Hello everyone,we are overwhelmed! Literally. We are getting loads of emails every day with people requesting the access to the alpha version of the game. We answered every single email (or at least we believe so - if you haven't received a reply within 24 hours, please notify us again). It just makes us really happy to see how many people enjoy the game we are working on. Despite that we decided to stop providing free alpha per request. Alpha will still be provided to users who contributed to the Indiegogo campaign. This was a hard decision to make. Please let me explain.
Our original intention was to provide a public demo only. The alpha was supposed to be released in March 2013 in case our Indiegogo campaign would have been successfully funded. However things have developed differently.
In our blog post from the 31st Dec 2012 we stated that the alpha is available to people who 'liked the demo and send us the email requesting the access'. That was at the time when we had like 5 people playing the game and we started sending the demo to our friends and relatives to gather the feedback. In the beginning of our campaign we got like an email a day from the people saying that they are super excited about our project, already contributed and then went through all of our blog and find this note about giving away alpha. So we gave them the alpha because we were just so happy that someone actually went and read through all of our previous blog posts (well to be fair there were like 7 of them at the time).
Our campaign looked futile in the first week. Actually we were really close to giving up. We were aware of the many mistakes we did in setting up the campaign and we were constantly failing to generate the interest in our project. Therefore we decided to try out offering alpha immediately to the people who backed our project. We believe this step significantly improved our chance of success. Within a week there gathered an amazing small community of backers playing the alpha, discussing the game on our forums, posting their factory creations and generally enjoying themselves.
Now the situation is different. We are receiving dozens of emails a day from people asking for the alpha because they read somewhere on a forum that we will provide them with free alpha when they ask for it. And we have suspicions this could get even more extreme. We are trying to be truly open and we don't actually mind giving the alpha away to people who really want to play it. But:
So this is our motivation. We hope you will find it fair. We are happy for any feedback.
