Hey, I STILL like discussing things with ya, bud. And even if I do decide to go whole hog and refund, I’ll likely still keep an eye on development and discussion here. Like I said, the only part I’m sure of right now is that snapshot will not ever get another dime of mine for a preorder or backing. Good for the game or not, first they decided to ditch Linux after the fact (which still rankles, even though I don’t use Linux), and now they are walking WAYYYY back, buying into Epic’s delusions of bullshit and giving them a 1 year exclusive on a game that was backed and legit Pre-ordered (making a distinction since backing and pre ordering are different) as being available on gog and steam.
Further, while I believe there was no malice in the comment on discord by UV, it’s quite risky to say, hey, between corporate/high end investors and this deal with epic, we’ll still be in the black even if EVERYONE refunds. It very much comes across as a) backers no longer really matter, since we don’t nerd them anymore (even though we wouldn’t be here in the first place), and b) hey, they don’t need us to buy their game, so why should we? Hell, I waited to get Gta V until it was under $20, I waited to get wotc until it was $9. I can wait on Phoenix point til doomsday and I won’t feel bad about it.
And trust me, I’m very big on certain other causes, such as the treatment of our fuzzy friends, and the environment (to a degree, I don’t buy into all the hype out there). I am very big on helping friends away from snake oil and bullshittery, such as folks who want health care to mimic the dark ages again. Games are different though. Games are a luxury. Games don’t have far reaching consequences, for me or the world. I probably have a few hundred games in my steam library. I have probably only played half of them, and probably only beat a quarter. There’s plenty of stuff there I could take my time on.
That said, nostalgia is rough. It’s hard to resist. I DO remember the heydey of Molyneux, who made my other 2 favorite games outside of xcom (and I bet you, specifically, could guess them :p). He burned up all his credibility and all my faith a Looooong time ago. This move by snapshot is concerning. It’s not just about PP and their ability to support DLC for a year. It’s about how willing they are to trade $100k tomorrow for $1k today. It makes me think they’re planning on either wringing PP dry and walking out, or that they’re trying to get noticed so someone like Microsoft will snap them up like they did Obsidian. And they’re willing to lock the game out for a year to get some skin from a company who has an aggressively anti-consumer stance and that bent over backwards to compromise their product the second some preteens flashed some credit card #s in their direction.
I’m rambling so bad at this point, I don’t even know where this was going. The thing is, money is great, we all love having it, but just chasing money isn’t a good thing. Epic sees nothing BUT money anymore, and a lot of folks are jumping on their wagon. We’ve all seen some titans of the industry fall apart over the years from overreaching and greed. And we’ve seen what happens when good devs hitch themselves to that wagon. We’ve already seen EA, Activision, and MS suck up, absorb, and sometimes dismantle half of the game studios that existed. Do we really want to encourage adding one more giant conglomerate into it? I’m pretty sure that’s Epic’s plan. Instead of Activision/Blizzard we get Epic/Gearbox or some such, and watch even more once loved studios ground up and spit out, or get misused for something insane like criterion making a star wars battlefront game.