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‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

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Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#131

Post by caffeinewriter »

amarkov wrote: post #92
cornholio wrote: post #66

He lost because of a forced arbitration clause. This massive privatization of justice where any boilerplate service or product now comes with forced arbitration is making my blood boil. The justice system should always be an option when arbitration fails, and arbitration should take no more than a reasonable time to fail (say, two weeks for this $5000 amount). The whole point of a small claims court is to handle such…

But arbitration didn't fail here. He never tried it in the first place.

Arguably he shouldn't have had to, since the arbitration clause appeared in the Terms of Service after he made his pledge. I have my own opinions about arbitration but that's neither here nor there when what you agreed to did not dictate that you must resolve disputes through arbitration.

Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#132

Post by 4restm »

Tepix wrote: post #60

I'm also a golden ticket holder and my patience is evaporating. I can't believe the single player campaign has not been released yet! Also the published roadmap doesn't seem to end anywhere that is satisfactory. They need to kick out a whole bunch of features (perhaps temporarily) to get the game in a state that it's somewhat complete and playable.

Golden ticket holder here as well, personally I don't mind, I check back into the game every 3 or so months, enjoy whats new, read the monthly pdf's and thats that. I understand that the game will take time, and am satisfied with my investment in the development

Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#133

Post by salvar »

kikki wrote: post #90
wongarsu wrote: post #77

>one of the worst cases of feature creep in history crowdfunding campaign that exceed expectations put the developer in a really tough spot. Star Citizen asked for $2 million but got 6. If they had said they keep everything the same, the schedule would stay sane but everyone would call it a money grab because they take $6 million to develop a $2 million game. The other option is to make use of the additional $4 milli…

> Star Citizen asked for $2 million but got 6. If they had said they keep everything the same, the schedule would stay sane but everyone would call it a money grab because they take $6 million to develop a $2 million game. What? That's not how crowdfunding works. If you crowdfund a bag for $200k and you get $1 mil, you don't turn that into a jetpack - you just ship the bag that you promised.

A $2 million game will cost (more or less) the same to develop whether it goes on to sell 1, 100, 10000 or 10 million copies. The cost of producing a handbag depends a whole lot on how many you need to produce.

So assuming that shipping more copies is very cheap once the game is developed, what do you do when you get $6 million in funding for a $2 million game?

Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#134

Post by kevin_b_er »

gwern wrote: post #112
cornholio wrote: post #66

He lost because of a forced arbitration clause. This massive privatization of justice where any boilerplate service or product now comes with forced arbitration is making my blood boil. The justice system should always be an option when arbitration fails, and arbitration should take no more than a reasonable time to fail (say, two weeks for this $5000 amount). The whole point of a small claims court is to handle such…

I'm more disturbed by the parts of the article which say that he never agreed to a forced arbitration clause in the first place because it wasn't in the ToS when he paid, but the judge decided to go with the later ToS anyway: > According to Lord, the terms of service when he made the initial pledge aren’t the same terms of service they are today. The original terms of service, according to RSI’s own records, make no…

Yes. That's what it means. Your contract is meaningless against a corporation when they can change the terms of the agreement and force you outside of a court of law into a monkey court of arbitration.

The courts are for the wealthy, not for the plebiscite. This is what this ruling shows.

Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#135

Post by mrep »

pageald wrote: post #50

Has there ever been a high profile early access game that crossed the finish line? It seems like studios usually take the money and run, like Bohemia Interactive with DayZ. Five years and tens/hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and the game is abandonware. I guess Minecraft is one notable exception.

Not exactly high profile but subnautica was an early access game that turned out awesome. Granted, I only bought and played it after it was fully finished but early access started 3 years before the final release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subnautica

Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#136

Post by dejawu »

nottorp wrote: post #83

While i regularly throw $20-$50 into game kickstarters, I stayed away from both Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous when I saw how hyped they were. Nothing good was going to come out of that. Personal statistics: 19 kickstarters backed, got a finished product on 9 of them so far, 2 more have builds that show everything is on track. Everything I got was acceptable, with at least 7 being good or above. Also, ALL of them w…

Your skepticism is well-founded, but I'd like to put in a good word for Elite Dangerous. I bought it for $15 on sale long after the Kickstarter had ended and it constantly impresses me with its sense of scale and level of polish. Sometimes I'm amazed that game exists at all, let alone that it successfully came out of a Kickstarter.

It's not for everyone but if the idea of "Euro Truck Simulator in space" appeals to you, you'll probably enjoy it.

Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#137

Post by jellicle »

pjc50 wrote: post #128
jellicle wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the public service of justice is slow and expensive Is small claims court slow and expensive? Not to my knowledge.

It's expensive for businesses because they tend to find in favour of the consumer, whereas with forced arbitration the business can pick the most biased arbitrator to rule in their favour.

Well, okay. Right. I agree. I just don't want people reinforcing the meme that "justice is always slow and expensive and that's why businesses want arbitration" when the real reason is "courts are too fair and that's why businesses want arbitration". The accessibility, fairness, speed and low cost of small claims courts to poor individual litigants is a bug, not a feature, from the perspective of the US's larger corporations.

Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#138

Post by dejawu »

djsumdog wrote: post #123

So what other good single player space sims are out there today? I'm not an MMO person. The last good one I played was Strike Suit Zero/Infinity. Back in the day I played Wing Command I, II, III, IV and Prophecy (still have many of them on CD). I was also a big fan of TIE Fighter/X-Wing. It seems like this genre has stagnated quite a bite in the past few years, or has gone entirely MMO. Is anything doing anything new…

I really like Elite: Dangerous and commented about it elsewhere in this thread[0]. You can play it solo if you want and never have to worry about encountering other players. Combat is real-time and you even have to dock the ship yourself. Like I mention in the other comment, I'm constantly impressed by the scale and polish of the game.

I'll watch some reviews of the new No Man's Sky update and if it looks decent I'll probably get it on sale.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17559080

Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#139

Post by pearle »

djsumdog wrote: post #59
raesene9 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Elite:Dangerous had a better model (although still not without it's troubles). They delivered the base game in reasonable order and have been iterating and adding content since then. Whilst the early game was pretty sparse in terms of content, at least it was delivered and reasonably complete.

That does seem like a better model. I might have to check that game out. Games should produce the base game they promised, and then just add expansion packs or additional levels (free to initial backers) to try and get everything else in until the money runs out. Maybe even the old shareware style route of releasing Episode 1, 2 and 3 (although in the shareware days, Ep1 was free and 2/3 were commercial .. like 1 was…

Elite is also one of the better VR games available.

Re: ‘Star Citizen’ Court Case Reveals the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200M Game

#140

Post by ocdtrekkie »

gwern wrote: post #112
cornholio wrote: post #66

He lost because of a forced arbitration clause. This massive privatization of justice where any boilerplate service or product now comes with forced arbitration is making my blood boil. The justice system should always be an option when arbitration fails, and arbitration should take no more than a reasonable time to fail (say, two weeks for this $5000 amount). The whole point of a small claims court is to handle such…

I'm more disturbed by the parts of the article which say that he never agreed to a forced arbitration clause in the first place because it wasn't in the ToS when he paid, but the judge decided to go with the later ToS anyway: > According to Lord, the terms of service when he made the initial pledge aren’t the same terms of service they are today. The original terms of service, according to RSI’s own records, make no…

When you make a new purchase, you agree to the updated terms of service. This is pretty standard practice. (Steam makes you press a renewed terms of service agreement on every purchase, for example.) When you agree to updated terms, it generally replaces your prior agreement with a company. Had he not agreed to the new terms, his account and the purchases tied to it would still be under the old terms.

The whole EULA/TOS nonsense is crazy in general, but RSI isn't doing anything unusual here, and I'm not surprised this is how a judge took it.

The idea that someone could make 61 different purchases over a span of years, and then go back and think that they are entitled to refunds for all of them is a little crazy. And while the game isn't done, it is playable, and he did spend a significant amount of time playing it. It's unfortunate the game isn't developed the way he likes, but that is again, not an RSI-specific problem.

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