Hello everyone !
We have an important update about two things : Friend Pass & the game's price.
TLDR : The Friend Pass is canceled, the price has been adjusted to 5.99$ (4.99€) and ~4.8$ (4€) on the first week.
Friend Pass
There's no good way to approach this but unfortunately, we have to cancel the Friend Pass due to some technical issues. Don't worry tho, we'll adjust the price accordingly.
We thought that the Friend Pass was a great way to increase the game's accessibility. You just have to buy the game and ask your friend to download the Friend Pass version to start playing. We prepared the Friend Pass for a long time but we didn't want to disable the demo (that was supposed to be replaced by the Friend Pass) until the release.
For those who don't want the technical explanations, you can skip to the next chapter.
Testing on the Friend Pass version was yesterday and as you understand it, it didn't go as planned. The Friend Pass version was complete and after pushing the build to the steam servers to test it, we ran into some lobby issues (the Friend Pass version couldn't join). After some research and debugging, we got word from the steam team that the steam multiplayer API wasn't able to connect a player from the demo to the main game.
As a result of this, we had to choose between reworking the game's multiplayer system to be independent of the steam API and leaving the Friend Pass behind. Reworking the multiplayer system a week before release wasn't an option (not to mention the cost of servers and issues related to ping) so we made the decision to cancel the Friend Pass.
Some of you might know this but before we switched to the steam networking API, we had our own system and a relay server that ran in France. That worked as expected but there was a cost involved in maintaining the server and after the first playtests, we got reports of heavy ping issues that made the game unplayable for people that were far from France. The cost that came with renting multiple servers from around the world was as you guessed it not something we could handle. The steam multiplayer API solved most of our problems (no cost, no ping issues) but it came with the price that we were dependent on the steam platform.
Today is the second cost that came with this decision : the Friend Pass is not possible technically in our case.
Price update
To compensate for the lack of Friend Pass, we decided to reduce the price of the game to 5.99$ (4.99€). On the first week, the game will have a discount of -20% which will bring the game to ~4.8$ (4€).
We always wanted to make the game accessible to most people. The Friend Pass played a big role in this. Unfortunately with its removal, we had to make sure you don't feel wronged in any way. With this new pricing, we hope the game will still appeal to most of you.
Thank you for reading, have a nice day !
-- GoatApe Team