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Anger as Elite:Dangerous Drops Offline Singleplayer

posted by n1 on Tuesday November 18 2014, @06:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the danger-of-broken-promises dept.

Gordon Shure writes:

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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  • (Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday November 18 2014, @08:41PM

    by nitehawk214 (1304) on Tuesday November 18 2014, @08:41PM (#117388)

    I think the problem is that "finished" is subjective when it comes to software. For some people it is "if it does not do all the stated goals at the inception of the project, it is a failure", for others if they get anything at all it is a success. For most people it is a specific subset of features that must be implemented.

    For you I guess it is a quite reasonable, "Did I get X dollars of entertainment value?"

    But I don't think there is a right way and a wrong way to think about it, just different ways. Setting expectations and detailed feature lists at the beginning of a project is a good way to piss off a lot of people when you don't meet them. If a Kickstarter was up front and claimed "do not expect to get anything at all from this", I doubt they would get any backers at all.

    I would like to say, "Don't promise anything you are really really sure you can deliver." But after a lot of years of experience, I don't think game developers are actually capable of this. At least they are telling people about it. We will see if anyone actually gets their money back.

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