(Future Fragments) Bad news about the $10 tier + how to get a refund if you want one

I've got some bad news about the game (we're not censoring anything and there's no delays); if you've backed the game for $10 though expecting a copy of the full game, read this.

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I really wish I didn't have to be the bearer of bad news, but I've got some fairly bad news for some people who've been pledging to the Patreon.

As a lot of you know, we've had it advertised since practically day one that if you pledged $10, you'd get the game at 50% off at launch effectively (since the launch price will be $20).

However, Steam, per its rules, informed us about a year ago that SPECIFICALLY for Steam, we wouldn't be able to honor that as Steam doesn't allow for us to give away the keys at a discount from the launch price since the game itself hasn't launched on Steam officially.

So, if you only pledged $10, you'd be able to get the game for free on other places I'd be selling it like Nutaku, FAKKU, etc.

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And that's where we were at until this latest set of messages back and forth with Steam that I had over the last few weeks.
After talking things out with them, I've now found out something new;

Steam also requires that if you do a "sale" on one site, then you have to do the sale on Steam, too.

This means that if we wanted to honor that $10 on other sites, we'd have to honor that $10 on Steam too, which would be a disaster, because Steam will likely be around 95%+ of our sales.

Setting it for $10 at launch would result in a massive drop in sales post-launch period as people would just go "wait, if it's for $10 and now it's back to $20, why would I pay for it? I'll just wait until it hits $10 again." which it never would, as that was specifically a price for people who'd pledged as such, so...

And before you suggest it, we can't just set it to $10 for like 5 minutes, hand out keys, set it back to $20; Steam forces you to keep a sale price for a good period of time, and if we just launch at $10, that will be considered the "base price" which also fucks a lot of things up.

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While we're not in this solely for the money, we are collectively $40,000+ in debt due to the costs of voicework/music/SFX and the patreon money just allowing us to break even monthly; doing a sale like this would permanently hurt sales for the final game, which would pretty much tank what we could do with Faye's game as a result.

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So, what does this all mean?

- If you've already pledged $20 or more cumulatively on Patreon, you're unaffected by this.

- If you wanted the game and you specifically pledged $10 only and left, unfortunately, you'd have to pledge another $10 before we'd be able to give you a key for Steam.

That's about it. I really hate to do this.

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HOWEVER, if you DO want refunds, please let me know through Twitter, Patreon, Discord, or some other form of contact; Patreon allows us to refund the last 3 months.

And if your pledges are farther back than that, I can directly refund you through PayPal or Google Play cards or Amazon Gift Cards or whatever other means you'd like.

We really, really do want to make this right by all of you, so again, please let me know if there's anything I can do to fix this if you do want a refund as you were expecting the game at $10 specifically.

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Steam has been fairly complex to work things through, but this is entirely on me for not having researched it enough and misunderstanding them the first time around when we asked them about this way back when, so all I can do is just say that it's a mistake/misunderstanding that won't happen again.

I feel awful, honestly. If I could just buy everyone a copy of the game that pledged $10 to offset things I would, but Steam won't let me do that either.

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As a final note, if you ARE under $20 cumulatively as of November 1st, I'll be sending you an email notifying you of the situation, so for anyone wondering if you are under that, check your emails around the 15th or so (it's going to be a lot of emails to send out and I can only send out so many a day per gmail limits).

As usual, if you want to get ahold of me quickly to ask questions about this, please ask on the Discord or PM me there; https://discord.gg/puXrfSm