FunkyMunkey
Banned
Oops, Chucklefish hah
Saw this on reddit(link):
With a followup in the comments from the developer:
He seems to think that access to the beta from a preorder should be good enough instead of a finished product. People who preordered the game(not early access) and aren't satisfied with it (considering it is very unfinished in the beta current state) should be entitled to a refund. Conflating early access and preorders together into one category is nonsense and a worrisome precedent. Just because you offer beta access doesn't change a preorder into "early access" and apply early access stipulations.
Some comments:
What say you, gaf?
Saw this on reddit(link):
"Hi, I would like to bring awareness to this because I know I'm not the only one in this situation. Starbound opened preorders on April 2013 stating the game was going to be released that year (beta and full release, see http://community.playstarbound.com/...sort-of-evaporating.24843/page-12#post-976402 , and their preorder FAQ page which changed several times http://imgur.com/YGIhmHy). They released the "beta", a far from finished game (and far from beta stage too) in December the 3th 2013. After reaching 4.000.000$ in sales, saying it would help "Starbound get here even faster", it only helped the beta, not the full product, come 28 days before the promised date. Well, after a long history of proofs of inability of the devs to develop the game and shady shenanigans like losing coders and hiding it I decided to ask for a refund since I wasn't happy with the development of the game and I had the right since I bought the preorder in April 2013 and I hadn't receive my full game.
As you can see in here: http://imgur.com/qMaslYb at first I emailed support asking for a refund and they denied it to me saying they warned it was an early acces title, but I told them I bought preorder, not Early Access. The answer I received was just "Unfortunately, we weren't able to offer a refund" and for what I can see, I'm not the only one (http://imgur.com/8LydeD3). I even made a post on their forums asking for a reason they could give me to deny me the refund, but my threads were locked twice. I emailed them back a couple of times and they didn't answer. Weeks after that I tweeted the community manager about the issue and as you can see, she couldn't give me any reason to deny the refund and just stopped answering.
I'm only posting here because I don't know what to do, I've tried talking to them in any way I could but as you can see, they just slam a door in my face. I feel powerless against this. I can't bring this up anywhere chucklefish has any form of moderation. They try to look like a friendly indie game developer but they behave like big greedy publishers .
Thank you for reading. Also excuse the grammar, english isn't my first language.
EDIT: I feel the need to make this clear, since a lot of people don't get it; I didn't bougth this game on Early Access, I bought it from their page on April 2013, several months before beta release. Read the whole post for more info."
With a followup in the comments from the developer:
"Hi guys,
I'm the lead developer of Starbound.
So I wanted to clear some things up. Before we released anything on steam we were offering people that had bought the game before any kind of release no questions asked refunds. That's because there was nothing to play yet and we had more control over actually refunding people. The screenshotted post Molly made was in that context.
Since the game has been released and contains hours and hours of content (our average buyer has an estimated 26 hours, many people have over 500. This average is actually much much higher than 90% of the games on steam) and given that it's down to the store (steam/humble) to OK refunds at this point, we've been telling people refunds aren't something we're personally able to do. The game is unfinished, but it's only really unfinished in the sense that we want to do more with it and we have more planned and it's going to become a better game. It contains as much if not more content than many finished games already.
As for the final release date, it has been pushed back a number of times, but that's purely to allow us to improve the game beyond what we wanted it to be from the outset. We run a nightly build update system and every day updates go live. We also update our homepage with our work on a daily basis. I'm sorry that we didn't meet our initial estimates, we could have done but the game would have been worse off for it and we decided delays on the basis of delivering a much better game to everyone was the best thing to do.
I think the context that's missing here is that unlike many early access games, the game is already fully playable, and although it doesn't have everything we want to put in it yet (which is what's holding it back from a 1.0 release) I feel we could have released what we currently have AS 1.0, outside of early access, we just wouldn't have been happy with it.
We're all still trying to figure out just what early access is, at what stage games should go in and out of early access and what the expectations are. I think as Starbound stands, our sharing of our future plans aside, it could leave early access and be an entirely reasonable stand alone game. I think the huge number of hours people have poured into it is a testament to that.
And whilst I'm sorry that we haven't yet put everything in the game that we've mentioned wanting to put into the game, I feel as a developer we've chosen to be really open and communicative and that means just talking without overly vetting what we say. Sometimes that means getting excited about a feature we want to put in but it takes a lot longer than we'd planned.
We're often criticised for not updating the game enough, especially as we said that we'd be putting out updates thick and fast. Along side that, we also warned that these updates would be buggy and broken because of the speed at which we were pushing them. We started updating the main game in this way but people quickly lost patience with small updates / constantly updating / buggy updates and we took the time to move those updates to a new opt-in branch in steam. So the nightly updates are the thick and fast, buggy and broken updates we promised. They appear every single day. And the game on the main branch exists as a perfectly playable stand alone whilst we continue to work.
I feel 1.0 is an arbitrary release number and it's down to us to decide what 1.0 means in the context of our game. If anything, the estimates for 1.0 exist for the people that want to wait and play the game when it's in a state that we are entirely happy with it.
We've chosen to keep upping the ante for 1.0, but that absolutely doesn't mean that what's available and playable right now is any less a game, any less enjoyable or any less worth £9."
He seems to think that access to the beta from a preorder should be good enough instead of a finished product. People who preordered the game(not early access) and aren't satisfied with it (considering it is very unfinished in the beta current state) should be entitled to a refund. Conflating early access and preorders together into one category is nonsense and a worrisome precedent. Just because you offer beta access doesn't change a preorder into "early access" and apply early access stipulations.
Some comments:
"My launcher being open has accounted for HUNDREDS of hours of play time for me. Trying to claim that the launcher is not broken and adds no time to the total play time is a bold faced lie. I have played SB for around 20 hours, but thanks to running a server with the launcher bug, I have nearly 500.
This looks really great when I try to warn people against purchasing SB on Steam, only to advertise the fact that my launcher had been open for eons. How rational does a review read when it starts with NOT RECOMMENDED; 500 HOURS ON RECORD?
This game is only "fully playable" if you are not bothered by a massive list of missing features. The devs have been retooling their engine and redesigning core features of that engine since the beta was released. Very little real progress in the form of content has happened in months (yes, I have played the nightly builds as well) The engine needs to be retooled because there was no strong gameplan for development from the get go. SB devs didn't know if the wanted armor pen, or if they wanted 10 tiers or 100 tiers of progression. After some of the changes to their engine, I really feel that a solid design doc doesn't actually exist for the game. From a users perspective, they are making it all up as they go and are doing more harm than good.
Recently, they put out a performance patch that they claimed would increase performance 30%. Nope. Most players (myself included) noticed a fairly significant DROP in performance.
Tiy's post here is simply damage control. And it is laughably transparent. They can't control the arguing on their own turf, and now it has spilled out into areas that they aren't the boss of. The devs police their official forums, deleting and locking dissent and silencing the angry customer. This is the same sort of behavior that also happens on not just their subreddit, but their Steam forums as well. If I said any of this in a place that CF mods are in charge of. My comment would be deleted instantly.
Chucklefish as a company has also decided that it is okay to become a publishing company with all the "extra" money that they were given for preorders. No finsihed Starbound yet. But, apparently its fine to take the money that early funders paid for Starbound, and spend it publishing other games. All the while telling everyone that preordering Starbound would get the game in our hands faster. Meanwhile they get their little office situated to play video games in, claiming that they're going to be soooooooooooo productive now.
As someone that has followed the development for two years, I feel lied to, swindled and unhopeful about the future of development for the game. Daily player base has dwindled down to nearly two thousand. I fully expect that the game will either be abandoned within the next year, or rushed to a finished state in an attempt to silence the drama surrounding the game.
People of Reddit. Don't listen to this man.
Oh look, some related pictures. http://imgur.com/a/fbcWr/all"
"I agree with you: When he says things like
"I feel 1.0 is an arbitrary release number and it's down to us to decide what 1.0 means in the context of our game."
It is incredibly frustrating. No, 1.0 isn't arbitrary. In fact, 1.0 has generally accepted definitions. IT'S NOT ARBITRARY."
"I think what OP is mostly worried about is the fact that he or she pre-ordered the actual game and did not order the early access version. They later changed their terms entirely from what I can see, barring a refund for the OP simply because they found some loopholes and by changing the "contract" of the original pre-order purchase.
I don't think anyone is trying to "pitchfork chuckle fish" or anything like that. In fact, it seems like the person responding to OP has been the exact same employee the entire time. This could be entirely that one employee's fault--they don't seem very skilled or experienced in dealing with customers or handling public relations, which makes sense since this is a very small, independent company.
I honestly think this singular employee is handling the situation completely wrong. She (going off of her username and avatar on the forums and her e-mails) seems to just see "I want a refund... game STILL isn't out yet... blah blah." She probably thinks, oh great, here is ANOTHER impatient customer. NO REFUNDS DUDE. In reality, she probably isn't even reading the OP's full e-mails or posts. I'm sure she is very busy, but she is making a huge mistake by ignoring the rest of what the OP is trying to tell her.
Personally, I would be upset with ANY company for ANY product that did something like this to me. It's great to support independent and local business of any product--I'd prefer to support these guys rather than the big companies for sure. However, when any company or business pulls things like this and then refuses to make it right for their customers... well, it's definitely not a good thing.
While I'm sure most people here would agree with what you've said, you have missed what OP is upset about in a way. Sure, they are probably still upset that the game isn't out and has a lot of bugs, etc.... but those aren't the reasons he/she wants a refund. They want a refund because they reserved a "pre-order" and the terms of the sale were retroactively changed into an "early access.""
"This is right.
A lot of the law is in the wording. Starbound was not initially sold as Early Access. It was sold as a full price pre-order that comes with early access.
They have repeatedly missed many of their promise dates and after the initial month the development crawled to a near halt. They are nearing a year past the original release date. People have the right to start cancelling their pre order if they are unhappy. Time playing the early access etc is all out of the window. They never sold early access they sold and promised a full game.
The reason they probably aren't giving refunds is most of that money is gone or allocated to be spent. One refund would snowball into many. This isn't a legitimate reason to deny the refund though.
Early access is a dirty business and realistically any early access that promises access to a full game at the end should be open to a refund. I People should not have to pay to test a game for the devs and give them input to make it a better game which will increase sales in the first place. It makes no sense and it is simply taking advantage of the hype that can easily be generated around certain games on the internet.
Early access can create a problem where it takes pressure of devs both Financially and from a customer waiting to play point of view. The devs start getting lazy and dead lines start sliding with ease. Day Z standalone is a great example. Since release development has been extremely slow, at it's current pace that game is going to take 2+ years to finish and there will be better alternatives available by then. The devs actually benefit from the slower pace since they are still making a ton off of early access pretty much every time they release a small patch that generates hype again, and they will make a ton more from the sales push they gain from the "full release"."
"I think you are indeed right. It does however depend on where you bought it.
Right now you bought it from THEM, while they said this is a pre-order for the full game. That means this beta is like a free demo which you could download, but it isn't the full game. For these people it's like the Destiny beta. It's a small version of the entire game. For people who pre-ordered Destiny this is a way to see what they're gonna get, but it's more a demo than a full release.
For the people who bought it on early access: Those people bought it knowing they were gonna get a beta game that gets updates until release. The beta seems to be like a release that just gets updates a lot. So this is not at all a demo like version.
In your case you are definitely entitled to a refund, just like you would be for any other game you pre-ordered and hasn't been released yet. (For example, if you pre-order Destiny today and tomorrow decide you don't want it, you can get your money back)"
What say you, gaf?