"Elite: Dangerous refund policy detailed after offline support dropped"

[kane_magus]

(EDIT) And here is the Rock, Paper, Shotgun version. They seem to be a bit more willing to take Frontier to task over this, as opposed to PC Gamer, which just seems to be more interested in reporting as is, rather than editorializing about it. And the comments under there are just as negative to this overall as they are at PC Gamer, which is nice

Comments

[owsf2000]

You know, ultimately we probably have Minecraft to blame for the whole pay-for-advance-access-to-buggy-alpha/beta versions that's so prevalent today.

And this policy of theirs basically confirms (to me) that what I suspected they did was actually what they did. The weeks and months they claimed spending on how to feasibly add the offline mode they had promised was actually weeks or months trying to figure out how to avoid losing as much money as possible when they eventually came clean about their true intentions.

ie: "So we have X players that preordered the game in total. X-Y of them have already paid SHITLOADS to play the buggy unfinished, feature incomplete version of the game. If we set our refund policy to those left over, we'll still have shitloads of cash so long as the clowns don't realize they can legally take us to court in a class action. Ok, let's go with that!"

[kane_magus]

Yeah, Minecraft was the first, and arguably implemented it in the best way. It would have went over like a lead balloon, though, if Notch had charged 3+ times the final release price for people to have the "honor" of testing his game for him, rather than significantly less than full price like he actually did. Also, imagine the outrage if Notch had said, a month before the game went full release, that he was scrapping the offline[1] mode and would require constant connection to Mojang servers just to play the game at all

[owsf2000]

With respect to Minecraft, you could always play offline without logging in. The only exception to this, of course, is to install it in the first place since it has to download the installers and thus log in the first time. After that, as far as I can tell, you can play offline as much as you want without it phoning in again. The only drawback being that you can't play online on any server that's running in online mode. (Meaning it will verify with Mojang when players connect to it to verify they are who they say they are

[owsf2000]

Also, reading over the comments a bit more, because I like torturing myself, I noticed that some of the FD defenders were going on how FD was "blackmailed" into adding the offline mode mid-kickstarter because they were going to withdrawl their pledges otherwise