> have all those ppl been playing free DF for 25 years and just waiting for an opportunity to pay $30?

> Yes

x 50 pages

In contrast to https://xkcd.com/2347/, the gamer community is just that more supportive of its creators than developers are. Why is that?

Depends a lot on the specific community. Different games get different kinds of people, and different developers cultivate different community norms. It can also be substantially more awful than normie software development. Devs can end up having adversarial relationship with the players of their games. It can be very bad. But normally it's ok...

The publisher is deleting comments bringing up their 80% cut.

Source?

The source for the cut (and how long it will be in effect for) is on their site. I can't source that they're removing it, because the comments are removed. If you lurk the Steam forum every day, you might see it.

There are reviews mentioning that they're removing modding info to try to force people to join their Discord server. Maybe it's brought up in a negative review.