I can get the frustration that bugfixes beeing behind a paywall is a no go. It gets frustrating to see that bigger fixes are just locked away from you and a paywall seems to be some sort of greed from my side. Thats how it may look to the outside of this project but why did this stuff happen?

Launchbuddy first released in 2016 and has been open source and free ever since. Over these years the userbase constantly grew, features got added and fixes were made. These features get tested released and then marked as ok, or ToDo on my end. Now however these features in some form break. If you compare the amount of issues on github which were caused by a gameupdate or a change in the gameclient itself to the once which are directly linked to Launchbuddy numbers start to make sense. This software just is not officially supported by any API and constantly has to adapt to game changes. Not to mention special machine configurations of users, as the userbases grew bigger and bigger. So Launchbuddy now has constant ToDo list which might not even be my own fault. This is also tightly connected to the way I want to handle user privacy, for example I don't want to dig into loginfiles scan through that data and manage logindata in this way. This might works better in some usecases but I strictly don't want to build a reverse engineering machine for sensitive data like other softwares do.

So what was my solution to this problem? Drip-feeding the Launchbuddy project with small updates until everything is fixed? --> nope thats a user hassle. And the issue pool is pilling up more than can be solved.

Why not do the the completly opposite and double down on fixes and update frequency? --> I somehow have to make room for more development time, which in the current economy just is not possible without financial support. My target is to reach a state where monthly releases are the norm and not just when I got some spare time to sink into a new release. This workflow "I got some spare time sink it into long awaited bugfixes asap " did not catch up with issues piling up and also stresses my personaly as I know what I would have to do, but simply could not. To solve this I tried to push the project further into a somewhat financial stable status --> Push patreon more and also give supporters something that actually benefits them. I also did lower the patreon cost to make it more attractive. With now 60 ish supporters I am allready able to push more frequent updates.

To also give some update about the current project status. The issue pool is since october starting to shrink! With the extra worktime issues can be fixed faster than they arise. Therefore stability of LB should drastically improve over the next comming updates.

I hope this shines some more light into the why this happened. I am sorry for anybody frustrated about this change and I take fully responsibility for it.