Re: Akabur Games
You got over 5k dollar on patreon too didn't you? (including my pledge)
Even though you never released a work before that people still trusted you.
Akabur may be a lazy fuck but he has created really great stuff in the past and most people are convinced he will release equally good games in the future.
As much as people hate Akabur.... His art is incredibly good and nearly untouchable.
Yummy does his by major update, rather than monthly, though. So it could be monthly or every six months, or who knows how often that you get charged, depending on what goals he sets and how quickly the work gets done. So that's one way to garner a little trust. At least he gets paid the same if he has to stretch three months of work to a year, or he gets nothing if the project just vanishes because he can't pull himself away from the PS4 long enough to get anything done.
The thing you have to realize is that if Akabur was operating under his old model with Hentai United, the only issue with WT would have been that it was light on art and not worth the price of admission for a month by itself. And while people might be impatiently waiting for the PT update, they wouldn't be concerned they're being taken to the cleaners in the meanwhile. This isn't exclusively about whether or not his art is good or whether or not he can eventually release a game that has a beginning and an ending and is finished halfway or more.
If you look at his Milestone Goals they're all about what he can get himself with the money, aside from one or two that required him to do things he'd have to do anyway, and one that he never followed through on. We've already addressed how his Pledge Levels are either meaningless gestures or broken promises. The one game he's released since starting Patreon was under-delivered and over-promised, and his games prior to that fall under the same heading. He has to be very careful that PT:GE lives up to the hype he's fomented, or this history could catch up to him in a big way.
He's running a campaign drive with monthly pledges, and operating in a nether realm between business, charity, and buddy who could use a few bucks and a couch to crash on. Many of the Patreon Creators seem to have problems with this. I think they're most familiar with handling the latter situation, but they want to look credible by imitating successful crowd-funding campaigns. So they promise things they can't deliver, or set one-time milestones like, "I'll send ten lucky winners a personalized drawing", for a monthly campaign that reaches $2,000/month. It could be deliberately deceptive, but I think it more likely that Creators just aren't thinking something like that through. They don't realize that persuading people to contribute more to hit a monthly level, for a prize they probably won't get is kind of shady. Or that it becomes even more shady that the milestone has no lasting effect, even if their pledges never dip below $2,000/month again. Akabur did all of these things in one form or another, and then never, even once, delivered on any of them that didn't benefit him. That's a bit of an issue.
