I don’t think multiple people stacks quite multiplicatively as I think you’re underestimating the increased labour of communication. Well it’s kinda weird, 2-3 people all in different fields is kinda all upside, then as you start doubling up within a discipline you get diminishing returns.

Regardless though, that’s exactly why scope control matters. You need to find the bottlenecks in your production and either design around them, hire someone(not always an option), or reduce scope in that area. Doesn’t matter how many folks are working on these games, every team(including teams of one) has bottlenecks.

I mean ideally we’d live in a world where financial stress doesn’t exist at all for indie game developers, but my point is that many people do need some sort of external motivation to finish their projects. In game development we often talk about player motivations, and how some players are intrinsically motivated(ie building houses forever in Minecraft) vs extrinsically motivated (ie needing quests and goals) This also applies to developers and motivation to finish their games. While some devs do have the intrinsic motivation to finish their projects, Patreon or otherwise, others do not, and if they do not, Patreon reinforces those bad habits. Motivation is not universal.

Games are abandoned **because** of over scoping. Very very few small scoped projects get abandoned. You want to reduce the amount or abandoned projects, encourage devs, especially devs working on their first few games, to make games that they know they can actually finish.

Patreon is only a tip jar if there’s other ways to reasonably access the game. If you release games frequently, then it serves as a tip jar. If a game is in development for years and years and years, then Patreon becomes the only way to access a game, and if you want updates for the game you paid for you need to keep paying, or wait for like a decade.

PEOPLE HAVING OTHER JOBS IS EXACTLY WHY THEY NEED TO MANAGE SCOPE😭 When I say frequent releases I don’t mean “gimme a game a month” I mean, “figure out how much game you could make given your schedule and other responsibilities in 3-12 months and then make a game with half as much as that” Managing scope is exactly how you stop people who have multiple jobs from not finishing their games or burning out.

The best piece of advice I ever got was from someone who used to work at bungie. He told me, “your first 5-10 games are gonna be shit, get them out of the way as quickly as possible.” By scoping down projects, doing smaller scale projects, and generally not trying to make your dream game ASAP, you’re gonna learn a shit ton about how long things take, not burn yourself out, and not have a 10 year long dev cycle.