General / Off-Topic Godus - Free to Play

Philip Coutts

Volunteer Moderator
Philip Coutts
Wowsers 22 Cans really don't do Public Relations do they! People back the kickstarter at I think it was £15 to get the game and what do they do? Put it on sale on steam for £7.49! What a kick in the teeth for us backers. Really hacked off with 22 cans now. They are pretty much sticking 2 fingers up at everyone who helped to make the game, it feels an awful lot like "we have your money now so just **** off!". Almost a perfect example of how not to run a Kickstarter.
 

Styggron

S
People are quite upset there indeed. I am SO glad I did not back it too highly as you know I am anti steam so won't acess the alpha and they gave us no other options.

THere has been no updates for quite a while now, their community is up in arms, the steam sale REALLY annoyed the backers now who feel as you do Phil and the Linux users are really really upset and want a Steam alternative (as do I ie DIRECT download DRM free).

So it's the waiting games but people will have long memories of this fiasco. I had too much trust with too few details so lesson learned my side. :)

It is disappointing of 22cans they should really know better IMHO.
 

Slawkenbergius

Slawkenbergius
I'm fearful they'll run out of cash before they've finished the game. Even if the 21 developers are only getting paid £20,000 a year, that's still £420,000 they've already burned through. The Kickstarter was hardly more than £500,000, and I wonder how much they got through the initial Early Access and this sale.
 

Cosmos

C
Darren Grey said:
It's really stupid that people react this way. Kickstarter is for backing projects, not buying products. The game wouldn't exist at all if they didn't back it.

If Frontier end up making Elite: Dangerous free to play I will not regret a penny I funded. I paid for the game to exist at all - getting my own copy of it is just a bonus.
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Thats just ridiculous. Just because people are backing a project it doesn't mean its acceptable have the dirty done on them. This sort of thing represents a kick in the teeth and its completely unethical. If stuff like this goes on and companies take the michael then it will simply result in legislation being drawn up, and rightly so.

Hey, thanks for being complete mugs.. thanks for helping to fund our game. Have a nice warm fuzzy feeling that you paid us a premium for a game that we are now giving away free of charge.

Its this sort of nonsense that will discourage people from crowd funding and it should not be tolerated.
 
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Cosmos

C
Styggron said:
I am SO glad I did not back it too highly as you know I am anti steam so won't acess the alpha and they gave us no other options.

THere has been no updates for quite a while now, their community is up in arms, the steam sale REALLY annoyed the backers now who feel as you do Phil and the Linux users are really really upset and want a Steam alternative (as do I ie DIRECT download DRM free).
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Hi Styggron - I was curious what is your complaint about Steam? I'm not asking in defence of it but really interested to hear your view. ;)
 

Slawkenbergius

Slawkenbergius
Cosmos said:
Its this sort of nonsense that will discourage people from crowd funding and it should not be tolerated.
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It already did the job for me. At the beginning of the crowdfunding thing, it felt like we'd be getting a genuinely different kind of product because, you know, no publishers. Now it seems like we're getting the same-old same-old, and there's not a publisher in sight to blame.

I'll need to see better returns from my other crowdfunded games before I'm convinced that I want to put money elsewhere. Hold on, do I sound like a publisher?
 

Cosmos

C
Slawkenbergius said:
It already did the job for me. At the beginning of the crowdfunding thing, it felt like we'd be getting a genuinely different kind of product because, you know, no publishers. Now it seems like we're getting the same-old same-old, and there's not a publisher in sight to blame.
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If I had got funding and people had helped me out on a project I would be bending over backwards to make sure I did right by them. I hope I am not an exception.
 

Slawkenbergius

Slawkenbergius
Cosmos said:
If I had got funding and people had helped me out on a project I would be bending over backwards to make sure I did right by them. I hope I am not an exception.
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Why bend over backwards when a lot of people nowadays seem accustomed to bending over forwards? That's what the cynic in me says at least...

I've still got high hopes for the rest of the projects I've backed though. Funnily enough, the Carmageddon: Reincarnation team have been the most generous. After a bit of confusion about DLC, they've basically said that anyone who backed enough to get the game will get all future DLC free. This is the genuine 'expansion-pack' kind, and not the phoney 'already on the disc' kind.
 

Andrew Sayers

A
Slawkenbergius said:
Even if the 21 developers are only getting paid £20,000 a year, that's still £420,000 they've already burned through.
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And that's not including tax, equipment, office space, etc.

I've been in projects before where management weren't willing to see their vision balkanised until it was too late. They couldn't see that having an unreleasable 90% of the project by the deadline was a worse result than having shipped the 60% we'd completed.

Chris Roberts is on the right track with all his modular releases, and our own DDF is a step in the right direction, but I doubt things will really take off until kickstarters embrace continual improvement and promise things like "will ship the pen-and-paper version of level 1 in six weeks".
 

Philip Coutts

Volunteer Moderator
Philip Coutts
I think Peter Molyneux has pretty much fired the last nail into his coffin with this one. It just comes across as a rip off and a real kick in the teeth to the backers. People who put up the cash to make the game should be treated with a bit of respect and get bonuses not find out a few months later that if they hadn't bothered backing they could have got the game for half the price. I'm glad I didn't back this at too high a level as I had invested heavily in ED and others. Has this put me off Kickstarters? No but I certainly won't back another Molyneux vehicle. The other KS's I've backed have been pretty up front and I genuinly feel they are grateful for my support.
 

Oss133

Oss133
Having paid over the odds to be part of the alpha test, I cannot feel aggrieved that other people will get the game for a standard price. Therefore I see no reason to think that, had I backed Godus from the beginning, I should be aggrieved that it then goes on sale at a lower price.

If you did not want to pay a particular amount for a game, either on release or as a backer, then you should not have done so.

All games eventually drop in price. Back when I was much poorer and the internet was not easily accessible for getting patches, I only ever bought games once they had gone budget. That way I paid less and got the least buggy version.

It is your money to spend how you want. Choose wisely.
 

amigacooke

amigacooke
My feeling on this is I don't really care how much people pay for the game, as long as we actually get a game in the end.

If someone got a better deal than me, well, good for them.
 

xyphic

X
The main bad feeling is down to the fact that the game is effectively still in alpha (in all but name) so a lot of those who pledged extra feel hard done by, especially as their feedback went largely ignored.

My problem with 22cans is that they've forgotten how to communicate with their backers. They're generating a lot of bad will at the moment and that could be turned around with a quick 5 minute update here or there to let us all know what's going on.
 

amigacooke

amigacooke
xyphic said:
My problem with 22cans is that they've forgotten how to communicate with their backers. They're generating a lot of bad will at the moment and that could be turned around with a quick 5 minute update here or there to let us all know what's going on.
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I can't understand why they have gone completely to ground. There is a good game in Godus somewhere, I'm not so sure that this 'game by giant committee' is the best way to find it.
 

Cosmos

C
Despite my stance on this if I am playing devils advocate its probably a decent reminder that there are risks in backing a project via crowd-funding and some of them are bound to go wrong.

Its easy to get carried away but this latest craze shouldn't become a replacement for simply buying a readily available product. With hindsight I probably backed ED too heavily but having been hoping for this game for decades and scouring the web for news of it over the years, I honestly thought it would never happen.

Perhaps we should use our heads and not our hearts when it comes down to money. ;)
 
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