No, they don’t. They pay for a project and a selected reward tier. I understand that they may do so in the expectation of an announced stretch goal, but that is not in any way explicit or formalized.
Can we agree that it’s an implicit promise? Stretch goals are clearly put up to garner more pledges and backer support. There may be no legal obligation to fulfill them, but studios shouldn’t just promise stretch goals they have no intention of working on, correct?
I 100% agree with this. That’s what I meant when I said (above) that they should have used more careful wording - maybe there is some sort of language in there somewhere, but something along the lines of “hey, we are like 10% into the development of this game and things may change, but this is all stuff we believe at this time we can do, and if we can’t do it we’ll communicate right away we aren’t/can’t and why” type of thing.
I like what crowd funding has done for the gaming industry, there has been some amazing titles that wouldn’t have existed without it, so I don’t want to see stuff like this reduce the money future projects could earn by making gamers that support games like this more and more jaded.
Sure, if they announce a stretch goal and it’s reached, they should try to implement it. I also think it’s perfectly fair to ask for a refund if someone backed for a feature that ended up getting cut (like when Elite Dangerous dropped offline mode). But I don’t see it as being fundamentally different than when devs pitch something in preview coverage that ends up not being in the launched game, except we are seeing it from an earlier stage of development. Stuff happens in development. sometimes you want to do things and they don’t work or there isn’t actually time or budget to do it right.
Great. Then we agree on the fact that it’s an implicit promise to do something if funding hits a certain tier.
I think there’s a big difference between a Kickstarter stretch goal and a developer spit-balling a feature in a preview article. When someone pledges money to a Kickstarter, that financial exchange coupled with the implicit promise of the stretch goal being in the game holds a lot more weight than a developer talking to a third-party interviewer about his game. In the former, the relationship is directly between the developer and the player. Money is changing hands and the communication is one-to-one. If someone buys a pre-order for a game based on something they saw in an interview, then they run the risk of getting a No Man’s Sky, but at no point did the developer directly promise the player anything.
“Stuff happens” in development. Features get cut. Concepts in testing turn out to be not as cool as originally thought.I think we all know that it’s better to cut or delay a bad system rather than be committed to it for launch. inXile messed up by not clearly keeping their backers in the loop on this stuff.
I do agree that they should have communicated better. I don’t agree that there is a direct relationship between stretch goals and the money changing hands, and it definitely isn’t a one to one communication between backer and developer.
I think the true arbiter of how this goes down is the backers and the crowd-funding audience. If enough of them think they’re getting screwed by shifty stretch goals, then developers should plan for less backers on their future projects. From what I can see in the various articles about this Torment issue, the optics are pretty bad for inXile.
Stop talking about legal obligations. Nobody cares about that. Nobody’s calling in the lawyers or opening a class action lawsuit.
They said “you pay us this, you get that”. Then they reneged on that promise. It was not implicit.
Again, I’m not mad. All I’m saying is everybody kickstarting a game should take it as an object lesson. Don’t make promises unless you have full confidence you can keep them.
It’s much better understood as “we hit this level of funding, we believe we have the budget to deliver that”.
I’m sure all the Italian speakers that purchased the game assuming they’d be able to play it agree with you on that.
Like I say, they have a pretty strong case for a refund.
They don’t need a case - refunds were freely offered immediately.
I think this is what makes the situation not so bad. I can understand people being disappointed that the game isn’t what they hoped, but I think the devs recognizing that they didn’t keep their word and offering a refund shows their integrity.
Much like nobody’s talking about legality, I haven’t seen anyone questioning their integrity either. They certainly aren’t looking to rip anyone off. They made a mistake and overpromised, that’s all. Moral to the story: don’t do that.
Hopefully some of the Italian kickstarters will learn a word or two in English while playing, so they’ll be better off in the long run. :-) And, as long as the game engine is made with easily accessible strings, anything can be translated - I’m sure there is a bunch of people already organized to translate the hell out of the game due to the demand.
Wasn’t aware that some people are only into funding a kickstarter for a stretch goal, and not for the initial project - is this a common thing?
This is something else I’m not clicking with, my own self.
I don’t think many people pledge based solely on the stretch goal, but I’m pretty sure people have been tipped from not pledging to doing so when stretch goals list features they think add enough to the project’s initial pitch.
Take this very example. I bet a few of the Italian backers did so specifically for the Italian language support.
All I am saying is that when you pledge to a Kickstarter, the money goes into a single pool and you are buying into the reward tier you selected. Stretch goals are not mechanically or explicitly part of that process, and any tie between your money and a stretch goal is purely in your head. The developers have no way of drawing that connection.
If they say they are going to do something, they should attempt it in good faith, and refund as necessary if they can’t, no argument there. But there is not a direct link between those things and the lump sum of funding.
They are explicitly part of the process. They’re on the webpage with dollar signs. “If we make $X, we’ll put Y in the game.” That is explicit.
If it were part of the process, Kickstarter would track and milestone stretch goal points. It would be built into the software. If you were backing to get a particular stretch goal, there would be some way to indicate that and track it. There isn’t, because it’s not actually part of the deal. It’s just promotion.