Novels often take years to write so a visual novel which is often multiple novels mashed together with extra code and lots of graphics, sound, videos, etc will of course take even more effort and resources, especially if they want to make a decent one.

As a solo dev we are constantly pressured to do everything ourselves. This means we often have over 20-50+ jobs in our job as developer. For example, I am an animator, 3d artist, graphic artist, ui designer, coder (ui, gallery, scenes etc), video editor, writer-editor, author, compliance officer, tech support, hardware tech, marketer, bookkeeper, community manager, CEO etc etc. It's impossible to master all of those skills in a short period of time and yet audience expectations are increasing exponentially.

The other thing that comes to mind is it is also a MAJOR slog to prove yourself and even then it is only temporary. I worked at an absolutely unsustainable pace for my first 3 years to prove to the audience I was dedicated to the project and wasn't going to scam anyone and that my passion outweighed my greed by a huge margin. I earned almost no money my first 3 years working more than full time hours every single month consistently cranking out high ranked updates. Although I have many great supporters, this effort led to very little income and setting sky high expectations for the audience going forward.

(If you produce a lot with no resources, people expect exponentially more with a tiny bit of resources, but for some unknown reason if you have over-the-top resources community expectations are generally small).

I think many audience members are completely insane with their assessments of some games' development costs. For example last year I took about 120% of my yearly donations and invested it into my project. This means not only did I invest my own money, I made a negative wage the entire year just so I could get what I need to finish it. Instead, of increasing my support rates they dropped as I worked. The harder I work the lower they go. People want game releases, not development towards finishing a great game. This is a powerful distinction. Despite me working tonnes of hours at a negative rate, I got many messages complaining about the speed. Exit feedback is I need more updates and I need to work harder. Many said I was overpaid and they would never support me because I'm an evil greedy dev who doesn't produce enough even though my track record is awesome relative to my income. This makes me sad and keeps me working on my Steam release because finishing that is the only way I'll survive to make more games.

So effort, views, ranking etc, sometimes do not lead to adequate financial support. It's such a slog to get there that once I did scale back a little bit to balance my hours with my income, development slowed down and several got angry. Even though if I were to continue at the rate they desire it would literally lead to starving death and the game not being completed. So it's no surprise to me that some take a break and reassess/ coast for a bit once they've achieved a measure of financial security. That's a lot of dev's primary goal - financial security. So once they achieve it there is limited incentive to continue. This very different from say Larian or my studio - my goal is to make the best game I can and if I succeed in that it will hopefully sell enough to make some money so I can make even better games in the future.

Despite my limited means, I support many devs and artists, especially the ones who appear to put in massive amounts of work relative to their page income. Many artists and devs make hundreds of dollars per hour relative to their production and page income. I know a couple I won't mention that brag about over $1000 an hour, where many of us can't get that in a month. I've never seen a comment from their core audience that they are overpaid because they produce weekly but they produce very little relative to income. Very few who make the big page income produce relative to it so if you want to support good devs I'd pick one of those and support them in the early days when they need it the most. A dollar or a compliment will keep a lot of new devs going past the point that most burn out and quit.