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

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

#271

Post by sandworm101 » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

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,…

Read the actual case, not the review of it. I suspect the judge is relying upon the fact that the money was not paid in one lump sum. It is reasonable to believe that later payment constituted an acceptance of those new agreements, that they should apply to past monies too.

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

#272

Post by im3w1l » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

I had an opposite experience of crowdfunding just yesterday. I had played the f2p clicker heroes (with iap, but it was easy to hack your save to get them for free, but i didn't) and liked it a lot. Never having supported them in any way, I thought that them asking for $20 to make a sequel was a perfect opportunity to give back even if I got no game for it. And yesterday, half a year after they asked for money the beta is out!

Anyway I feel asking for your money back sounds like it would ruin crowd funding. How can the developers spend the money on development if there is a risk they need to refund people en masse? And if they can't spend it, what's even the point? I mean yeah I guess if all the money's gone to luxury resorts and bunga bunga parties then that's not acceptable but if they spent it trying and failing that's just tough shit.

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

#273

Post by Laforet » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

benjaminsuch wrote: post #269

everyone wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not feature creep that killed SC. I'm a game dev and I followed its development just out of sheer morbid curiosity.. Pretty much their entire process was fucked from the beginning, and they never corrected it. Its a huge case of 'Escalation of commitment' rather than feature creep, being the root cause. At the very beginning Chris Roberts hired some artists to make a visual demo in Cryengine, to raise money. It w…

Uhm sorry but what you just wrote are pure assumptions. And the fact that you are "a game developer" doesn't make your claims more true. If you really followed the development process and watched their "Around the Verse" video series you cannot, by any means, call it a "Cryengine demo". In late 2013 the scope of the game got totally changed. It turned from a small multiplayer space flight game to an MMORPG. So they l…

He's not entirely wrong though, CryEngine was and arguably still is wholly unsuited for anything that borders on MMO. Instead of realigning your plan around the changed scope, Chris Roberts decided to keep the glitter of CryEngine visuals and he is paying the price for this decision. Netcode is still affecting performance to this day and I doubt if it will ever be solvable.

We are long past the time when Iwata managed to single handedly refactor Earthbound in a few months with minimum external help. Complex projects carry so much inertia that makes it very hard to correct course once you have momentum in one (wrong) direction.

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

#274

Post by withinrafael » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

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…

I'm glad you brought this up; my head spun when I read that too. I'm hoping this is a error on the part of the article author or source.

Are there records created for small claims cases?

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

#275

Post by mesozoic » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #116

the_snooze wrote: post #54

That sucks, but it seems almost inevitable with these new funding/purchasing models: the risk necessarily shifts from the developer and onto the consumer. This is a big reason why I'm a "patient gamer:" why should I be the one exposed to uncertainty when there are plenty of other complete and patched games out there vying for my attention?

I mean, it does need to be treated like an investment, and you can lose on an investment. You can say, "That Camera rig is amazing. I've always wanted something like that. There's nothing on the market like that." If you put like $600 in, you're hoping for a return on that investment in 8 months of a product. You might get something amazing, or something okay or nothing at all. Just like any other venture. Okay, so y…

If you are have no expectation to get your principle invested much less potential for additional monetary returns then it is NOT an investment. The potential monetary returns on this is $0 in all cases.

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

#276

Post by sombremesa » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 9:53 PM UTC

mawburn wrote: post #264

beerlord wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Star Citizen is not really a game at this point, more a funding vehicle to get more money out of kickstarters - many of whom are suffering from the 'sunk cost' fallacy. Grey boxing is a step towards a complete game, but it doesn't allow you to collect money the way that a glorious, fully modelled giant spaceship (that people can buy for $250 - years before there is even a game to play it in) does.

Star Citizen has pretty much given up all hope of trying to give people realistic expectations of a game. At this point, it's just everything anyone has ever wanted in a space MMO, no matter how grandiose or pointless a complicated feature would be to the overall gameplay. It amazes me that people are still being duped by it.

Ha. Makes me think of the way Trump makes promises. Seems like a great way to get a crowd riled up.

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

#277

Post by spyder » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 10:04 PM UTC

spathi_fwiffo wrote: post #155

nebulous1 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing to note there is the "according to Lord" part. While I have no reason to doubt him, it seems so counter-intuitive for the judge to make that decision that we should probably get an additional source.

Which is followed by "The original terms of service, according to RSI’s own records, make no mention of arbitration before February 2015". The author is making some confusing word choices.

According to their website the ToS issued at 08 29, 2013, already contained the arbitration, and only the version issued at 10 10, 2012 is missing it.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/tos

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

#278

Post by TimTheTinker » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

AngryData wrote: post #261

TimTheTinker wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So if the people's will is guaranteed basic medical services available to all, I don't see what the problem there is.

There needs to be a distinction between fundamental government functions (those that exist to establish the rule of law) and those that were created by law.

It's the fundamental government functions that should never be outsourced.

(If the people's will is that government take care of other matters, no problem. They can choose either way, provided the resulting laws are not unconstitutional.)

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

#279

Post by benjaminsuch » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

Laforet wrote: post #273

benjaminsuch wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm sorry but what you just wrote are pure assumptions. And the fact that you are "a game developer" doesn't make your claims more true. If you really followed the development process and watched their "Around the Verse" video series you cannot, by any means, call it a "Cryengine demo". In late 2013 the scope of the game got totally changed. It turned from a small multiplayer space flight game to an MMORPG. So they l…

He's not entirely wrong though, CryEngine was and arguably still is wholly unsuited for anything that borders on MMO. Instead of realigning your plan around the changed scope, Chris Roberts decided to keep the glitter of CryEngine visuals and he is paying the price for this decision. Netcode is still affecting performance to this day and I doubt if it will ever be solvable. We are long past the time when Iwata manage…

They switched 2 years ago from CryEngine to Lumberyard from Amazon which have an integrated feature for using AWS. They also stated that they completely rewrote the network part and still working on it to date.

They call it Object Container Streaming and Network Bind Culling (I'm not a network developer, so I have no idea about the technical side of it). I don't know how far along they are (they postponed the feature to the 3.3 update) but I'm confident in their abilites.

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

#280

Post by kevin_b_er » Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #216

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…

No. The judge announced that courts of law do not apply, only arbitration psuedocourts apply.

Arbitration is no longer thrown out almost ever, because of ATT Mobility LLC v. Concepcion. An unconscionable contract with arbitration is not an exception to arbitration anymore and state laws no longer apply to arbitration compelled agreements. The arbiter will decide what, if any, laws to follow. The arbiter will decide if the contract is fair. The arbiter will decide if they even want to rule based on the dispute at hand or something arbitrary.

You are behind the times on the sheer power of mandatory binding arbitration.