Maybe they could have looked at the reaction to literally every other game that’s broken a promise in this specific way. There are plenty of examples.
I think there is a sad irony here, in how a cutesy, chill game like this seems to be, it’s generating this amount of conflict, vitriol and hate.
Just look at it!
I have zero sympathy for these tossers. They take money from users via patreon promising the game on a certain platform. Not only do they choose not to fulfill that promise, they then release a statement taking the piss at those same supporters who were upset. What kind of response does a developer expect when the essence of their statement boils down to “we got ours, fuck off losers”?
The game is coming to Steam, eventually.
And they have offered full refunds to Patreon backers.
The game didn’t generate the hate. The developers screw off attitude did. He had one good paragraph in that blog. They could have posted that and just left it, but oh no… they had to sandwich it with all that crap, and then for good measure, have Sweeney come in and give it a thumbs up. It was a train wreck you could see coming for miles. They don’t get to act surprised now.
And of course, another dev that took money but felt zero obligations to the promises they gave to get it.
Yes , nice touch.
Seriously, I’m all for competition to Steam and all that (though I prefer having all my games in one place), and Epic certainly has the ability to eventually make an excellent store, but Tim Sweeney seems to have decided that anyone who has criticism of Epic is someone who is never to be won. I mean, this is not the first tweet like this he’s made, and every time he makes another one, it makes me even less likely to ever buy anything from the Epic Store. He’s like the Trump of video game publishers. Purposely trolling your potential customers might backfire hard on him.
Unjustly keeping the money would have just made it worse. Refunds may have not been legally required but keeping the money would have been beyond the pale.
I do not know why developers make it more difficult on themselves. It is not hard to craft a statement that says something along the lines of “I know this will disappoint some followers but for the future of the studio and the security of our families we have elected to do this”. In that statement make no judgments about anyone who does not support your decision and do not go into any further detail trying to rationalize it either. Because no matter what is written it is likely to come across in a condescending manner. So do not do it. Do not even promise a better game because of the funding. Just let it be. Throw it out there, duck the inevitable backlash and move on with life. Instead, these prats threw the Molotov cocktail out there and decided to soak the ground with petrol while doing so. Is it any small wonder that it blew up in their faces?
Games that are kickstartered and break promises are a very different situation but that does not apply here. I had this game on the follow list. I removed it not because it will not be on Steam for a year - other Epic exclusives are still on my follow list - but simply for their attitude. If they show that kind of disdain for the customers I find it unlikely they will adequately support their product.
Man it REALLY escalated today, I wasn’t around much for the past 12 hours, but this is from the husband of the dev team.
It’s probably Sweeney. Because he has so much attention, his gas lighting was eventually going to keep this going.
I honestly don’t know what they expected with releasing a blog like that, complete with their cute little Epic based animations followed by Sweeney throwing even more fuel on the fire… Now this poor dev is asking for help from a community he gave the middle finger to. It’s not going to get better at this rate.
Another group, not the ones that find this approach unsavory, but just you know, the groups that love a good fight, that group they accused everyone counter to their view point to be a part of, is going to eat this up.
Yikes.
That doesn’t make the reaction any less shocking. It’s disgusting and unwarranted by any metric. Also:
They didn’t ‘take’ money, and they didn’t ‘promise the game’, let alone on a certain platform like Steam or whatever. Look:
And even if they did, I still don’t understand this crazy level of toxicity. It’s inexcusable.
Their statement boiled down to the ‘Why’d we do this?’ section. I’m guessing you read it.
I think I’m just going to mute this thread because I’m pretty disappointed by some of the reactions here and I could do without that.
@lordkosc I don’t even know what to say to that. It’s such a shame.
Maybe because it’s… listed on Steam. It has been listed on Steam.
If the developers doesn’t intend on actually releasing their game on Steam. Do. Not. List. It. There. If you don’t list it on Steam (hint it’s still listed), then you can’t really pull anything from that platform.
Guess what kind of posts are going on in the Steam Community, no you don’t need to; we all know. It’s not like they used that platform to spread the word before their announcement.
Do you have some sort of financial interest in this game? I am honestly wondering given your extreme reaction to any criticism of the actions of the developer.
They have indicated the game was going to be on Steam on their discord channel. It is listed on Steam. Come off of it - your posting of one screenshot is disingenuous.
Whether or not you do not understand this “level of toxicity” there is undeniably quite a bit of anger at Epic. They are tainted with some gamers because they have induced developers to break promises (and in some cases contractual obligations, though no one will bother suing) and then have thumbed their noses repeatedly at those impacted. There is host of reasons why some gamers are put off by Epic and you can find that in the Epic thread. But that anger exists and any association with Epic is going to be seen as negative in some very vocal circles that have significant numbers of people in those circles. Whether you agree or not with their reasoning it is a fact that has to be taken into account.
Their statement went far beyond “why did we do this” and trying to paint it as such shows extreme bias. About 4 posts above yours I explained how to craft a brief statement that does not intentionally (or unintentionally) antagonize the followers of your game who may not like the news. Instead these developers decided to craft a condescending, antagonistic statement and then acted injured and surprised when the inevitable backlash came. My sympathy is generally reserved for those who do not throw the first punch and then cry when they get hit in the nose.
Of course it does. The fact that it’s happened over and over again, and could have trivially been predicted to happen here, is the very definition of “not shocking.” Beyond that, the wording of that post pretty much predicted and mocked this exact reaction. No one gets to act surprised here, and the devs acting weepy about it in that article just reads as incredibly disingenuous.
Now see, that’s a new one, I’ll grant “shocking” there even by the standards of the cesspool that is the internet. Obviously the reaction as a whole is wildly disproportionate, but that’s next-level.
It is shocking, and it’s not; here’s why. His blog didn’t just call out and explain their decision to fans and anyone interested in their game; it poked at and targeted everyone who ever had an issue with Epic and then labeled them as some sort of miscreant and then decided that nothing they said was important because of human rights… coming from someone working in an industry that is not targeted at all towards helping human rights. Then you throw Sweeney on top of it, just to make sure everybody and their neighbor reads it, and you get a combo attack right. We’re all gamers right? We know the potency of combo attacks.
So they’ve angered some of their fans and people actually interested in their game. They got the wrath of anyone that takes an issue with Sweeney or Epic, and because that’s not enough, they got the groups, any group really, that might care about something, anything in gaming, that might not of cared otherwise… by calling anything video game related low stakes.
You can’t even head this off anymore. There are too many groups upset and angry over too many things because he reached out and decided to antagonize all of them.
I wouldn’t be surprise if this is the ugliest in the Epic debate we get to to date because of how they handled it.
Some of the stuff others are posting, of course, is well beyond okay, like report it to the social media platform, maybe call the cops stuff.
I agree with essentially everything you’ve said here and yes, this. They voluntarily placed themselves at the center of an ongoing internet rage storm and made themselves a lightning rod. People have grounds to be upset, they have grounds to demand a refund, but this is the internet and what they have grounds to do is nothing compared to what they will do, especially if you go out of your way to focus all the rage around a much larger topic onto yourself.
Not at all. I’m fine with the criticism, but not the toxicity and disproportionate anger. And I don’t know what’s extreme about being saddened by gamers hate mailing a developer by the thousands because they decided to secure their future creating their game for a year’s exclusivity on a free store. Just keep walking.
It wasn’t disingenuous: Steam isn’t my go-to for information I’m afraid, especially when there’s accusations of breaking Patreon/KS/Fig promises. And while Ooblets may be on Steam, evidently things change. I’ve never looked at it on there.
For what it’s worth I’m a Phoenix Point Fig backer and when they announced they were going to the Epic Games Store it didn’t shift the needle for me because I didn’t buy it for Steam. To a certain extent I can understand the disappointment of those who only wanted it on Steam but after the likes of Uplay, Origin, Battle.net, Windows Store etc. it’s not something I’d ever expect folk to get so disgruntled about.
I’ve read most of the Epic thread and while there are some reasons for being wary, I don’t remember anything putting me off enough to stop me installing the store. I’m not a fan of exclusivity but eh, it’s a free store and only for a year. It sucks for Linux users. It sucks for those who benefit from regional pricing.
There’s backlash and there’s what this has escalated into. That’s going to injure and surprise anyone. Assuming some of the screenshots I’ve seen of the developers’ reactions on Discord haven’t been doctored, I will say they’ve been unapologetically harsh with what seem like legit concerns/questions so that’s also disappointing but I imagine they’re totally fried after the last 48 hours.
Bleurgh. It’s all so unnecessarily charged and volatile.
Funny you use that particular example because it’s why I will never kickstart another game ever again. Full stop.
There seems to be a lot of anger and outrage about this story and Epic I general. It seems too bad that what seems like a decent game is causing people to react in such an extreme fashion.
I’m going to toss something in here, probably to my eventual regret.
People want human-level access to developers. And indies are just usually a couple of people. When you have human-level access, you get human-style responses - not PR-filtered stuff.
As indie devs when we say something, we try to target it at somebody, some specific audience - but that somebody is not necessarily the person who receives it. EVERYBODY does, as though it was tailored specifically for them. That’s nobody’s fault, that’s just the way this communication medium works.
But what bugs me is that people seem to desperately want this ‘accessibility’ - but then when they are displeased, they want to then treat these humans like a corporation - like they were sending a message to some monolithic entity, and not a person. Their response is disproportionate, and often vile. And there is no filter, no PR flack to absorb that. It hits the developer with its full weight - and it’s usually at the time when the developer is at their weakest, most worn down, and most thin-skinned.
And just by saying that, people who have some legit disagreements over Epic, or whatever, are going to think that I am directing that statement AT THEM. And it is going to make them mad. Even though I’m not. I’m directing that statement at the frankly nasty people who will fabricate imagery to try to hurt someone else with that untruth.
The above is a micro-example of what I’m trying to articulate.
There’s a lot more pearl-clutching about how an indie developer phrases their website post though than over the truly gobsmackingly awful things that get said or done to them. And to me that means that our meters for this stuff are woefully miscalibrated.
Anyway. Carry on.