Towns and Stardrive

[cschraer]

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the end of development for the game towns. I understand the reason for this and I accept it, but I haven't seen much talk about Stardrive.

For those who don't know stardrive is a 4X space game heavily influenced by Masters of Orion. It is a real time strategy and it is fairly complete.

That being said it was a game that was released incomplete before early access on Steam. Development on the game continued for a while with optimization and feature patches every so often.

Then it seemed a long time before any news was heard. No patches, no plans for patches. When the silence finally broke, the developer announced Stardrive 2! Coming this fall!

I can understand bugs existing in the game and other issues not being complete when a sequel is announced and released, but there are major features missing. Multiplayer, being the one I care most about, was promised for years, and will no longer ever be added to the game.

Currently the steam forums are ablaze with ridicule for the developer and how no one will buy the second one after being slighted so much.

I want to be clear that I understand the developer's reasoning. They ran out of money for development and need more cash flow to continue. That's perfectly reasonable.

What do you guys think? Should Stardrive 2 be boycotted? Should the developer have tried to find funding elsewhere?

 

[veloper]

Depends. I'll forgive him if customers who bought Stardrive, can upgrade to the sequel for free, or maybe for a few bucks at most, as an option, any time they want.

Otherwise, abandoning a crowd-funded project to make a sequel is a shitty and stupid thing to do.
Stardrive does a lot of things right and it looks like it could have been a great and unique 4X game, if it were ever completed. Abandoning SD just makes no sense when it is so promising. Starting again from scratch will only be harder. A big fuck you to the people who crowd fund the project is also not a good idea, for an indie who wants to stick around.

No boycot is needed. Nobody is going to support the next project if the developer trashes his reputation like this.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well I'm not familiar with the specific problems of Towns or Stardrive so I can't comment on them in particular, but if a dev sells bullshit you do not ever go there again. I understand a devs funds can run out but one must be very aware that shit that was sold was not delivered, so you either make recompense with codes for the new game or all the bridges have just been torched.

And so we are clear on matters of opinion, this shit violates consumer rights in most countries who could take them to court and clean them out for all the got. Luckily for them digital sales are still not taken as a serious business.

 

[cschraer]

Well I'm not familiar with the specific problems of Towns or Stardrive so I can't comment on them in particular, but if a dev sells bullshit you do not ever go there again. I understand a devs funds can run out but one must be very aware that shit that was sold was not delivered, so you either make recompense with codes for the new game or all the bridges have just been torched.

And so we are clear on matters of opinion, this shit violates consumer rights in most countries who could take them to court and clean them out for all the got. Luckily for them digital sales are still not taken as a serious business.

While it would be great to be able to hold them accountable through some kind of legal action, the premise here is that they are out of money. I'm assuming there wouldn't be any financial gain there, and it still doesn't get people what they really want which is just the complete game.

It would set a nice precedent though. But I'm sure it would make indie developers more conservative in their claims, and cause a few to not attempt anything in the first place.

 

[Eve Charm]

I would say it's boycott worthy, but then again it's like believing peter molyneux. Basically the games should be pulled for false advertising if it's advertising features that are never going to be put in the game.

You'd usually expect this to happen if the indie company closes down, not still here making more games.

If anything I'd raise hell if they tried to go the early access route again.

 

[jackknife402]

The reason why Stardrive moved on was that the engine was limiting and made it harder to do multiplayer while maintaining decent game speed.