Re: Malise and the Machine - Public Demo Available Now!
To an audience that believes game development is done by magic wand, maybe.
No, if you order a coffee in a restaurant you don't give a fuck if it's squeezed by a magic toaster operated by infantile lemmings, you just want to get your damn cup of coffee for the price listed.
The process that goes into making a product is rarely relevant to a consumer, unless that process is something notable (i.e a product being made through child labor, and even then it's rarely a consideration, see shit like McDonald's being as popular as it is)
People who are considering being a patron simply to get a product don't care what goes on in production. People who are patrons to support someone will generally do so because of what that person makes, not how he makes it, while this kind of background information can be interesting and entertaining details it's not critical to the decisions of the majority of your audience.
So if, for example, I donate because I want to see more Malise and the Machine, and throughout a year I get an utterly trivial amount of it, I consider my investment a write-off, the promise that work behind the scenes will allow for an increased rate of production is worthless until it pays off.
You can compare this to hosting a radio show, your audience expects a steady and reliable stream of new content, even if you want to do something like a vacation or upgrade your equipment you need to do something like record some content ahead of time to tide them over, additionally you'll want a buffer for when you get sick or otherwise indisposed, telling people "it's coming" will just have them lose interest and move on to more reliable content producers. So yes, while the work they do behind the scenes is great and important, the negligible amount of actual content to keep the interest of their less committed patrons is cause for some people to stop supporting them.
I mean... going so far as to blaming the customer for not being interested, I just don't even know how to respond to that. You don't have some obligation to inform yourself, people don't fucking have time for that shit. You need to understand that the customer doesn't want your product to succeed, doesn't want you to realize your hopes and dreams, they want to masturbate to girls being molested by weird monstrosities, everything else is secondary to that.
Note, most importantly, the difference between something like a customer of a producer (which will still be a good chunk of Patrons) and a supporter (or an actual patron in the regular sense of the word) and even supporters don't really care WHAT happens, just that it does. You don't care what materials a painter uses to mix his paints, you just want them to make beautiful paintings, the materials become relevant when the painter starts suffering mercury poisoning for using weird materials and it gets in the way of the paintings being made.
