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Elite: Dangerous Dumps Offline Single-Player
Robotron23 writes: The developers behind the sequel to legendary video game Elite have, to the anger and dismay of fans, dropped the offline single-player mode originally promised. The game is due for full release 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, gamers are livid. A complaints thread on the official Elite forums has swelled to 450+ pages in only three days, while refunds are being lodged in the thousands. It is down to the discretion of Frontier, the game's developer, whether to process refund requests of original backers.
Disappointing but not at all surprising.
Their focus on the online multiplayer has been pretty obvious for awhile.
They sell different colored ships and stuff - can't have people running their own multiplayer servers or cheating and give stuff like that away, not if they're trying to run a business.
This Kickstarter stuff isn't very well regulated...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you helped crowd fund my shoe, then I deliver you a hat, I think you'd be a little disappointed. Even if it was an awesome hat.
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
It's definitely for the backers' own good that the experience be the same for all players... so just one month before release we tell them that we didn't bother to implement the single player offline component.
/s
It took a while for me to decode all that marketing speak to figure out that they were canning single player. It was a deliberate design decision they must have made months ago, and just conveniently "forgot" to tell the backers.
Elite Dangerous is a shower.
I'm one of the backers of the Kickstarter. I am absolutely TIRED of being asked for more money for every damn thing they do.
The number of paid Alpha's, premium content, several Beta's (Beta Premium!) is unbelievable and they seem to want to make me wait until the very day of release before I get anything out of my backing unless I pay more money.
Sure, I get a "reserved Commander name" and a couple of bits of digital content but I have seen nothing of the actual game in all that time except for the occasional screenshot. They have probably made more from the Beta's than they have from the Kickstarter, and every damn newsletter is "just another $15 will get you this...".
I've totally lost any interest and regret backing but, unlike some, I'm true to my word so have written off the money I've given them so far. I've truly not expected to see the game because every preview/screenshot/update still without any access by myself but with begging all the way through it just disappoints me further. If they are milking it that early, what the hell is going to happen in-game when they want to form the economies?
I'm honestly fatigued by the requests for money, which they are still putting in every newsletter. It makes me worry that any final game is going to die from budgetary shortages the second it's release because the begging is so intense.
Meanwhile, all I have to show for backing it is a cart with one item "bought" that I can't touch for another month or so and that's all I ever had.
Honestly? I'm sick of it already. And I haven't even got to play it. Given that it was one of the largest and most successful Kickstarter projects there was, I'm a bit disgusted by how much more they seem to want in order to let me see how it plays, even in a tiny demo.
It's gonna be an over-hyped flop, isn't it? Or crash and burn in the first few months when the servers can't be kept running due to lack of budgeting. And to leave it until NOW to tell people about the lack of single-player, while you're still pasting in 4K screenshots and plugs for various books written in the Elite:Dangerous universe (that doesn't exist yet as far as I'm concerned)? I just don't care any more.
The one Kickstarter project that I really regret backing.
Agreed. However, crowdfunding for something and then completely abandoning the idea is only going to prompt ire.
You're still obliged, in law, to deliver what you promised you would. Sure, it's almost impossible to enforce that, but you can't go spending the money on holidays in the Caribbean nor can you use it to develop an entirely different game or product. People have had their projects shut down and been chased through the courts for failing to deliver on Kickstarter. It's not easy, but it's no different to any other payment. If you misrepresent what you're going to receive in return for someone's money, it's fraud whether it's an investment, crowdfunding, or written into a sales contract.
To be honest, E:D is my worst Kickstarter. I've contributed to a handful and they've all been great, whether for physical products, digital content, or whatever. I've got several rare beauties of games (I collect mathematically-interesting board / card games), good video games on Steam (including copies), video graphics hardware, all kinds from it.
E:D is disappointing, however, mostly because of the constant demands for more money and the complete under-delivery of the base product. I backed it out of retropathy, yet I have ZERO idea how it plays as yet. That doesn't bother me. But being told "Just X amount of money more and you could see how it plays!" every week in an email is really grating. I regret backing E:D just because of the lack of real return for the backers as yet, and the constant demands for more cash.
That said, it was such a pittance that I don't really care because I always follow your "rule": Never crowdfund with money you can't afford to lose.
Another disappointed backer from the kickstarter in late 2012.
I have wasted over $500 on this game with the PROMISE that it will be offline.
Now a few days before its official launch, they drop this bombshell, and are not even responding to refund requests.
Absoulutely shattered.
Frontier, hang your heads in shame. I will NEVER purchase anything from you again.
They lied. They claimed offline was part of the project in 2012 and took a lot of money in on the back of that. Now they're going back to the original plan after raking in all that money. They should at least be offering refunds to those they conned, but their refund statement is almost two years out of date and leads nowhere.
This outfit will not make anywhere near month they need to sustain their product. Therefore the online only requirement means this project will disable all copies of the game when they shut up shop in a few months.
You could say that (and in a way it's true), but technically there is no "buyer" since it's NOT a purchase, it's financial backing of a project.
Right, but when grown-ups accept investment in their company/fund/whatever, they normally publish various information about their strategy so investors know what they are backing. If the officers/fund manager/whoever then deviate significantly from that strategy, investors typically have some redress in law and regulatory action may be involved.
It's a simple analogy to look at backing a Kickstarter campaign that states certain things about their project goals in the same way. Whatever the legal position, in practice a deliberate and unnecessary deviation from what backers were explicitly told they were supporting seems likely to end only one of three ways:
1. The project team relent to save their reputation/project and issue refunds to those who feel it's not a project they would have backed under the new conditions.
2. Kickstarter themselves step in to protect their own reputation, somehow forcing the project to issue refunds. This issue could be an existential threat for the crowd-sourcing business model, after all.
3. Kickstarter and/or the project admins argue that a bait and switch is OK under Kickstarter rules and say something weaselly about legal terms and the deal not being what everyone thought it was. If too many backers take a different view and pursue this with their card providers claiming fraud, good luck doing any further business after the resulting chargebacks.
It's not clear to me how significant and widespread the objections to this actually are, but if it's a real problem, I don't really see any way it ends well for either the project or Kickstarter if they don't proactively do something to make things right with backers who thought they were being ripped off.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Beware of gamers developing games. Too often you find them preferring their own game play style, ramping up difficulty, no bones thrown to casual players, and so forth. Then it gets defended as "by real games for real gamers" or something like that.
I get a sneaky suspicion this might fall into that category. They've got a "vision" of what they want, and damn the paying customers who say differently.
I mean isn't this part of the whole reason kickstarter games are popular, because they're supposed to listen to customers which is the opposite of what the big name game publishers do?
Agreed. However if you lose the money that you can afford to lose, you still have the right to complain about it. And that's what people are doing. Telling them to stop complaining is kind of dumb. At the very least there's some moral obligation to warn potential customers to stay away from Frontier and its games.
Kickstarter is best described as a donation.
Even donations come with obligations though. If I donate to a charity to support science education in country A and they use the money instead to purchase needles for drug addicts in country B then you could sue them to get you money back since they are using it for a significantly different purpose even though both might be considered good causes.
Whether the a single player game is sufficiently different from the delivered MMO game is something for the courts to decide if it ever gets that far. However what is very shabby about this whole thing is that the announcement has come only 1 month before the release. Given their description of how essential the online servers are to the game it seems highly likely than they have known about this for a very long time and have only just come clean.
It's also a real shame. Part of the beauty of the previous games was that they made such a detailed, massive open sandbox which you could explore and admire the intelligence that went into crafting the procedural generation. Now you are going to be sharing the galaxy with immature, adolescent school kids and any unusual features you will ascribe to a human moderator putting them there. It's going to have more similarity to Eve Online than Elite.
Single player still seems to exist, but will need to sync your universe with that of the multiplayer universe "from time to time". That's perfectly acceptable
no, that online DRM, like simcity
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
You got all excited about this new funding opportunity. The ability to get funded directly by your customers rather then going through the big scary publishers.
And it could have worked except you crapped all over your customers the instant it became possible. You told them what they wanted to hear until the checks cleared... and then you betrayed them.
Again and again.
All these crowd funding systems need to have some sort of refund clause built into them.
We're very happy to fund you guys... but if you intentionally fuck us over then you deserve to have the money pulled.
Obviously you can't afford that happening. You already spent it. I get that. That is in fact the fucking point. You make your commitments and you damn well follow through. Alternatively, just bail on the whole project and never get funded again. Either way, this sort of behavior needs to be a third rail. It needs to mean financial ruin or career suicide.
The first rule of crowd funding is DO NOT fuck over your sponsors.
The second rule of crowd funding is DO NOT fuck over your sponsors.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I do not want to synchronize anything with any server which might or might not make it for some years until it is shut down. This is DRM nothing more. I bought this game to play on my own not bothered by any other player... Kickstarter should be able to penalize companies which are not willing to fulfill their promises.
You're right that "backers" need to realise that Kickstarter is not a pre-order mechanism. But developers also need to realise that turning to crowdfunding means, by necessity, a different kind of development model to a "traditional" game.
If this game was - as is more usual - being funded by a big publisher and Frontier decided that the offline mode wasn't working out, then that would be the cue for them to begin a negotiation with the publisher. The publisher might be fine with the change. It might not be. The publisher might want to change its funding committment. It might even want to walk away and leave the project looking for a new publisher. But at the end of the day, it's a commercial negotiation.
Now generally, when a game Kickstarter goes horribly wrong, the root cause is that the developer was a "two men and a dog" team with little to no experience of games development. That's not the case here; Frontier are an established studio with a long track record of delivering games (even if most of those games for the last decade-and-a-bit have been low-profile franchise tie-ins). But they're attempting to behave here as though the absence of a traditional publisher means that they have licence to do what they want without the usual accountability to backers. There's no possible world in which that is reasonable.
So it's no wonder backers are upset.
You're still obliged, in law, to deliver what you promised you would.
No, you are absolutely not in this case. Kickstarter is microfunding investments in a project/company, not a purchase of a product with a specific guarantee or warranty. The fine print says as much.
The fine print is less important than the law. In the US, microfunding commercial for-profit enterprises is illegal -- this is why Kickstarter, Indiegogo et al don't offer equity: it would get them thrown in jail. In the UK (where Frontier Developments is based), there are no "competent investor" laws so all microfunding is legal, but because there is no equity stake, Kickstarter is not considered microfunding. Last I knew it was considered a commercial transaction ruled by the Sale and Supply of Goods Act, and Kickstarter income was subject to VAT (similar to US "sales tax"). This means that they have to deliver the promised rewards, or declare insolvency.
This is ABSOLUTELY incorrect. It's not a payment at all, you are NOT buying a product. You are investing in one,
As I say, if this was true, the Kickstarter team would now be in jail for breaking investment law.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
no, it is a contract - under UK law (and FD are in the UK) once money has changed hands you have some form of implicit contract, though you may have difficulty in court getting your cash back, or it'll cost you more to claim than most backed even in small claims court (£25 filed online)
Plus, the Kickstarter TOS explicitly say that it is a contract between the backer and the producer.