Since clear communication is very important to me, your post had me go back and check that I wasn’t fooling myself into thinking we’d said something we didn’t. We’re both sort-of right, but that means we could definitely have done a better job of communicating it.
In the Dec 21, 2021 Kickstarter update, I said:
In the Kickstarter You pledged your support a long time ago, and we will ship your rewards with every production run until every pledge is honored. At this time, we can’t commit to shipping rewards and perks before orders. But as production increases we will include more as fast as we can.
This implies our position on orders vs. rewards, but doesn’t explicitly state it. We relied on Kickstarter users understanding what that difference means, and so we didn’t make that explicitly clear in that post.
In our Jan 26, 2022 blog post, in response to the questions that arose from that update, we tried to clarify:
Though we’d love to ship crowdfunding perks first, we have to ship both new orders and crowdfunded perks simultaneously to make production work financially.
Again, we draw a distinction, but don’t explicitly define what that is, again relying on Kickstarter users understanding what “reward” means on that platform. I had extensive discussions with the team about the policy before we adopted it, so we all had a very clear idea of “what” and “why” but it seems we could have done better job making that clear to our backers.
But yeah, it didn’t work out, and we’re not able to ship any more rewards or perks to crowdfunding platform supporters. I don’t think anything I say will make anyone happy about that.
