I kinda agree with you, but at the same time, there is more to that.
This is indeed a small-ish ecosystem, but it's not without lack of competition. We see daily dozens of games being "released" at least as a tech-demo. Also, lack of regulation is not the entire point. If you look at some of Steam's Early Access games. Some of them just make a quick cashgrab, some of them takes long periods of time without even releasing a single update. That is not also a fully regulated environment and although we still see some people straight up scamming people, this kind of behaviour is not as common as with this specific genre.
It's not regulated and that's the precise point! Patronage is an entirely different concept and if you look back centuries ago, creators supported by patrons were often sitting on their asses instead of creating, and when they did, they still did it on commission, so they were paid extra.
In the context of adult games, it's similar to a subscription services offered by places like Lesson of Passion Gold or Meet'n'Fuck, except with subscriptions, you see the content up front (through demos and old releases) and there are regular updates with no pre-releases, few sneak peeks and the content is published finished.
But there is no flexibility. If you were looking for a specific art style or a specific fetish, you would be out of luck.
Patreon put this model completely on its head. There are hundreds of creators who cater to every niche, but it came with scammers, and they were on Patreon ever since the beginning. I've seen creators who only put together a basic game to get a few patrons, but if none were coming, they reused the art in another game under another account, until a game took hold and they could continue from there.
The threshold for people straight up calling an adult game, a scam or something among those lines, is pretty high. If you look at one of the genre's big hitters, like for example Milf City. The game was literally tagged as abandoned and yet, people were still giving the developer money. The patreon for this dev even when it was not updated for more than 6 months, was still full of people paying for nothing.
By whom? By mods at F95. No such tag exists on Patreon.
People should just stop encouraging scummy behaviours and giving devs money mindlessly, regardless of whether they are delivering stuff or not. If a dev goes radio silent for months, don't deliver meaningful results at reasonable periods, people should stop giving them cash. It's really simple.
I agree, but it's completely on people. There's no incentive for Patreon to introduce regulation or policing. It would lead to at least some patrons stopping support, while at the same time it would cost Patreon money, so they would have to increase their fees, which would drive away even more patrons and creators, which means they would have to increase their fees more.
All of that would achieve precisely nothing with some creators who are actively scamming people (since Patreon wouldn't even flag them, as they're ostensivly active).
There's no real solution to this problem. Even discord or other channels don't come in useful since people will ignore those who tell them to stop paying and not all patrons even use them.
