Star Citizen Refunds Pledge

[42kq]

On 7/16/2016 at 5:05 AM, sTizzl said:

but this backer brings up an interesting point that the game is no longer what he originally purchased.

This is exactly why I hate 'patch' culture in videogames. Tribes Ascend and TF2 are great examples. If you purchase an item and sometime later the devs change it, are you entitled to a refund? Since it's changed from it's original state. Is it considered a bait and switch? Or something else? Do the players who purchased said item before the change, have their items grandfathered in and thus are exempt from future changes? 

 

Back in 2010 I purchased the Saharan Spy set in TF2 during the opening days of the mannconomy update. A few years later they removed the attributes that made me originally purchase the set. It pissed me off, and it further destroyed my faith and confidence in microtransactions. Are evolve founders owed a refund? Now that the game is F2P? Should battlefield play for free issue refunds to all those who opened their wallets?

 

In the professional space any unauthorized/undesired software changes are extremely frowned upon and may result in lawsuits. My company sued and settled with a company that used to provide us with certain key software for day to day operations. After most of our computers automatically updated to a new version overnight, even though updates were turned off. 

[ThinkWithPortals]

God, I'd forgotten Star Citizen even existed... is it still not out?

This might be another Arkham Knight... by the time the game is actually ready and finished and bug-free, everyone will have forgotten about it and no-one will care.

[Sauron]

On 16/7/2016 at 11:05 AM, sTizzl said:

now take it a step further, could i return my 2nd gen ipad for a full refund because the iOS experience is no longer what i originally purchased now that after multiple IOS updates its running slower and slower on the bulkier platform? or how about an iphone 4 that doesnt even get updates anymore.

At the same time isn't it reasonable to expect your device to not be rendered useless by software updates? Maybe going as far as a refund is excessive but it is a problem.

 

It's also not the same as what is going on here - a kickstarter backer must realize he might be throwing his money away. That's part of the deal. The developers are under no legal obligation to do anything with it and certainly do not need to follow every single backer's vision for the product.

[ACatWithThumbs]

How is it different than what they pitched back in the day?
They wanted to make a PC exclusive space simulator game with AAA quality story and visuals and a massive persistent universe and that's exactly what they are developing.
Some of the fine details changed, but those were always posted as work in progress which is totally normal for a game in alpha state.

It may took longer than originally expected, but that's how game development works especially if you have to built up AAA studios from the ground up which was going on up until 2013.

[dalekphalm]

12 hours ago, ThinkWithPortals said:

God, I'd forgotten Star Citizen even existed... is it still not out?

This might be another Arkham Knight... by the time the game is actually ready and finished and bug-free, everyone will have forgotten about it and no-one will care.

Big difference, in my mind.

 

Arkham Knight was officially released, and in a buggy, completely broken state. It was also in development for years before hand, we simply didn't hear about it, because that's normal AAA development cycle. 3-6 years for a AAA game, with little to no inside looks until a year or less before release.

 

With Star Citizen, it was completely the opposite. It's still a AAA game (in scale and features, and in dev talent), it will still take 3-6 years to make, but they've let you inside from day 0.

 

That's the problem with Star Citizen. We've got an inside peak, but people have (and have always had) unreal expectations about how long a game like that takes to finish.

 

Star Citizen is pretty much still on track with their estimates, ever since the Kickstarter Campaign finished. Any estimates BEFORE the kickstarter campaign finished are irrelevant, because those estimates were based on THE MINIMUM FUNDING LEVEL, which, as we all know, was blown away by a nuclear bomb of backers.

 

The original promised game, with the minimum funding level (eg: no stretch goals reached), would have been a very different, and much smaller game. But it hit basically every stretch goal there was, and blew past them all.

 

The game will come out - of that, I have no doubt. We see constant progress every month. But progress is slow, and has fits and bursts. Don't expect massive progress every day or every week, because that's not how game development works.

[Humbug]

18 hours ago, ThinkWithPortals said:

God, I'd forgotten Star Citizen even existed... is it still not out?

This might be another Arkham Knight... by the time the game is actually ready and finished and bug-free, everyone will have forgotten about it and no-one will care.

hmm that's not an accurate comparison.

regardless of whether star citizen succeeds in everything it's attempting the challenges faced are very different. What we have heard re Arkham Knight suggests that the PC version had very limited staff working on it with an unreasonable deadline.

[iamdarkyoshi]

I want a refund for minecraft. They absolutely ruined it.

[Humbug]

7 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

 

The game will come out - of that, I have no doubt. We see constant progress every month. But progress is slow, and has fits and bursts. Don't expect massive progress every day or every week, because that's not how game development works.

Some of their technical achievements are quite remarkable. Being able to walk around in first person on a sprawling space station, walk over to a ship get into the cockpit, take off and fly thousands of miles get into dogfights along the way, go EVA and spacewalk along the way, then land on a procedurally generated planet and walk around again with key areas as detailed any modern AAA first person shooter. All in one instance! they seem to have cracked the major technical challenges. So I feel confident that they can build gameplay content out from this point and then polish it. Technically speaking I don't really see where the whole project could possibly fail on the longterm now that they have come so far, unless they run out of money trying to support their massive staff.

 

I just hope it will be a great journey and fun to play, in addition to being a technical achievement.

 

[kuddlesworth9419]

On 19/07/2016 at 7:05 AM, Humbug said:

they can probably learn some things from elite dangerous

 

but the last thing star citizen devs want is to end up like elite where players are complaining about a large universe with nothing to do.

They are different games but still Elite is actually done and I don;t think Star Citizen is anywhere near being finished. 

[jasonvp]

58 minutes ago, kuddlesworth9419 said:

They are different games but still Elite is actually done and I don;t think Star Citizen is anywhere near being finished. 

A hot dog takes much less time to prepare than a full 5-course meal. :-)

[kuddlesworth9419]

1 hour ago, jasonvp said:

A hot dog takes much less time to prepare than a full 5-course meal. :-)

I wouldn't say Elite Dangerous was a hot dog. It is a very complex game. It's not that other one thought the one where people spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on it to lose it all. Sure it's not as graphically intense as Star Citizen but graphics are just graphics what always should come first is gameplay and Elite Dangerous has some very solid gameplay although it is repetitive. But then what game isn't after 1000 hours.