Glad to know you have the same opinion or yourself as I do.

Online only single player is the antithesis of DRM-free, which was promised during the kickstarter.

Yes. Some games install themselves on first run - including Half-Life 2, by the way. So all you need Steam for is to download the files, you may them copy them outside of Steam folder and run them for the first time there.

While not optimal it sounds drm free. Do you know how much HL2 waits before being run for the first time?

Yeah, and they also like to shrug off warning about questionable projects only to address after the campaign is over and their % is safe. I still like the idea of crowdfunding but these are two reasons why I stay away from KS.

Anyway, I guess Elite Dangerous managed to convert a solid number of potential crowdfunding backers to "Never again" persons successfully.

Not really, it is just a database so someone could do their own. The original elite used a fibonacci algorithm to generate the galaxy, so they could simply reimplement the original algorithm and use a database to save any changes.

Yeah that sucks, but what can be done in such a case? They are still legally required to refund you, but they can't. That is not what is happening here. In this case the company can pay, they can deliver, but they choose not to! It is a deliberate business decision to screw over the backers who only backed after they added a DRM free pledge reward.

Actually they are and I am very glad I didn't go for a digital reward. At least it is probable that I can sell this 100$ cardboard for even more than it cost to one of the sycophants.

If we would believe that FD honestly thought that they could just leave implementing the offline mode so late in the development that they really only recently understood how difficult it supposedly would be to them right now, then they should have let the backers vote how the situation should be resolved. Instead they just cut the offline mode, tried to let it slip as a casual mention not even worthy of a proper headline in their newsletter and didn't even offer refunds until the backers expressed their outrage on the unilateral decision.

And apparently they are not going to refund anyone who pledged for the game in the Kickstarter, even those like me who specifically only pledged after the DRM-free offline mode was promised and who also only pledged below any alpha or beta access tier.

Lets see if they bother to respond to my feedback ticket that points out to them that they are not properly following the Kickstarter's procedure for handling unmet goals, nor can they claim to process our request case by case if they just copy and paste two different arguments to justify not refunding my pledge when they should know that they have not given me anything to download yet.

All right, I did a little experiment right now - I have:
1) Downloaded Half-Life 2
2) Copied the game's folder outside of Steam.
3) Deleted the game via Steam
4) Turned off Steam
5) Launched the game from the copied over folder. Game works fine, first launch is as quick as usual, saved games work properly, options get stored correctly.

For all intents and purposes, the original Half-life 2 can be considered DRM-free. The expansions are too, but they require you to create a link with a parameter (in other words, launch hl2.exe -episodic or something like that). You don't even need to ever launch HL2 via Steam for the first time. Copying the game over to a completely Steamless system is something I have successfully tried at one point previously, worked fine as well.

From the E:D Newsletter #50 that just came out.

"Will you give people refunds?
We have started responding to requests where there is a clear outcome:
- Those who have pre-ordered an Elite: Dangerous release version from our online store and have therefore not yet played the game are eligible for a refund.
- Those who have already been playing the game online in the Alpha and/or Beta phases, regardless of whether they backed the project via Kickstarter or purchased access to Alpha and/or Beta through our online store, are not eligible for a refund."

So, if you have already played the game, you're out of luck. If you haven't, and you're not happy with the situation, request a refund.

Basically, they fucked over the majority of backers?
Or do they consider the backers "pre-orderers"?

The only intent I care about is being able to vote with my wallet by buying a version of Half-Life 2 that is officially sold as DRM-free. HL2 was THE game that I had to be without in order to make a point in never ever letting myself to be lured into supporting DRM'ed single player games, so I will not be tempted to play it until it goes officially DRM-free or it becomes "abandonware" as in not being sold in any form in anywhere so my wallet can't cast a vote anymore.

I seem like that at times, yes, but I'm not an idiot. I understand why people don't want to support Valve and I'm not trying to persuade anybody to purchase anything. SentinelWolf asked a question, I have answered.

And what about not taking part of the alpha or the beta? Of course it could be that they were sneaky and launched an open beta just recently before they came clean and told that the offline mode was axed, but even then as I have not downloaded any version of the game they can't provide any server logs of me logging in to play the game.

Try again, it's just another canned response they sent to everyone. I guess there must be a ton of refund requests, so they can't properly deal with them.