Moral code of current developers (definitely not clickbait)

Is crowdfunded obliged to deliver no matter what? And if that is deliver are they obliged to refund? This is crowdfunding in the end, don’t you think?

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Refund is obligatory or do you condone Snapshot keeping the money from Backers and Pre-orders whilst having development paid for by them, then tucking that 2 million from Epic as a bonus.

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Of course, why wouldn’t they be. Is Supergiant no longer Indie because they released they game exclusively on Epic Store? Are all indies who released exclusively on XBOX Live arcade no longer Indie?

Indie means independent from a publisher - developers have full creative control over the project. It doesn’t mean that every Indie game is completely funded out of creators projects. Supergiants’ Bastion had support of Warner Bros, to help publish the title.

Deal with Epic is just an exclusivity deal. They don’t take creative control over PP.

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I’m not sure about the definition, but Julian recently said that they are no longer indie developer studio. They have 55 people working on the project.

That’s the problem, I don’t know a “proper”, accepted definition for being “indie”… some consider it if the studio is “small enough”, some needs it to be independent of publishers… though there are publishers “specialized for indies”…

So I can’t be sure if the “no longer indie” was just to their size or other stuff too.

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I don’t think there is a official definition of indie. For me that describes studio, that is independed from external creative constrains, or controlling interests. As long as people who create the game are in full control of how the game is shaping up, then I would categorise them as indie. Jullians exact quote comes from a thread asking if Epic deal benefits PP:

We are not a tiny, indie company anymore - we have 55 employees who need some sense of security in an industry which is quite unstable and is going through some profound changes.

Personally I didn’t read that as a change is studio’s culture, but as a reminder that Snapshot doesn’t fit anymore into a preconception of indie studio - less then ten people working on a project. Possibly they might fit more into middle market slot (AA), like pre-Microsoft purchase Ninja Theory?

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We’re still an indie studio. We don’t have a publisher, so we have full creative freedom.

Julian’s “we’re not a tiny, indie company anymore” was referring to we’re now a mid-large size indie company.

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Is it set out in law anywhere that Snapshot must offer refunds? (I personally feel that they’re doing more than they need to, but I’m happy to be corrected if they are literally obligated to offer a refund to people)

I don’t know about ‘most’. It sounds like less than 10% have asked for a refund (based on the other posts in this forum which said 3-6%). It’s fair to think, the current spam rage is from that 10%. If we give that some space and say 15% get their money back, that will still leave 85% of backers in play, that still want the game.

I guarantee you a ton of backers don’t even know about all of this. Some can’t be bothered to ask for a refund, and some didn’t trust the third party that was initially responsible for handling the refunds.

I would hope Snapshot wouldn’t even try another kickstarter. Even if this all blows over and somehow more or less works out, asking for people’s trust again in another crowdfunding campaign would be galling and shameless.

Agreed, they would really struggle to pull of another crowdfunding campaign. It will all come down to how well PP sells. With the Epic and left over backer $$ they have enough to last 1 year past release.

So it will all come down to how much $$ they make in actual sales, to see if they have enough to make something beyond PP. As long as we get a really good game in PP I will be happy. That’s what I put my $$ down for. Anything beyond that is a bonus!

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You know what? 2 simple points:

  1. Doing the moral and legal thing is not praise-worthy, it is expected behavior in any high trust society. Snapshot games did nothing morally praise-worthy, they did the bare minimum necessary to stay out of legal murky waters and not open themselves up to class action lawsuits. What other developers do is irrelevant to reality, and them not offering refunds does not make Snapshot offering them moral, it makes Snapshot the only company that does not break the law. And yes, going by the generic contract laws of any civilized place in the world, this is a breach of contract because it did not happen with the express consent of BOTH parties involved in it. Snapshot Games on one side, the backers on the other. Offering the option to withdraw from the contract with no losses is mandatory in order for them to do this and have any sort of case in court. Learn your rights, learn the laws, stop just gobbling down whatever gets shoved down your throat and accepting it, else this industry will never improve.

  2. Epic is not competition for Steam. Competition means actually competing, offering a product on the open market and making it BETTER than the one of the competition and drawing in more customers. Bringing in anti-consumer time-gated exclusivity practice from the atrocious console market on PC is not competition, it’s pure anti-consumer cringe. Anyone mistaking this for competition is delusional and supporting a business model that will in see the “console war” phenomenon revived on the ONE platform that was always above such idiocy, forever tainting the process of reviewing a games quality AND making sure no digital distribution platform ever has to improve it’s features and customer interaction because they can just hide behind their latest crop of exclusives as “good things” instead of offering customers something substantive to them.

Oh, and as aside or a bonus point if you will: Developers are not your friends. They never were, they never will be. They are a business, to them you are a pay-day, a walking wallet that occasionally speaks inconsequential things so long as access to your money remains open. PR spiel is irrelevant, all the empty platitudes spoken in rehearsed overused phrases by ANYONE in the name of the company mean less than the bleating of a CNN anchor as they incite the latest fake-outrage fest. They will always try to to milk you dry and maximize their profits. Not out of malice like a lot of people seem to think, but out of pure business need. I don’t hate EA, or Ubi, or WB, or even Snapshot games. They all make decisions towards the inflation of that bottom line profit, but when their decisions hurt me as a customers, I don’t have to give a crap either about them or their survival as a brand. They can all crash and burn tomorrow, the industry will live on. Big or small, indie or AAA, it does not matter, and you owe them nothing. Drop the emotional attachment and think about your benefit as a consumer FIRST, never ever care even in the slightest that now Snapshot takes more money from their profits from sales because of Epic. That information means nothing, the fact the Epic games store is a piece of illegal in Europe spyware and data harvesting program IS the ONLY relevant thing, and why I asked for my refund, beyond the pure principled point that I backed this project in good faith that when release date rolls around, I will have a launcher-less, DRM-less GoG version to access the game through. Not one year later, not an Epic store version, on release day GoG. They can no longer deliver on that point out of decision THEY MADE, I no longer have to support their project or future projects of theirs. If it was something unforeseen out of their control like GoG suddenly going bankrupt or GoG refusing at the last moment to sell their product, then I would not have minded.

And as someone pointed out: I can guarantee you a lot of backers aren’t even aware of the change, or trust money transfer services most of them never even heard of about until this day even less to go through with the refund process. I barely caught on to the change because of a chance change in my daily schedule gave me enough time to check up on the project and then do the necessary background digging on transferwise to see if I would trust them to handle the transfer. There will be plenty more people who simply forget to check on their emails or don’t trust the service to go through with it, or misguidedly believe they can still change things and get the product they wanted on release as opposed to one year later. But the damage to the trust of the company in the eyes of many will not become evident for a while still. It will still be there, and Gollop was correct in one thing: Snapshot is no longer an indie company, not in the eyes of many. Tout the lack of publisher all you want, at the end of the day people will remember taking a bribe from Epic for artificial exclusivity and that will count for a lot more than a dictionary definition.

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Since the same arguments are being brought up time and time again i’ll just copy paste my comment from another thread.

There’s no reason for users to switch platforms because steam is still king. They were the first to venture into setting up an online sales platform by using the revenue from half life to pay off AAA developers just so they could sneak their adware on physical disks which would be unacceptable in this day and age.

Valve pioneered the concept of an online gaming platform and all other attempts at competing with them have failed because there’s just no reason to switch to an “inferior platform” since steam is so far ahead. It’s also been brought to my attention that in order to launch on steam devs are obligated to provide the bottom price on their platform meaning it’s nearly impossible to compete.

That’s where Epic comes in, they have some leverage because they own the UE4 license.
Dropping the revenue cut to 12% instead of steams 30% and also waiving the license fee for devs using the UE4 engine is just too good to pass up. They also have a massive userbase already from the success of fortnite. Ofcourse there’s no point in competing if they can’t draw in players from Steam which is why they’ve decided to give publishers a deal that’s too good to pass up in exchange for exclusivity.

People can hate Epic Games as much as they want but like it or not they have a very solid plan unlike any other online platform and it seems they have a very good chance at bringing Steam down a notch. The excusivity deals play a key factor in this. I also wouldn’t underestimate the amount of people that don’t care about the Epic controversy at all given the success they have with Fortnite.

The reason why indie devs are abandoning steam is because Valve has been squeezing them dry for long enough. More competition is healthy for the future of gaming because it will result in platforms undercutting each other so devs will have more funds to improve their games.

The amount of senseless drivel being posted from people who are clueless on why giving Steam complete control is a dumb idea or why devs choose to abandon it is making me root for Epic more and more despite it being such a terrible company.

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I found out that you don’t have to install the EGS atrocity but you can register and get the free games with a simple click. You could even create multiple accounts out of spite and just rake the free games.

Thats what I intend to do over the year :innocent:.

Let’s just say there are 20 games left with a cost of 20 bucks per game then you would send 0,88*400 = 352 to the developers.

I’d also like to point out that Epic buying exclusivity doesn’t mean that it doesn’t compete. In fact, it’s the opposite. If what they’re doing works, and not only brings revenue, but hurts steam, then they’ll be forced to compete for the exclusivity of titles. This means that companies might get even more money for their game. So just because it seems underhanded doesn’t mean that it is. It just changes the way the market works to hopefully make indie publishers have a better chance, making the game industry better. :grinning: (Side note, being moral is always praiseworthy. Being legal not so much.)

Do you even believe this “bullshit” ?

If Epic wanted to compete, they could have used the Fortnite money to develop a storefront that was as good or better than steam, and because of their lower take (12% vs 25-30%) could have had lower prices on the games. Then they would compete!

Now they are buying customers to increase their userbase, not competing on price (afterall you can only buy it one place), and once they have a large enough userbase, they will increase the prices to make more money. Epic does not give a rats ass about developers, this is a pure market-share grab, and exclusivity is anti-consumer.

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i have been a fan since the first xcom this shit hurts me too. i haven’t been this excited for a game since i discovered ‘spin the bottle’ in my early teens

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They can’t have lower prices because devs are obligated to provide the bottom price on Steam if they want to make use of it.

You ARE getting compensated for the year’s wait. They are giving you that entire year’s DLC free, which probably works out at about $40. Assuming you’re one of the 3000 or so who pledged at the Digital Download level of $30, that means they are compensating you by 130% with payment in kind. You just don’t want to see it that way.

False. Those people already get that with the Epic key. Also at least some of that was already planned to be free DLC prior to the EGS switch. So people who wait for Steam aren’t getting any compensation for that year wait over those that get it on EGS.