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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

#211

Post by stochastic_monk »

smogcutter wrote: post #183
kevin_b_er wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FWIW, a plebiscite is a yes/no popular vote of the whole population, not the population itself. Also, totally agreed.

He almost certainly meant plebeian, but his intention is clear and his point incontrovertible.

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

#212

Post by mooxie »

xoa wrote: post #151
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

Right, but like I said earlier (and I think the source of general confusion) is that the article doesn't seem to indicate that's what the attorney's asserted. Like, if they'd said >"Yes your honor, this did not apply at the time of pledge, but we updated the TOS, and he specifically agreed to updated TOS as part of his playing the beta test and here is the timestamp when he did so through his account." well, that'd s…

> Which might be because we're getting it 2nd or 3rd hand, so we shouldn't necessarily jump to conclusions.

Yeah, as a Star Citizen backer (at an extremely modest level) I think that it just wasn't spelled out in the article. There was a LOT of hubub in the community when they added this new clause to the TOS, because you had to accept it to continue playing the alpha, which in turn meant that you could never get a refund.

Now I do agree that it would be very nice to see that the judge confirmed that the user actually went through with this agreement personally and that his acceptance was not just implied by the fact that the change was made a ways back in the release cycle.

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

#213

Post by slfnflctd »

simias wrote: post #168
softawre wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people like games like that. Tell your own story, use your imagination, stuff like that.

I generally like games like that to some extent but I still found the original version of NMS mind numbingly dull. I think the problem is that they decided that they would just let the Random Number God decide everything through the procedural generation and they thought that gameplay would organically happen on its own. Except it doesn't work that way, the procedural generation engine in the game obviously has too f…

I'm not sure if you're aware, but they also added a central story line and some 'farming' elements & side quests in the Atlas Rises patch (which was when I picked the game up on sale), and I found it gave me plenty to look forward to, at least for a while.

It still felt a tad bit unfinished in some respects (a flashier 'ending' with multiple possible outcomes would be ideal), but I was able to get a lot of great hours out of it-- enough so that I'm definitely planning to replay from the beginning after this Next patch.

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

#214

Post by PurpleBoxDragon »

NullPrefix wrote: post #127
daburninatorrr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is especially important, and I don't see anyone else here (at the moment of posting this) calling this out. This is a disastrous precedent to set for consumers, because it means that even though you are agreeing to terms on the date of the sale, those same terms of the sale can be changed on a moments notice and still affect you, without your knowledge or consent. It's a shame that he has to keep fighting this,…

In other words if ToS can be changed retroactively, it's a wildcard agreement. Is there even a point in reading it?

The simple solution is we need to ban all ToSs and EULAs. Make it a crime to try to enforce them on users, one that results in mandatory prison time (else companies will still use them to scare consumers, same as the warranty void if removed stickers).

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

#215

Post by genericid »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #207
dragonwriter wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Government is and has always been about law Government has always been about the legitimatized application of force; the use of law as one of the key components of the legitimization of force is very old, but not essential to the concept government (it's essential to modern, and even many older, norms or models of government, though.)

The principle of the rule of law says that all parties, even the government itself, are subject to the law. This would imply that any application of force on the government's part must only be done in the service of the law. This is how government ought to be, and has been at least several times in the last 1000 years. The Magna Carta is famous for first codifying the rule of law principle.

If the principle of rule of law meant that a democratically elected government cannot use its powers to take care of its citizens, it would simply be a bad principle.

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

#216

Post by ajross »

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…

> If the public service of justice is slow and expensive, we need to fix the public service,

The public service (small claims court) was present and used. He just didn't get the result he wanted. It's not like the "public service of justice" was evaded. He got a hearing. The judge (a real judge!) said the arbitration clause was enforceable.

So he lost. In court. Having exercised his constitutional right to petition his government for redress of grievances.

I mean, look: I get that arbitration clauses can be unfair. But that's not an indictment of arbitration, it's an indictment of unfair contracts. For every case like this that makes your blood boil there's one that throws out an arbitration clause that wasn't appropriate.

The system works, basically. It just doesn't get this guy his $4500 back because he made a stupid bet on Kickstarter.

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

#217

Post by TimTheTinker »

genericid wrote: post #215
TimTheTinker wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The principle of the rule of law says that all parties, even the government itself, are subject to the law. This would imply that any application of force on the government's part must only be done in the service of the law. This is how government ought to be, and has been at least several times in the last 1000 years. The Magna Carta is famous for first codifying the rule of law principle.

If the principle of rule of law meant that a democratically elected government cannot use its powers to take care of its citizens, it would simply be a bad principle.

A democratically elected legislature's job is to write the will of the people into law.

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

#218

Post by heyoni »

daburninatorrr wrote: post #121
gwern wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is especially important, and I don't see anyone else here (at the moment of posting this) calling this out. This is a disastrous precedent to set for consumers, because it means that even though you are agreeing to terms on the date of the sale, those same terms of the sale can be changed on a moments notice and still affect you, without your knowledge or consent. It's a shame that he has to keep fighting this,…

They claim that he’s played the game so wouldn’t it be possible that he was presented with the new TOS before playing and agreed to that?

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

#220

Post by viscanti »

NullPrefix wrote: post #127
daburninatorrr wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is especially important, and I don't see anyone else here (at the moment of posting this) calling this out. This is a disastrous precedent to set for consumers, because it means that even though you are agreeing to terms on the date of the sale, those same terms of the sale can be changed on a moments notice and still affect you, without your knowledge or consent. It's a shame that he has to keep fighting this,…

In other words if ToS can be changed retroactively, it's a wildcard agreement. Is there even a point in reading it?

He made some purchases on the old ToS and some on the newer ToS. So he did agree to forced arbitration on the bulk of his transactions. That's not saying that the first transactions should be grouped in (or that forced arbitration should ever happen) but this isn't just a company changing the ToS later without him ever agreeing.
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