fronzelneekburm: It's not a good start. Once again, the DRM-free crowd gets treated as second class citizens. They promised this would be DRM free, so excluding non-Steam backers from early access versions is a complete breach of trust. Yes, they do mention that betas will be distributed via Steam, but
they only added that point to their FAQ a month after the campaign ended and the money was collected. (Which unfortunately is exemplary for the kind of bait & switch tactics that have become standard MO for most Kickstarter campaigns.)
HypersomniacLive: I think this is quite inaccurate. First off, a project creator
can't make any changes to the tiers description
after the campaign has ended and I do recall that the part about the Beta being a Steam-exclusive was there from the beginning. That was not the problem as they were upfront about it from the start, i.e. one decided to back having full knowledge of this.
The "discrimination" of backers started the moment it went on
public sale (which was advertised as the final release and not some beta). In other words, everybody and their grandmother got access to the game - except DRM-free proponents, backers and non-backers alike. And from what I read on the DF forum, the windows version doesn't run without the Steam-client. That basically means that, until a DRM-free version is released, pro DRM-free backers essentially supported both DRM and Steam exclusivity with their money.
Thanks to a number of vocal pro DRM-free backers, they reconsidered their stance about the DRM-free version coming only after Act II, but that "in the next month
or so" leaves room for a longer wait than one month.
They could have handled it a lot better, I guess it's lesson learnt.
Since I didn't back "Broken Age" myself (missed out on the initial campaign and the fact that physical copies weren't offered to later investors scared me away), feel free to take what I've written with a grain of salt and correct me. As for the beta statement, I was referring to their Q&A answer where the beta would be released:
"Q: How do I get access to the beta?
A: On Steam. Isn’t Steam the best?!"
(SOURCE) This was added (or changed) on Apr 25 2012, while the project was funded on Mar 14, 2012.
Thanks for your insights on what happened after the public sale started! Do you know whether the DRM-free version of Act I also be available to buy for non-backers? Because that's another thing that ticked me off in the past: I remember once Larry Reloaded got greenlit, they changed their paypal-backer tiers to not offer DRM-free versions anymore. I took to their forums and wrote a lengthy complaint about how disgusted and disappointed I am to have potentially helped fund a Steam-only title. The main rebuttal I got at the time was somewhere along the lines of "As a backer, you'll receive a DRM-free version. What more do you want?" They did keep their promise and delivered a DRM-free version to the public, so all's well ends well, I guess. But it was that precise moment that I first got weary of the DRM-free promises made during Kickstarter campaigns.
