I received no email in or around January 2020.
Going back through my records, it looks like I made a mistake on the dates when I initially wrote about this a few posts up; it was October 2020, not January 2020, when I made the post on Patreon, which you can see here
You must be registered to see the links
and that I've made public temporarily.
Soon thereafter, I started sending out emails alerting people who may not be following the Patreon anymore, but had pledged in the past.
I'd need to know what your Patreon name was to check on this, but it's unfortunately often that stuff goes into people's spam boxes or just doesn't get delivered period; you can see a lot of examples in the picture below.
Practically every time I send out stuff like this, a good hundred or so people say they didn't get an email from me, and then I check and we've sent them like four emails over the last few years about rewards, alerts, etc. and so on.
I do try to send out Patreon messages about the same, but unfortunately, those don't get delivered either if the person's email inbox isn't working and they don't sign into Patreon anymore.
Additionally, I had to send out emails in waves; I actually had an entire google account of mine banned, literally deleted completely because I was sending out too many emails in a short period of time.
You can see just a few of the emails from the second email account I had to make to finish off sending the alert emails;
Here's what you said in February 2020 (so after January 2020)
So investigating into it more
(sorry, been pretty much on full time game crunch and haven't thought about this kind of stuff for a while now), the difference here is that prior to October 2020, when I talked to Steam's help desk about it, I was under the impression that while we planned to sell the game for $20 on all store fronts, we could give away
keys on other storefronts for under $20; i.e. the $10 we originally promised.
However, when Steam notified me that if we give away keys on itch.io, gamejolt, mangagamer, JAST, anywhere at all under that $20 retail sales price, on a campaign that was without end as shown in the previous post, we
had to make the
retail price on Steam whatever we were giving it away for on other sites, which would have been $10.
In other words, Steam's price had to be the
lowest or equal price to all other storefronts
and equal to whatever price we were giving the keys away from, if we wanted to abide by their ToS and still sell on Steam.
So, when I found that out, that's when we changed things.
And here's what it says in an email I received in September 2020
This email saying this is explained by the one above.
Steam's price parity is only for Steam keys, as you say in your post above. So what's the deal? When I first pledged you wouldn't have even had the option to sell the game on Steam.
Yes, when you first pledged, we wouldn't had had that option, which is why we were able to make that claim for the $10 everywhere.
However, once Steam allowed adult games, we got our game on there around May 2020, and then we found out about this rule a few months after.
Not selling the game on Steam would probably reduce our income by about 95% for the game, which, while we're not solely about money
(per my posts about piracy on this thread), I would like to not be in debt
$40,000+ so that we can afford to begin work on future games immediately, and Steam sales would hopefully make that possible.
But, as this choice to sell on Steam (and the change in needing $20 instead of $10) is absolutely on us, that's why we offered to refund anyone, in full, no questions asked. That's still available too, all the way up to launch and through it. (You can even see some of the refunds in that email above where I say things like "Just sent!"; that's referring to the refund being sent.)
So if you or anyone else backed us and you do want a refund, feel free to contact me here, on Patreon, or twitter DMs, or anywhere else really.
