Consult your rewards on your dashboard, changes to Patreon/Tipeee rewards, and Kickstarter coming soon!

July 30, 2021

(Illustration: screenshot of the rewards section. Your actual rewards can be different, log in to vgc.io to consult your rewards )

Hello everyone!

I know, it's been a long time since the previous news, and I am long overdue for giving an update on the project. The past few months, I had been a little bit swamped by a sea of bureaucracy, but things are starting to settle and should move faster now.

VGC Software is now an actual company

First of all, I am pleased to announce that VGC Software is now registered as anactual business entity in France! For the few of you who might care, I was previously operating as a sole-proprietorship, which is a very lightweight status allowing people to do business but without actually being a separate legal entity. VGC Software is now registered as a "Société par Actions Simplifiée" (SAS), which is a type of business somewhat between an LLC and a Corporation, if we were to compare to businesses in the United States and other countries.

Upgraded rewards for long-time Patreon/Tipeee sponsors

Good news for long-time monthly sponsors on Patreon or Tipeee: I have re-evaluated your rewards, so you may now have more rewards than you had before! You can check your new rewards on your dashboard on vgc.io.

The idea is that it was little bit unfair that someone who contributed $5/month for 20 months got less rewards than someone who contributed $10/month for 10 months. So for each of you, I computed your total contribution, and made sure that you got at least the same rewards as if you contributed as a single Paypal payment. Of course, I didn't downgrade anyone.

Example:

Let's suppose Bob was a Gold Sponsor ($5/month) on Patreon for 20 months. I first converted dollars to euros: since the Gold Sponsor tier on Tipeee was 5€/month, I considered that Bob had given a total of 5€ x 20 = 100€. Since 100€ is more than 80€, which was the one-time cost of being a Platinum Sponsor on Paypal, I upgraded Bob to Platinum, and therefore he can now see on his dashboard that he has a 5-year upgrade reward, instead of only a 3-year upgrade.

Note that I removed the "your licenses" section on the dashboard. The reason is that I will most likely change (again!) how license keys are generated anyway. So it made more sense to replace this section with the "your rewards" section, which simply indicates whether you will be offered a license key once VGC Illustration 1.0 or VGC Animation 1.0 is actually released.

Patreon is now only for alpha/beta and exclusive news

The fact is, monthly payments don't really make sense for fixed rewards. So I decided that from now on, new Patreon sponsors will unlock access to alpha/beta versions and exclusive news, but will not get license keys anymore (of course, if you were already a Patreon or Tipeee sponsor, you keep your license keys). In order to get license keys, there will be Kickstarter campaigns, or the possibility to pre-pay them on the website as a one-time purchase.

The Tipeee page is now closed

If you were a Tipeee sponsor, you already got the notification yesterday. But for the others, just know that I have closed the Tipeee page. Why? Because having both a Patreon page and a Tipeee page was very redundant. In fact, the only reason I had both is that Tipeee was more advantageous than Patreon for European sponsors: Patreon automatically applied VAT, despite the fact that as a sole-proprietor, I wasn't subject to VAT. But now that VGC Software is an actual company, I am now subject to VAT, and so Tipeee doesn't provide any advantages anymore over Patreon.

Kickstarter coming soon!

I am currently preparing a 30-day Kickstarter campaign for VGC Illustration! The campaign should start sometime in the second half of August 2021, with the goal of raising 10,000 €. The success of the campaign will be quite important for the project: the idea is to prove to several local organizations that there are many people interested in the project, which will make it easier to get business loans, which will make it possible to hire an extra developer and accelerate the progress of the project.

I will keep giving more info on the campaign in upcoming news, so stay tuned! In the meantime, if you're interested in contributing artistic content which I can share during the campaign, feel free to send me your illustrations and designs created with VPaint, either on my email at boris@vgc.io, or on the Discord: https://discord.gg/ywY4Pcv .

Thanks everyone!

Thanks again everyone for your patience. I am aware that this project isn't the fastest in the world, but I'm fully committed to make it work! I hope you are all enjoying the summer (or winter if you leave on the southern hemisphere), and I can't wait for the Kickstarter to start.

Cheers!