Last night some of you signed up for our new Gold Membership service. Unfortunately there was a bug in my implementation of Steam's subscription API, and as a result some people got charged a second time this morning.
In my defense, this was mainly due to Steams terrible API documentation. Subscriptions especially are not properly explained, have no concrete examples, and you often simply have to "guess" the correct values to many of it's function calls. Everything worked fine when testing it in Sandbox mode.
I am happy to report that the issue that caused this problem is now fixed and I have now managed to refund all of the extra orders. Unfortunately the refunded money only seems to go back to your Steam Wallet, rather than to your own funding source. There is apparently no way for me to make a full refund like this happen using the limited tools Steam makes available to developers.
I will be writing to Steam shortly to try and get them to fully refund your money where possible. However Steam are notorious for not always responding to developers so I strongly recommend that those of you affected also send in your own tickets to Steam Support via the following link and choose "Payments" from the first list of options:
https://help.steampowered.com/en/
If there is any problem, please kindly link them to this announcement so that they have proof that these purchases were indeed a mistake:
https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/744900/view/2368278345859249646
To those of you affected, please accept my sincere apologies. Not a great way to start a new product launch :(
P.S Some of you have been asking me about why I decided to add Gold Memberships to DF2. Whilst the game is fairly successful and makes a small profit, it really pales in comparison to DF1. For DF2 to earn anything close to that, I'd really need to be churning out new wearable items every single week. But they take a lot of work to add, both in terms of artwork but also in terms of code and testing. So doing that then wouldn't leave me with any time to improve the gameplay itself, which still needs a lot of work IMO. I feel like the Gold Membership is a good middle ground between keeping the paid elements to a minimum, but while also allowing me to actually take the game forward in a meaningful way.
To those who feel like I've broken my previous "Ethical Free to Play" promise, I do understand why you're upset and I agree it's not an ideal situation. But I do also think that this is the only reasonable way for me to keep giving this game so much of my attention going forward. I have 4 kids, with a 5th of the way so it really isn't realistic for me to keep working on things if they aren't bringing in a solid income.