat of a story building and there were interpersonal talks, so on. It was great.
Then he clearly realised he struck gold with the game and an update that was meant to be released on the usual 3-month period, released 1 day before it would have been a year with no update. That whole time at a bare MINIMUM his Patreon income was 9000 USD, that was assuming most people were on the minimum support tier, which usually the average person is on the 5-dollar support tier... Which would have netted him closer to 15,000.
Ever since he has consistently released updates slowly, and people continue their support, simply put: He's milking it.
This game I withdrew my full support because of what were monthly updates with a new story, new sexual content and also A REASONABLE PACING, have again reeled it back and just said "screw you I want money".
Everyone needs to make a living, and I understand wanting your baby to stay home, but at some point, it's gotta leave the nest.
Competent developers can release consistent updates, and just wrap their story up. They then just make the next best thing or an even better work.
My main assumption is the developer has few ideas for a second game, he tried doing two games simultaneously in the summer, and I'd guess that was him gauging "Once Devoted Wife is gone, how much would people care for my next game".
I played it, and it was "alright", but I could feel the efforts were split and his main game (Devoted Wife) suffered because of it too.
Then we had the "house fire where I lost everything" in September. I feel bad saying this, but we have no way to know if this was true, or just an excuse to take a break and not have to be accountable for missed release cycles.
The above is indeed speculation, but it's the only way consistently good release cycles make sense to be interrupted.
If a developer is competent, their game doesn't drag for literal years unless it has the means to do so, heck the sandbox model is mostly made by devs so that they can milk you even harder, since it creates an ILLUSION of "longer gameplay", when it's just a chore of figuring out where to go unless EXPLICITLY TOLD.
Hidden scenes are the same thing, when missable it's not exactly easy to know if you've advanced the story too far to get it, thus you make saves everywhere, and even with a gallery telling you where and how to get it, there's usually hidden "love points" or such required to unlock it, which can be needed by "x day", so you just ultimately end up spending more time looking for 1 scene, than if the dev just found a smart way to incorporate it.
I do believe this game had(MAYBE STILL has) good potential. But the developer has put less and less effort into each update it seems, and ultimately what bothers me most is the redirect and slowed pacing.
I'm tired of these "slow burner" eroge, yes I PREFER story and semi-realism.
I hate incest games where the guy drops his pants, and his mum sees his dick and just wants to fuck him.
I hate ntr where a girl sees a big dick and just cheats.
Both of the above can be made playable for me: Show first a sequence of the mother already having feelings.
Show first that the girlfriend/wife is dissatisfied with her sex life.
But both the above typically pretend to be a "corruption" story where the girl is begging for dick in 10 mins of gameplay.
The opposite end is the milking where the developer waits YEARS of in real life time to show you penetration. Netorase is so bad for this nowadays, devs outright intentionally just make you wait so long to see penetration and stick to reports for so long.
This is fine at first, but just make the story flow well. No one sane wants to hear Gf/Wife 1 recount their swinging or whatever 50 times before penetration is shown once?
Sorry for how ranty it became, but the above is pretty much the reason you'll see most developers now, especially for niche genres slowly work less and just milk their games.
