As some of you may be aware, we have been having some problems with Paypal. These problems involve them cutting off our only income stream and then freezing the $4,300 in the account for 180 weeks before they return it.

The community has been very helpful during this period, both in terms of the community around the our project and the indie scene as a whole. There have been numerous suggestions about how we could circumvent the Paypal ban on pre-orders, but I was never particularly keen on going back to them. Fundamentally we were always going to struggle with their rules, I think – I was much more interested in finding a solution that was better aligned with where we were going as a project. This gave us two main options – Desura, or the new Humble Indie Bundle store widget.

The HIB store widget was effectively exactly what we had before, but with lower transaction fees and the shield of another (better known) organisation between us and Paypal. Desura, for those who are not aware, is effectively an indie version of Steam owned by the people who run IndieDB/ModDB. I think both would have been good partners, but we decided on Desura because it allows us to outsource the pre-order process (saving me time) and will make it easier to actually deliver the final game when it is released – the plan is Desura or Steam keys for each pre-orderer.

We’re currently working on integrating Desura with vBulletin so pre-orderers can get forum badges for buying the game, but pre-orders should be up again relatively soon, so sit tight. We’re announcing this on this site rather than Xenonauts.com because we’re having problems with that – the frontpage is frozen as it was when the site crashed from the Reddit traffic a couple of weeks back, so we’re migrating over here and will be replacing the current Xenonauts.com with something a bit more snazzy.

All pre-orderers will recieve a Desura key sent to their Paypal email addresses when the Desura pre-orders go live, just as a heads-up.