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The developers behind the sequel to legendary videogame Elite have, to the anger and dismay of fans, announced they've dropped the promised offline singleplayer mode. The game is due to be released in under a month. With the title having raised about $1.5 million from Kickstarter, and millions more in subsequent campaigns that advertised the feature, many of those following the project are livid. A complaints thread on the official Elite forums has swelled to over 450 pages in merely three days, with backers demanding refunds. It is down to the discretion of Frontier, the game's developer, whether to process refund requests of original backers.
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Anger as Elite:Dangerous Drops Offline Singleplayer
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The truth about a man lies first and foremost in what he hides.
-- Andre Malraux
(Score: 5, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday November 18 2014, @07:06PM
More evidence that Kickstarter is for chumps.
And this is speaking as one of those chumps. Occasionally I get what I wanted eventually, but it has resulted in more frustration than it is worth.
I intentionally sat out this one as I had sworn off all software based Kickstarters long ago. My guess is that with how big of a disaster X:Rebirth is (not a kickstarter, but people were sure pissed that they did not get what they paid for) Elite:Dangerous made some serious bank in getting Kickstarter money.
This goes the same for pre-ordering games. Seriously, don't reward bad behavior by enabling these assholes to get away with it. And this goes double for so-called AAA developers.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 5, Insightful) by novak on Tuesday November 18 2014, @07:25PM
Basically. Most people who are both good enough to be in the business and want to be in the business, already are. If you're going to invest in a kickstarter it should be more along the lines of wanting to see what some very talented people can do, not preordering a product which is still not designed.
I think kickstarter has its uses, but unless its almost more of a group buy for a production run of something already completely prototyped, it's basically a crapshoot. Treat it as such, or you're likely to be as disappointed as these fans.
novak
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday November 18 2014, @08:00PM
Even in your already prototyped case things can go horribly wrong. A kickstarter I put a bunch of money into has become a disaster because when they got the first rewards sent out they discovered the product has manufacturing defects from their supplier in China.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday November 18 2014, @09:07PM
Do ho ho, prototyping with Chinese anything has been a rookie mistake for at least the past ten years. Now the jackass who wanted to pocket the saved pennies is now going to be shit out of luck and never trusted again because there are no deliverables.
Care to be more specific about what exactly went wrong?
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Tuesday November 18 2014, @10:10PM
I'm assuming an overworked sweatshop employee forgot to check the solder arms for that batch or something along those lines.
That ought to teach them to not use plants in their own countr- heh. Heheh. Bwahahahahah.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I couldn't type that with a straight face. Plants in their own countries. Heh. Maybe 60 years ago.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 3, Interesting) by novak on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:49AM
Yep. There are very few places that do manufacturing left in the USA (which is where I'm from, other relatively developed nations have not fared a lot better). I guess somehow slave labor is fine with everyone as long as it is done elsewhere. At my company, we do as much manufacturing as possible in house. That isn't everything, but we do PCB assembly including SMD components. Granted, we don't have that much volume, at least yet, but we're paying people who can do a good job to do so.
As much as possible, we source the components from the US (PCBs) or other nations with better labor laws (Japan). That isn't just for touchy-feelies; buying high quality stuff generally results in a better product. If you take apart a failed computer monitor, for instance, maybe 80% or 90% of the time it is blown caps on the power supply. And almost always, they are capxcon or a similar trashy brand, which are about the most worthless capacitors in existence. Saves a cent or three compared to buying quality Japanese caps such as Nichicon. I guess they get more monitor sales if your screen breaks ever few years.
novak
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:57AM
Wow, I know hatred of China is big in the US, but it's still shocking to see it for the rest of us...
Yeah, some parts of China suck. Some parts of the US suck too. That doesn't mean that you can't get high end, well paid manufacturing done there. I've stuff made in China before, and it wasn't done in a sweatshop or bad conditions. The factory was clean, the workers well paid. I went there because no local companies were flexible enough to do what I wanted at a reasonable price. The quality of the finished products was extremely high, and actually had a lower failure rate than the UK board house that made the first batch of prototype PCBs.
You get what you pay for, anywhere.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:38PM
Google "Potemkin village" and get back to us.
UK board house
UK is small. In the US you just contract "down south" and it ends up costing about the same overall by the time you're done with tax rebates and lower transport costs and faster deliveries and generally better quality. In the UK its too small so there isn't a "somewhere else" and you gotta go China, so I sympathize.
On the other hand you got your southern/Mediterranean countries in euroland which are in economic collapse, so they'll work cheap until the revolution or breakup of euroland or nationalization of industry, so you're in a geopolitical risk scenario.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:17PM
You can't just take an awful reputation that China willingly made for itself and go "welp, 'murikans hating them foreigners". As sympathetic as I am to the people there, the government is shit at a level that our own in the US is only just beginning to approach and the sweatshop transistor stereotype is a well earned and willingly reinforced one. You can probably get high end manufacturing there yes, just like anywhere else. But you can also probably get free healthcare in the US somewhere. These things are a minority. I'd love to put the sweatshop transistor crap behind us as much as the next guy. But the fact is that the chinese government doesn't really care and are letting the abuse continue.
This is all kind of besides the point anyway because what grandparent said was hardly hatred. It's a genuine advantage his company has and statistically parts manufactured in the US and Japan are going to be on average higher quality. If someone is still able to maintain profit and do that I whole-heartedly encourage them to advertise the fact. I only wish he'd have given the company name so I can put it in my mental whitelist when deciding which stuff to buy.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @08:56PM
> Seriously, don't reward bad behavior by enabling these assholes to get away with it.
That's why I always vote 3rd party.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Tuesday November 18 2014, @10:03PM
May be it's not, at least not entirely, but yours is a fair description of backers of this particular campaign. Wow... These people pre-paid for a non-free game. Just how bad are they with their wallets?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @10:16PM
There is only one reason to go to kickstarter: pay for a game that you wouldn't get otherwise and hope to get it. It's a risk, but often the only option for games that aren't trivial to make and no publisher would touch them.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:20AM
Actually, Kickstarter happens to have a few categories outside of "games" and "gadgets".
I backed the OotS reprint kickstarter. That one came through, even though the kickstarter kind of exploded and got to 1 million instead of a few thousand.
There will be plenty of cases (like reprinting books that are currently out of print) where getting to the final stage is not as wrought with thorns as developing a game based on a proof-of-concept version.
On a side note, as Kickstarter points out themselves: Kickstarter is not a store. Treat it as such at your own peril.