Hi all,


Yesterday I have spend ca. 5 hrs implementing new spell - Chain Lightning, which will help to make Greenskins more interesting (it's a offensive spell for Warlock). To support reduction in attack and damage at every lightning hop, a large portion of code had to be refactored. Nevertheless, I did it :-)

However, in the morning I saw sales chart again and that make me fell very sad...

You see - over the last couple of weeks, most of players got their AoF Steam key in a way that made 3rd party profit, making money on me and my team back. I will give you bare facts:

- Over last couple of weeks, about 70-80% of Age of Fear games were purchased via G2A for 1-2 USD. We can't really compete with that price unless we do cheap stuff like puzzles.

- When you purchase AoF key on G2A, we get absolutely zero money from that transaction. Moreover, we are losing sales here on Steam!

- Those keys come from 2-years old bundles. Please don't try to convince me that few thousands people have just found found AoF in their old bundles.

- G2A is not authorised seller of Steam keys and those sales are illegal (re-selling Steam keys is illegal). Unfortunately, we practically cannot do anything about it aside of suing G2A (which costs money and takes time!).

- Sending take-down notices to G2A is utterly pointless. They either don't reply at all or make us to waste lot of time proving that key is illegal. Even if they take game listing down, few days after new one appears.

- I have tried to undercut current sellers from G2A by providing super-cheap keys there, but G2A-ranking system prioritizes 100k+ sellers (I wonder where they get all those super-cheap keys from...)

- G2A is very parasitic company. There are many indie developers affected. More details on that topic there:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4pgszv/g2a_den_of_thieves/
http://tinybuild.com/g2a-sold-450k-worth-of-our-game-keys


Unfortunately, G2A is what is currently killing small indie games. Development of games costs money and how it currently stands here I can barely cover graphics and sound costs.

I have full-time job and I do AoF in my free time as a hobby. However, I have few other interesting projects to work on (e.g. my phd) and gradually will be spending more time on those.

I am so sorry to bring this topic here.


Take care,
Les


P.S. I have asked Steam to invalidate unused keys from previous bundles batches and hopefully they will invalidate them (they might not). Hopefully they do.