Star Citizen Kickstarter backer loses lawsuit pursuing $4,500 refund due to ToS - Sensationalist Headlines

Do you not realize that the FPS gameplay wasn't an addition made later on, it was intended to be part of the game from the start? It was always a game where you weren't going to be just a space ship, you were a character. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11wivt/i_am_chris_roberts_creator_of_wing_commander/c6q6xv8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11wivt/i_am_chris_roberts_creator_of_wing_commander/c6q8d5f/

The boarding was listed as a stretch goal, not like the stretch goals matter at all, you can add as many as you want and claim that it was a part of the original vision since it takes literally nothing to spew out ideas. They promised mod support too and that is pretty much abandoned. They can promise all they want, I still want no part of it for the time being even if it was a part of the original vision to promise everything under the sun and then some. I don't see the problem with wanting to wait and see from outside.

No, it wasn't. I just posted 3 quotes made at the start of the kickstarter saying that boarding gameplay was planned to be part of the game all along, it was always something going to be there. There was no Stretch goal to add boarding gameplay, the first stretch goal that makes any mention of boarding gameplay is at $3.5mil, and it says this: "Ship boarding – learn more about how Star Citizen will allow players to conduct boarding operations." Notice how that says "learn more"; It is not a goal to add it to the game. and that can be clearly seen by reading the chairman letter discussing it, which says "We’ll also expand the boarding mechanic, outlined below"; it was not a goal to add it to the game.

Small but important correction, backing a Kickstarter is not investment. You are not getting shares or dividends or anything. It is donation. Sounds nitpicky but it's important when discussing things like this.

by the time this game comes out the sun is going to explode and incinerate everyone on earth so no one will be playing it though

Mod support is on hold for the game to actually see release. If they wasted developer money trying to support modding tools for an engine that's still constantly changing (and breaking the mod tools), that'd be a massive inefficiency and another distraction away from primary development and they'd be rightfully criticized for it. The same goes for private servers. Both of these stretch goals haven't been forgotten, but literally what is the point in delivering them before the game's finished development? They'll break constantly at best and at worst you'll have a Minecraft where the community takes over development from the developers. Much the same happened to Rust with the old legacy client when Oxide and Magma allowed people to make plugins for features they wanted instead of waiting for the Rust devs to implement things their way. They have been delivering on an increasing number of stretch goals recently, in fact. Procedural planets was the $41 million stretch goal and they became first playable in Alpha 3.0. Several stretch goals relating to celebrity voice acting and mocap for Squadron 42 have been worked through, because they spent a good amount of time showing us behind the scenes footage of the celebrity mocap sessions and the technical process of taking that data and turning it into in-game character models and animation data. The $14 million stretch goal of being able to log out in your ship in space if you have a bed is now implemented in-game, climb into your bed and log out and when you log back in, days later perhaps, you'll be right where you left your ship. You're sitting here complaining about how they're full of delays, empty promises, and abandoned promises, and talk is cheap, but you don't seem to know much about what is actually happening and what has already been done. Yeah, the game isn't finished yet and the original deadlines got blown out by the scope increases and I genuinely feel for the people who really did just want the simpler game originally pitched and are being dragged along for the ride, but would you have preferred they release early and empty like Elite Dangerous and try and bolt painfully-needed features like being able to share missions with wingmen to the side of a live environment on the fly, disrupting the economy as they go?

Sad loss for consumer rights

That will never happen so he has nothing to worry about.

nope, the pro corporate scotus doesn't care about individual rights or laws pertaining to them as long as you've been lawyered into a contract.

Yet another brilliant resonant post. If half the planet ends up playing it, sure, I'll give it a shot, and I'll give it a shot without wasting any money. What makes you so sure that it's going to be a hit, though? Why wouldn't it already be a hit? Why shouldn't I wait for a bigger studio to iterate the concept and fix all the fuckups? Star citizen is literally associated with 2 things right now- taking too fucking long to develop, and being a money vampire.

Honestly, he should get a refund. First of all, the terms of service he agreed to when he first backed them did not have that clause. Second, he has a disability that will not let him play a portion of the game that is required to progress, which also wasn't in the game when he backed it

You have to do the FPS bits? I thought the point was if you wanted to sit in your ship forever and slowly merge with the pilot's seat you could.

Except as already mentioned, the stuff he bought was for the Persistant universe; something that from the very start had the FPS gameplay concepts so he wouldn't have really been able to entirely avoid that in the first place, but more Importantly SQ42 was said to have FPS gameplay during the kickstarter. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11wivt/i_am_chris_roberts_creator_of_wing_commander/c6q8d5f/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11wivt/i_am_chris_roberts_creator_of_wing_commander/c6q7x90/?utm_content=permalink&utm_medium=front&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=IAmA https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11wivt/i_am_chris_roberts_creator_of_wing_commander/c6q7k8k/ And that can also be seen in the letters released as it was going on.

And he kept pledging well after it was absolutely confirmed no later than 2014 that the goal is a first-person universe. That'd be like me asking Steam to refund me every game I bought in the last five years because I found out last year that next month I'm moving somewhere where there's no Internet. People always complain about SC whales having no impulse control, but when a whale with no impulse control tries to go backsies on five years of decisions suddenly everyone has his back and wants to defend his 'rights'. That's just a bit odd.

There's a huge difference, both legally and ethically, between asking for a refund because something went wrong on a project in which setbacks were inevitable, versus asking for a refund because the project has fundamentally changed direction and scope. Ask for a refund on your church donation because the project got delayed one month by weather, and a judge will tell you to piss up a rope. Ask for a refund on your donation because the humble community church project turned into a sprawling megachurch complex that still isn't complete nearly a decade after the initial donation drive, and you might actually have a case. I donated to the original Kickstarter back in 2010, when they promised to deliver a game by 2012. Whatever Star Citizen is now, it's not the game I backed, and I have strong doubts that the game will deliver on its promises when it eventually releases. I'm not asking for a refund because it was $40 that has long since become a sunk cost, I don't understand why the guy in this lawsuit had a strong case, but I don't think it's unreasonable at all to be upset about the direction SC has taken.

it's a project that you backed knowing that setbacks were inevitable, that it might not go well or might not happen at all, and that changes could and would happen. You agreed to that and said that was fine by backing the game. It isn't a case of "Oh, i backed this and had no idea this could change, give me my money back!", it was something stated at the time of backing. I don't quite see what things have drastically increased the basic core of the game since then, though. There's more ships, items etc of course, but what has changed about the fundamental core of the game to you? The game you backed was a wing-commander style series of missions for a campaign, with a more open persistent universe where you could do what you wanted, it would change and adapt to what players did and had all sorts of different elements and gameplay mechanics to it.

The game isn't finished so they haven't done anything wrong. They never said they'd deliver SQ42 when he demanded it, as with all kickstarters it's a done when its done deal. If they announced that SQ42 was cancelled then maybe he'd have a case, but it isn't, it's still in development so he has no case

You guys keep acting like this is an investment when its as pre-order with benefits. I see no one batting an eye to people's general scheme to pre-order Fallout 76 and play the beta just to refund it if they don't like it. And that's a game with a definitive due date. The original proposal was Squadron 42 and then the persistent universe. That's changed clearly. Also if you want to treat this like an investment, then he still has the right to a refund. Plenty of people pull their money out of projects.

It isn't a pre-order with benefits, how could you think that when the game isn't even made? You're giving them money to make the product in the first place, that's not the same as a pre-order where the product is being made regardless of if you give them money or not. "The original proposal was Squadron 42 and then the persistent universe. That's changed clearly. " No. It wasn't. So much incorrect information gets spouted with this game that it's just absurd, go back and read what was initial pitch was. He's some archived versions of the page just to show how was it at the start and early on: Star Citizen | Roberts Space Industries Star Citizen by Cloud Imperium Games Corporation — Kickstarter Notice the mentions of player-driven economies? Mining? Trading? Squadron 42 is actually just a relatively small part of the overall pitch. The initial pitch was Star Cititzen as the persistent universe - the funding goal was a bare minimum to start work on the game in general, starting with SQ42 campaign part and then having to release it in small parts rather than work on one big project, because they wouldn't have the funds to do it all at once. That was something the Kickstarter explicitly said. It wasn't "They promised one game and changed it entirely when they got more money!", it's the other way around - the "SQ42 was going to be first" was the limited, cut-down version of their pitch because they couldn't have afford to do it properly. From the FAQ on the kickstarter: without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production. With more funding we can include more ships, systems, unique locations, animations and cinematic sequences. Last updated: Fri, October 19 2012 5:08 AM BST The pitch was Star Citizen; the persistent universe. Part of that was SQ42 as the campaign. The stretch-goals were stretch goals to make the actual game that was pitched, not something that changed it to something else. I've even seen elsewhere people say something like "I had no interest in an MMO-like Multiplayer game, they changed it!" which is even stranger because that's eexactly what was pitched and what they backed.

It's pretty clearly stated that any money given is really just a donation with rewards