Yup.

Seriously, I'm starting to dislike the people who always say : " Who does not have internets today? - quit moaning "

Too many individuals today take the Internet for granted, like the air we breathe - is.

The Game will fail, then they will ask GoG to sell it DRM free.

Wishful thinking I suppose. Well it depends, I think the question is how long they have money to maintain the servers for the game after the release? If money runs dry, I see two options:
1. they will introduce a subscription model with fees or
2. the game will get free-to-play with micro-transactions.

One should also not forget the competition on online space games from Eve Online or Star Citizen. The former seems to have an established community already, while the later one will probably have much more content to begin with and a better, more stable starting point if you compare the financial bases of Elite and Star Citizen.

Maybe it even works like they build it up now. Don't they have micro-transactions already? Paid cosmetics and stuff? What about paying for updates further down the line? DLC could also become a constant source of income if they provide it regularly. Being online you might even need to buy the bigger DLC to continue playing or you might be left behind because you can no longer participate in the persistent server environment without the additional content from the DLCs.

Nevertheless all of these models do not fit my taste and sadly, I don't see a GOG release though.

A game I didn't back and won't buy.

SimCity 2013 had an offline mode patched in later on (despite EA using very similar excuses for requiring a server) so it's not out of the question, especially if the backlash against this betrayal ends up hurting their bottom line.

I have read pretty much all of that monster thread on the frontier Forums and Michael Brooks have stated many times now that an offline mode doesn't fit into their vision of the game. I am so gutted, hopefully my refund will come through next week.

I only pre-ordered last week, I wish I waited a couple of extra weeks.

Frontier is definitely in my bad books now, I'm sick and tired of all these MMOs. I just want some good games again that can be played single player. I don't mind if games have multi player, just not at the expense of single player.

What a letdown. Sorry for all of you who preordered under false pretenses :(

They should have thought about that before they did the KS. I'm convinced by the reaction to the news that their KS would not have reached its goal without the promise of an offline mode. So the only reason they are even *making* a game now is the promise of offline being possible.

No need for an account, Ian Bell is your friend :)

http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/index.htm

Thanks, but which one of them? :P

David Braben has alway been a prick, if Ian Bell had been behind the kickstarter this would have never happened -_-

So they elected not to escalate this shitstorm. A wise move, but they'd have had to be trying to hurt themselves had they not offered anyone refunds who asked for them.

edit: wow, almost 200 pages of posts in a single thread on this topic over at the frontier forums, that's close to 3000 posts.

Over a weekend. I didn't even realize people felt this strongly about this game.

Giving refunds is really the only corrective course of action they can make. They were selling the game in their own store with a promise of offline mode for quite a while, so some non-KS backers bought it because of that as well.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=58789&p=1002307&viewfull=1#post1002307

Looks like refunds are on a case-to-case basis. That's unfortunate. A refund is not guaranteed.

Fuck those DRM microtransaction EA/Ubi wannabees.