Gandos: While I'm not a big fan of either the Kickstarter or the Early Access trends, one positive thing that has come from them is that these sort of events and occurrences are increasingly making gamers re-examine the traditional notion that developers are "creative, innocent angels" and that publishers are "mean and oppressive".
Not to say that there haven't been legitimate examples of publishers acting that way. But now that certain studios have opted to/have been forced to handle all the financial, publishing and marketing duties themselves and don't have publishers to use as scape goats, they are showing themselves as they truly are. They are showing that they are just like anyone else; human beings who make mistakes or, in some cases, may even harbour malicious intent.
Very well stated! And this is a new, tough, lesson that we gamers should learn fast.
A little history lesson from the past:
Back when I was a kid, and most people were still playing with cassetes or floppy disks, there was a lot of piracy. Most (almost all) of the games I played were pirated copies. Games were expensive. Almost every new game costed about 50$ then and I and most kids didn't have the means to afford boxed copies. You either used piracy or you didn't play at all.
Game developpers then complained about the piracy issues and stated that, if piracy was stopped,
then all games would be much less expensive, because then they wouldn't need to raise the price of new games in order to balance the market losses due to illegal copies. This was their justification.
Well, time passed. And, in the early 90's, we saw the appearance of the CD-Rom. And, for some years, there were almost no pirate copies. Because almost no-one was able to afford a CD-Recorder. They were way too expensive.
If memory serves me right, between 1992 and 1995 game developpers and publishers didn't needed to worry about pirating.
Did they finally lower the price of games?
Hell, no! The price remained the same!
And what was their justification for that? "Oh, you see... we now have more expenses in making a game. Full-Motion-Video, hiring actors to be digitized, making 3D intros, blah, blah, blah....
I was still a young boy then, but I learned a valuable lesson in those times: Don't trust the word of a firm or a producer. Most of the times they don't give a shit about the client. They just want the money.
And I'm sorry to say that I feel David Braben just wants our money too. I lack the programming skills to properly know how to develop a game. But I know plenty of people who are tech and programming-savy. And they state that the idea of
Elite: Dangerous singleplayer being hard to achieve is ludicrous.
Sure, I understand that an offline E:D may be poorer than the online experience. But plenty of people still get their fun out of
Elite+ or
Elite 2. A new, single-player, space-trading game would be fun to play.
Now I have to wait till the
X games reach GOG.
And I have a bad feeling towards the game's future. If the megalomaniac
Star Citizen manages to fulfill its promises, then E:D will be smashed. I suspect that, in 2 years, the game will become deserted. Then its servers will be shutdown. And E:D will enter history as one of gaming's most hyped fiascos. But maybe I'm wrong.
Time will tell.
