I coughed up £200 for a game that I knew would have a retail value of about £35 for a year or so and then drop to almost nothing, I gave them money based on both written goals and promises and those made in the developer videos and the private design and development forum. The level I backed at gives me free DLC for the life of the game which was planned to be ten years, so even if they released one major update per year I'm still paying £20 each for them but it wasn't the monetary value that bothered me, I just wanted them to make a modern, updated version of the original game which is what they pitched at us.
I think that I have a RIGHT to get most of the stuff they promised us BEFORE they add in things they never mentioned, FD have let the backers down really badly even if they only put in a fiver almost ALL of their problems come from the multiplayer aspect of the game they could easily have built a single player game that worked and then added on the multiplayer aspect had they wanted to, their ambition has not been backed up by their ability IMO, game is OK when it could have been GREAT.
I was off the grid during the kickstarter and missed it. However, since I've thrown a similar amount of cash at it, including the LEP, books, skins, kits and hardware, which has all stopped until improvements are made. A decision, based on the Kickstarter scope and interviews up to 2015 and the absence of anything concrete since. I truly feel the same.
I agree with every syllable of your post. I feel justified in doing so. I feel the actual Kickstarter funders, especially at your level, are even more justified in doing so.
But every time I bang that drum, someone says "shareholders" and "MVP" before the page is out. Or invoke the whole server side walnuts.
I would have thought a company that delivers on it's promises as a priority, offers the kind of value that can be monetised?
I get the Theme Parks and Dinosaurs, I do. It's risky to put all your eggs in one basket and I get that a more diverse portfolio is a good thing. It may result in longer term development and support for ED having alternative revenue streams.
However it does "feel" less like risk mitigation, and more like the Kickstarter was about kickstarting the next development phase of Frontier, rather than Elite Dangerous at this point. The cycles are so slow, it's pretty clear theme parks and dinosaurs are the priority and resource allocation to ED is secondary. Maybe not in the run up to April, which is encouraging, but certainly through 2016-2017 it would be tough to argue against further to keeping Microsoft and Playstation happy.
Now I don't work at Frontier so don't actually know, and I'm not trying to tell anyone how to run their business as that would be rude unless they are paying me to tell them, but from a Kickstarter or as secondary an LEP and Horizons perspective, it's been dire in development scope for two years at the front of shop and one can only hope the code's been re-written from stem to stern in the back office.
That's why I'm encouraged by recent changes in approach. The developers must be excited to be let off the leash and have some resource assigned to support in the run up to April.
The Design Team must be hugely relieved, to finally be directly accountable for getting the design decisions and feature implementations right from here on in. After three or more years of getting it wrong in the context of the Kickstarter brief, (and indeed in the context of making any sense in design decisions at any point over anything) they now have the chance to make it the game it always promised to be.
Which will be better than it is now, under anyone's definition of normal.
If it isn't, the Major Stakeholders, including the Shareholders, should certainly start giving back. As they have been well looked after up until now.
I'm afraid that you don't have a "right" to anything of the sort.
Not "legal right". But I'm not sure that's what he meant. There is a deep rooted, almost religious connection with the original Elite and subsequent versions, including the current one. A connection that has been perceived to have been exploited by the Kickstarter scope implosion.
The amount of people that accept this level of corporate terminology as life boundaries is frightening. i swear modern politics are to blame, it's almost as if people expect this kind of treatment these days, so it's okay.
Like it or not, trust is a huge factor in this going forward. If it's now down to the small print, I suggest everyone starts reading it. If that's the case, I find it both a real shame and kind of sickening to be honest. Trying to build a sustainable open system ecology, with no trust and no perceived return on engagement is one thing. Make it about money and you might as well not bother.
"Doing what's right" builds trust. Not doing it makes me spend money elsewhere from now on. It's a sustainable model....
