Soooo 30 people (seriously 30, f*cking 30?, really?).. didn't pay? It seems most likely the person responsible for customer order tracking screwed up making sure everyone was properly notified and confirmed their orders... considering 3 of the people that just responded today said they didn't get any invoice or email yet, and i doubt esteban, bernie or albtross (i don't know you but lets go with it!) would just sit here and make that up.
I do everything. Me. By myself. All of the order tracking.
I didn't screw anything up. PayPal sends an e-mail to the related e-mail address upon me sending you an invoice. It's super easy to check your e-mail, or your PayPal, and see if there is an invoice.
Esteban, Bernie, and Albatross haven't been invoiced yet. So, of course they haven't seen an e-mail.
I've sent numerous reminder e-mails to people (PayPal even has a button for this), numerous news posts (some of which were liked on Facebook by people who haven't paid...)... so...
But regardless of whose fault it is and why this is batch had such a huge payment fail, wouldn't it make alot more sense for people to prepay for their pre-orders if they are serious about buying something? Then there's no bullshit involved, the company just ships out the product when it is ready to go.
No, this makes absolutely zero sense, because then I am sitting on people's money while the items are being manufactured, and I do not want to be caught in a situation where something comes up and I have handfuls of pissed off people wondering where their game is because we're waiting on jewel cases, or for spools of plastic to be back in stock.
See: Every homebrew release ever that took money before a product existed.
Aetherbyte has gotten to the position it's currently at by us *not* doing terrible ideas like this.
It's clear you're a bit out-of-the-loop on how this works, so I'd appreciate if you properly informed yourself about how this operates before coming in and winging it acting like I've screwed something up. ("I don't know you! but let's go with it!")
Mainly because you seem to think this is some big operation when really it's two dudes in a basement, and a guy in the UK doing pixelart.