I was waiting to get a few more details about this before i went ham, but i think i have enough now.
I made a thread the other day talking about the importance of having a site like Patreon where English speaking developers could make English-centric H games, clearly there is an interest in doing so and i still think that a platform such as Patreon is important because unlike Japan there isn't a massive culture around animated porn and it is very much a niche interest outside of that country, ideally people would be able to crowd fund projects them like without the platform itself getting in the way as Patreon has recently, With that being said, people who gain funding through Patreon need to fucking get it together.
The first demo for Divine Arms was put out nearly 2 years ago and since then, i haven't seen a single H-related update since, only promises to enhance the existing game system, expand the world, other massive and unnecessary undertakings. I believe that when deciding to make a project, it should have a limited scope, similar material to what we saw in the original demo would have been enough and after a few more similar scenes and a couple months of work and funding, it would have been enough to have a completed project under their belt.
Unfortunately, like alot of developers on Patreon, they want their game to be this big massive undertaking, the more promises they make, the easier it is to collect the continuous paycheck from patreon without ever actually delivering anything besides the occasional concept art or demo.
Ofcourse, this isn't the first time people have become skeptical of the development of Divine Arms, people were upset at the lack of new content for several months, enough that the developer eventually came on here and told everyone that he didn't care about the complaints here and he made content to serve his patrons, a shortsighted view as additional patrons cannot be attained without public support.
What makes me so upset is that this is yet another example of an overly ambitious dev who ultimately failed to complete his game, the excuse for his animator/artist quitting is horse shit, if there were any philosophical problems, they should have been solved with a simple conversation between the members of the small (2 man?) team, it should not resulted in the person quitting a 2 year project entirely. Whether this is truly the case or not, the project certainly looks like a scam.
In closing, i want to offer a warning to both potential patrons and devs who take advantage of Patreon (or similar services). As a Patron you have all the power here, you decide whether a project is worth your funding or not, as Patreon asks for funding every month, you should expect an update of substance every month as well, if at any point you feel as though the project isn't going in the direction you want it to, you should tell the dev and cancel your sub. To Developers: As mentioned previously, you have to keep the scope of your project in mind when developing it, i see projects like Divine Arms and Malise in the Machine either making a plan to expand the scope or the project to a much larger level or overhauling existing systems and basically redoing earlier sections of the game, if the original scope of the project changes, the likelihood that the project will fail increases tremendously, whereas if the developer simply kept making more of the same kinds of content in the original demo, the projects would have been much closer to completion.
Devs ofcourse are able to take the direction of the project in any way they want, but they do so at the risk of losing Patrons, current devs must shoulder the burden of utilizing the same platform which have failed to deliver time and time again with few exceptions (Sourjelly's Anthophobia being one of them), Patrons should question whether or not Patreon is a viable method of funding a English H-project, with each failed project, It is becoming increasing clear that the answer is no.