Free to play =/= free to make.
If the team makes no money off the game (their full time jobs), they can't pay for hosting fees for the site(s), their internet subscriptions, any programmes they use in building the game, etc.
So: 3 options
1) Hold down regular jobs on top of TiTS's work load - slowing content releases down immensely - which nobody wants, seeing as you've been complainin' about the lack of story updates. This'd push them back eeeeven further.
2) Literaly insert ads everywhere in the game. Yeah, no thanks, I don't want a virus.
3) A completely fucking optional Patreon that can be cancelled at any time.
Remind me why the last option is somehow awful?
Didn't Fen have a normal job before TiTS was a thing? He was still producing updates at a somewhat decent rate. Y'know, until TiTS became a thing and raked in all the money that he prompted abandoned CoC and begrudgingly "finished" it. What about the rest of team? I'm sure they had jobs too before this was ever a thing. Also, it doesn't cost anything to make a flash game. Just time and effort.
1) I mean, there's plenty of people who make indie games and such in their free time as a hobby or side project. It's called managing you time wisely, and having a schedule. Not only that, but it's not like Fen and the gang are doing 100% of the work. There are people outside of their group that write scenes for plenty of things, all it takes is for Savin, Upcast, or whoever to sit down and code it into the game.
2) That's what anti-virus is for...
3) Again, Fen did CoC without a Patreon bringing in 30k a month to keep the site up, and continue to write, code, and update the game :v He even had a donation thing as well, but that was a one time thing. Think of it this way, when you support a Kickstarter, you donate to that project, once. Not monthly, just once, and get the thing or tier of things you donated for. Now, may I remind you that the initial Offbeatr campaign ended with like 200k. Now, are you going to tell me that it takes over
$200,000 of support for what is a flash game to continue getting updates and content that is, if not mostly, written by that very same community?