They say that when it rains it pours and June suddenly has felt like that to us^^0
So good news first as to not alarm you! Kickstarter rewards have all been packed and we’ve shipped a bunch already so some of you should start receiving your packages soon, and the rest will follow soon after.
So what happened? Well, during the 14 weeks where people were allowed to update their addresses, the rules for postage changed YET AGAIN, so our plan to take a trip to Germany to ship everything was foiled x,D Cue us spending weeks emailing curriers and checking prices and options and we’re happy to say we found something that’s working, but boy that sure was stressful, but that’s not even the biggest hurdle we hit this month.
Steam removed Arcadia Fallen II from their store!
Yesterday, Steam Support told us they would remove the Steam Cloud category from Arcadia Fallen II because some players on Linux had reported an issue that we haven't been able to recreate or solve.
While doing so, they somehow managed to remove the "visible" tag from our store page as well, which means the store page is now gone, though you can still see the game's community hub, its DLC, and many other sub pages. But the page itself and the ability to buy the game has disappeared.
We've done everything we could to reach Steam Support, but they have this tendency to put you back in the queue when they think they are done with an issue, and we have no way of escalating the severity of our report ticket, so given their usual track record this might take days to be fixed.
What hurts us more is that this is doing the Summer Sale, one of the most important times of the year for an indie game. We also have no idea how this will affect future sales, as the Steam algorithm will now register a gap in sales and who knows how that's gonna affect things.
In short, we're really not having a great time, we're usually trying to keep our posting lighthearted here, but this is a very scary situation for our team as the sales for Arcadia Fallen II is what is supposed to fund the next game we are working on and Steam is our best selling platform.
We are very fortunate to be able to do this work for a living, and there are many indie games who do not make it, but if we were to fail as a company we would have loved for it to be due to us not making a profitable game, not because a billion dollar company cannot be arsed to pay for their support staff. We're not even mad at the worker who made this error. They are probably severely underpaid and overworked. We're mad that Valve put the staff in a situation where A this kind of mistake could even happen, and B they did not have enough staff on hand to respond quickly when it did.
To sum it up we're sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused anyone who wanted to buy the game, we've already had a few people reach out, and we'll keep you updated on how things progress. For now the game is still up on GOG and Consoles.
This might make shipping parcels a little slower as we are all very affected by the situation (I don't think any of us got any sleep last night^^0) so please bear with us as we navigate this crazy situation.