I'm speaking more specifically about devs that are doing it full time that had an initial roadmap that lured in subscribers but doesn't honor it. I'm not talking missing a deadline here and there, but repeatingly doing so, or steering away from the content they said they were going to do without sufficient notification and/or explanation of the new proposed idea. If that dev just simply deleted evidence of the first roadmap, the only people that would know the difference are the early subscribers, but the dev spent x amount of years making money on a different concept without actually completing a product. If a dev is making a game as a hobby, in contrast, then it should be very obvious on their page that it is a donation to the hobby a subscriber is giving and not a investment into a finished project.
Not sure how to implement something like that to be honest. Patreon doesn't care as long as they get money. People on F95, for example, can potentially fill that role, and they partially do (just look at the reviews), but I don't think it's enough. It would be nice if this forum could be a point of clarification to save time and money.
How to make this better is a tough question, because I don't think it really solves the global problem I mentioned: this whole industry is underpaid. By making it clearer when a full-time developer misses all deadlines or changes the roadmap, you're not bringing more money into the industry, you're doing the opposite for the sake of quality.
It's basically min-maxing something that doesn't even work.
But it can save a lot of money and even potentially slap lazy devs.
The problem is to even identify who is a full-time dev and who isn't, who changed the roadmap and who didn't even have one to begin with. We are still talking about
indie devs, and most of them work alone, even if they are full-time. The best-case scenario here is for a dev and the community to talk to each other to
set the expectations.
After thinking about it, I believe it would make much more sense
for now to do the opposite: if a developer delivers updates, doesn't miss deadlines, shows results - he gets some kind of advertising benefit.