So on the main site, it shows $338,778 as the current funding progress. However, to see how the cash flow broke down between the different ranks, I decided to add up all of the different groups and their costs and noticed very quickly that it was more than $350,000. The total I got was actually $450,180.
Just curious about why these two numbers don’t match. Carry on 
Has to do mostly with how the site syncs with paypal and steam purchases.
Do you know the reasoning behind doing it that way vs. just adding up the numbers like I did?
The devs say the progress is more accurate at the end of every month (when everything is added up), but is still weird and unaccurate at times.
Yeah, still just curious about the thought process behind doing it this way when, in my mind, there are far easier ways of going about doing this hahaha. I work as a software tester, so I’m just curious about the reasoning as a matter of self-education.
Figured I could also just make a post so the information is public for anyone else who is curious and to have as reference in case the question is brought up by someone else.
I don’t want to take away their time from working on projects that might hasten the release of the game, so I don’t take it upon myself to tag or message them (except for one instance where i thought of something that could be quite useful). And now a private message would be worthless since you just tagged both of them and adding a private message to your tag would only take away more of their time
The difference is accounted for by:
TL;DR
There are a few factors at play here:
The game is sold via oortonline.com in USD $, GBP £ and EUR €. The total is reported in $. So there is obviously some discrepancy in the conversion. Price converse between the currencies is almost bang on - but isn’t perfect.
The game is also sold via steam.oortonline.com in many more currencies. (There are websites that will report the price around the world. It can vary quite a bit.) When you set prices on Steam you can set regional prices manually, or as Valve recommends, use their default pricing tool. They claim that this is balanced to correctly price games around the world. We’re using this tool. The tool generally makes the game cheaper outside of NA + EU.
When the game is purchased in the EU we’re required to pay VAT.
When we get the sales data from Steam, we add the # of sales for Oort Online to the Explorer total, and the # of sales of the Collector’s Edition to the Adventurer total. However we add the income from Steam to the total manually. This is because we never see the VAT charges and Steam takes a share of the income.
I could have easily made sure that the total on oortonline.com added up (# of sales x prices) but this wouldn’t reflect the money we’d actually received. I decided it was better to report the # of sales accurately and simultaneously the income accurately (even if there was a strange gap in the middle.)
Technically, the total on oortonline.com includes VAT from EU sales via oortonline.com - but this was the case on day0. So when I started adding the Steam data, I decided to try and report the Steam sales+income accurately but without changing the way we’d reported sales via oortonline.com in the past.
Makes sense, thanks for taking the time to lay it out!