As much as I agree, some game devs rely mostly on the payment from their games, I have some good old friends who quitted their jobs to focus on GameDev and endded up returning to their jobs and abbandoning game development.
Trust me, at least this game gets free updates, theres a couple games I love that wont get any further for free.
Not that I think that 5 versions away is not too many, but I understand why the logic, but let's remember that nowadays, the majority of the good eroge games goes directly to Steam, and we don't even feel the smell of them, and yeah, I'd rather not buy a Steam Eroge game for a AA pricetag without at least a free version on Itch.io...