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STEAM | July 2014-2 In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming
- Thread starter MRORANGE
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Kiru
Member
Chill bro.
Tizoc
Member
Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice, yo Sub you available in the next 7-8 hours?
YianGaruga
Banned
As if that has ever stopped anyone in this thread
This is definitely crossing a line though..
freshVeggie
Member
I have a Ultratron coupon at 90% off from badging.
If anyone wants it, I'll gladly give it.
It expires on 23.07. So hurry, it's free.
I'd relieve you of Bad Rats cards though.
EDIT: Feels inappropriate posting game coupons after plane crash news :/
If anyone wants it, I'll gladly give it.
It expires on 23.07. So hurry, it's free.
I'd relieve you of Bad Rats cards though.
EDIT: Feels inappropriate posting game coupons after plane crash news :/
Gianni Merryman
Member
Yes, everyone should get an extra key upon activating the game
let's play a new game, if we can get the total to $500, you have to livestream Serious Sam 1-3
YianGaruga
Banned
I don't even have access to these codes but I'd pay to see this
There should be a crossover. The Ship: Monkeys with Guns.
Kiru
Member
Hahaha that would be torture for him. Good one.
I need that Saints Row IV: Game of the Century Edition
Same here, think I'm gonna wait til they have another sale though. Been waiting for a complete version of SRIV before I jumped into it. My brother is gave me all his steam trading cards and it pushed me over to having 25$ in my steam wallet, so I was just thinking about blowing it on keys to get Dead Rising 3 (it's not region locked correct?). But now Saints Row 4 complete being only 7 keys or so is kinda tempting lol. Help everyone, what game should I go for?!?
The Ship: Find the monkey and shoot it!
morningbus
Serious Sam is a wicked gahbidge series for chowdaheads.
Well, I'm only doing this through SteamGAF and nowhere else, so it is almost as related as using this thread to organize gaming sessions and is somehow actually more on-topic than posting the GOG deals of the day. I also only post it after serious movement, with either the batch of codes I get overnight or if we've reached a milestone.
But, point taken (because deep down I do agree with the sentiment). I doubt this can be broken out to its own thread and I don't think it will be as fun for the people contributing codes, but if anyone else wants the scoreboard posts to stop, I'll stop.
This could be arranged.
Nabs
Member
No godmode hacks or anything either. He has to actually try.
PandaPandaPanda
Member
Agh. Tough choice mate. I never play Dead Rising 3 before. I played Saints Row 3 on PS3 and platinum it. Enjoyed it a lot. Played a bit of SRIV too.
I think you should get SRIV though. Caged maybe Dead Rising 3 will be cheaper by the time it come out. (If it doesn't get lock)
But you could also make the case that you should get Dead Rising 3 before it get locked. SRIV doesn't look like it will be locked anytime soon.
I'm thinking Verizon's punchline will be "limit one credit per billing period." Can you imagine if you still had a $6 credit show up each bill for over 5 years?
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
That's not quite true, though. KS backers are entitled either their reward or a refund, just like anyone else in any other case. That's true in both the KS terms of service and as a matter of contract law. The problem is that the only time you don't get your reward is if the company has used up all the money and gone bankrupt, in which case how do you get your refund? Well, you can sue them and you'd win, but how do you enforce judgment? You can't enforce a small claims judgment against a bankrupt company. And is it a judicious use of your time? No, not really, especially not for $10.
This is true with conventional advance purchases as well. If you go to a print shop and say "I want you to print me <xyz>" and give them a downpayment, and you go back when the job is supposed to be done and they've gone bankrupt, what do you do to get your downpayment back? If you book a venue for an event next year and the venue shuts down before the event rolls around, how do you get your deposit back? In all cases, the answer is that if a hostile actor is not cooperating with you, you sue them to get legal remedy, and you shoulder the burden of enforcing judgment against them, and if they well and truly have no money with which to refund you, chances are you're not ever going to get a refund. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush (wow, the double entendre there is brutal, I've never noticed that before) is a lesson worth repeating here. It's still a purchase, you're still owed it, but if they don't fulfill, you're probably up shit creek without a paddle.
Or imagine some other kind of fraud. Imagine you have internet service through Comcast, and they just randomly decide to overcharge you $15 this month. So you call them, and they say "Oh yeah, you got overcharged. We'll refund you." and then they don't. So you call again, and they say "No, we issued the refund, tough shit." What are your options at this point? Well, you can do a credit card chargeback. That will get you your money but presumably you will never be able to get service from Comcast again. The same is true here--nothing prevents you from doing a chargeback and facing the consequences from Amazon, which handles the payments for KS. You could go to the media and try to kick up a stink. You can do that here, as well--but the people responsible for taking your money aren't hiding or burying the fact that things didn't work out, they simply can't refund you because they don't have the money to. Or you could sue Comcast. You'd win, of course. But the odds of it being worth your time are pretty near none. You can do that here. So again, the entire basis of our market system is trust, and the entire thing that supports that trust is reputation and the legal system.
Or imagine something as simple as being at a fast food place, ordering food, paying, and never getting your food and the store won't give you a refund. If they keep being obstinate, you eventually need to sue them. It's not worth your time, but you will have to do that if they resist.
KS isn't just a donation to a cash pile. It is a purchase. You are entitled to something for your money, or you are entitled to a refund. Just like any other purchase. But like any other purchase, you are basically doing it on the basis of trust and confidence, and if those fail, only the legal system protects you, and it doesn't protect you very well, and it's not worth it for the smallest stuff.
In terms of consumer protection, the most obvious way KS could protect you would be to offer optional purchase insurance that insures a refund of the project. They could pretty easily do an actuarial table. The question is who would buy it. So I donate $25 to a project. KS gives me a pop-up saying "For only $10, we can insure your $25 purchase against the project not being fulfilled." If I thought the chance of failure was high enough to merit the insurance, why would I pledge? So, decline the insurance. Anyone who'd be willing to buy the insurance shouldn't be pledging at all, which just gets us back to square one, right?
Alternatively, KS could offer a type of project funding where instead of taking 5% or whatever they take, they take 25% as a hedge against project failure. There's two possibilities for how project creators could react to this. One is that instead of asking for $100k, they'd ask for $120k+ to cover the fee. In which case, fewer projects would be funded (there's no reason to believe that the security of insurance would make people pledge more because there's no reason to believe people are pledging less today as a result of risk, as these projects show) to begin with. Alternatively, the project creator asks for the same amount of money, but has even less to spend on the project. This makes narrowly-funded projects even more likely to fail once funded, albeit reducing the risks if they do fail once funded. This is similar to the approach a lot of places use to pay for your expenses if you're in a car accident with a driver that has no car insurance; a liability pool. But remember that the impact of this is that people who do pay for insurance pay more, so while it solves one problem, it creates another.
So I mean thinking about consumer protection, there are options, but none of the options magically fix the problems that lead to projects failing to begin with. Ultimately it's still going to come back to a judgment call on the part of the funder. Anyone who spent 10 seconds of rational thought on Yogsventures would have found the project lacking.
- Why am I funding this? Because of the Yogscast name. Who is working on it? A bunch of people who are not Yogscast.
- What pedigree does this team have? None, admittedly they have never made a game. Some of them have maybe worked on previous games, but we don't know who or which or who is on project management.
- How much are they asking for and is it likely to fund the project to completion? Let's do a Fermi estimation. $250k (so probably than $200k after physical rewards, KS, taxes, Amazon, etc). $200k gets you about 20 person-months of employment in the US (I'm going for $75k a person year and then thinking licensing, administrative costs, rent, equipment, etc. I'm in the ballpark). We know this was a professional team taking professional salaries, nothing about the project purported that this was a garage operation or someone taking enough money to pay for ramen and peanut butter and a dial-up connection while slavign away. For a team of 5-6, that's about 4 months. For a team of one person, that's about two years. Can you make a 3d open-world adventure game in 4 months with a team of 5 people? No. Can one person make this in two years? Maybe? Maybe not? Is there any evidence of external funding to plug funding gaps? No.
- Is this an interesting looking game? The answer is honestly no, but I guess different strokes for different folks. But still, I mean, it probably wouldn't hurt to check whether or not they seem to have a really good core idea for a game with proof of concept stuff in their pitch. These guys didn't. It looks like they had an extremely basic 3d engine (Unity?) prototype with a few models. I don't see any evidence that they had much of a game design at the time they pitched it.
It took me maybe 60 seconds to type that and well under 10 seconds to think it. I have to assume that the people who backed it either spent less than 10 seconds considering the risks, in which case, like, honestly? I spent more than that when I'm standing in front of a vending machine considering buying a bag of chips. Or they did consider the risks, but they lacked the capacity to do the above analysis, in which case I feel bad.
To those people, I say: for 10% of your Kickstarter pledge to any Kickstarter project, I will produce a one page briefing telling you my assessment of whether the project is likely, plausible, implausible, or impossible including hard-hitting analysis like the above. Paypal only, no refunds. Let me know. I'm sure now that I've offered this wonderful service, no one will ever again be burned by a KS.
"Monkeys on a Ship"? You may be on to something!
No, you aren't. You don't get a return on investment, you don't get shares or any kind of ownership or rights related to the product that is being kickstarted, and you don't get to see any of the money they make. Basically, you are assuming the risk of an investor without any of the potential benefits. Or, to say it in a more friendly way, you are paying for the promise of getting a product.
corrosivefrost
Member
Who peed in the bear's bowl of Super Sugar Crisps this morning?
There's usually a few thousand people online.
It's the most popular COD game on Steam, which in practice translates to a peak for today of a little under 8.5k players.
billmcdougal
Member
Wouldn't that be called Monkey Guns?
Kiru
Member
Or bananas that shoot monkeys?!
corrosivefrost
Member
DR3, no contest.
Plus I have DR3, so you'll always have a potential co-op partner there.
SR4 is a big step away from SR3 from what I've heard. SR4 would be a better grab during the Winter sale when the SR4 franchise gets it's normal sale discount and that applies to the "complete" edition or whatever.
I grabbed Wolfenstein, gonna return my sealed PS4 copy now. Now to download 44 gigs.
You chose... wisely.
I see Nabs hop on it from time to time, so I'm guessing yes.
maneil99
Member
More then ghosts, 7-8k during peak
You can always just look it up if all you care about is the story. Should save you a bunch of time so you can play something you're actually excited to play.
lashman
Steam-GAF's Official Ambassador to Gaming-GAF
The ToS say the project creators must deliver a product, though. I seriously think something (don't ask me what, I don't know) should be done to prevent bad people from scamming their backers. They are backers, but they also get to receive some rewards according to the tier they are in, which I believe makes them customers too.
And yeah, I'm not good with that idea, which is why I already said I won't participate anymore.
Kiru
Member
Happy birthday duderino!
DR3, no contest.
Plus I have DR3, so you'll always have a potential co-op partner there.
SR4 is a big step away from SR3 from what I've heard. SR4 would be a better grab during the Winter sale when the SR4 franchise gets it's normal sale discount and that applies to the "complete" edition or whatever.
Thanks guys, gonna get DR3 for sure then once my cards finish selling off. I'm pretty sure Saints Row IV GOTC will be having a ton of sales anyway like 3 did by Winter hopefully.
lashman
Steam-GAF's Official Ambassador to Gaming-GAF
Well the monkeys are shooting those guns at other monkeys. So in a manner of speaking, the guns do shoot monkeys.
Guns don't shoot monkeys, monkeys shoot monkeys.
For the 2 people that don't have 10 copies yet: Nuuvem is doing a huge Magicka sale, including all the DLC, with various times and various percentages ranging from 30 to 80% off
Don't give them any ideas.
I beat/100%'d SRIV during the free weekend, too, but will definitely pick up the complete edition when it's on sale.
I hope Volition's next game is an open-world crime game set in early 19th century England where you play as Jane Austen.
Stallion Free
Cock Encumbered
... and a really good port too
Ain't that the truth. Hopefully Advanced Warfare doesn't borrow from the Infinity Ward tech clusterfuck.
Totally agree with everything you wrote, but part of the problem with Kickstarter is this right here. It shouldn't be a ever considered a purchase. There should be a giant "YOU MIGHT GET NOTHING IF THIS FAILS" warning before every Kickstarter payment. Maybe that would chase off some of the idiots and remind people of the reality of projects like this. It would also protect Kickstarter and projects that legitimately try and fail. They are trying to have it both ways right now, and it's becoming a mess.
Another part of the problem is that Kickstarter treats $1k novelty projects the same as $1 million dollar corporate sponsorships. If your Kickstarter goes (or even tries for) a larger amount (say $100k or more), it should require financial details. Where the money is going and why. Actual expense reports and transparency both before and during the project. If three months in backers see that 90% of the money is gone, they might catch on a bit. This Yogscast kickstarter was two years ago, and by all accounts has been mostly dead for at least a year. This shouldn't be news now, it should have been news 18 months ago when it became obvious it was going to fail.
maneil99
Member
Hoping theres a console command hack for some screenshots
I know what you mean, and it makes sense. Still, it doesn't sound right at all, and I don't like it that there's a service which allows malicious people with no intentions of ever delivering the product to steal money from others. The problem is that I can't imagine any way those potential backers could be protected from this.
It's a shitty situation, either intentionally (scum who only want to take the money and run) or not (projects that failed for any number of reasons).
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