It almost makes it worthwhile to keep it in a state of perpetual alpha, doesn't it?
It's clearly incredibly lucrative already and he's not at all constrained by the formality of a product that must be maintained or kept consistant, no worries about making significant or breaking changes to game mechanics, no formal bug reports of any sort... he doesn't have to worry about any of the things people expect from even beta software and instead gets to focus on the things he really wants to work on.
Yeah, it seems like an interesting mix of game-design and a forum: people are basically paying $10 to get access to a community & experiment, the way you pay $10 to get a SomethingAwful account. They're not paying $10 to buy a product that's expected to work to any particular standard, which is certainly nice from a game-design point of view.
It's clearly incredibly lucrative already and he's not at all constrained by the formality of a product that must be maintained or kept consistant, no worries about making significant or breaking changes to game mechanics, no formal bug reports of any sort... he doesn't have to worry about any of the things people expect from even beta software and instead gets to focus on the things he really wants to work on.
Seems like the perfect system to me.