Are you happy with the development speed? [Unofficial Poll]

Other citizens have seen posts like that and like to call it "unfounded Chicken Little doomsaying". And I've seen a loooooooooooooooot of that over the years, way more than what you're describing.

And "vaporware" means NOTHING exists, NOTHING makes it out. And you cannot make that claim honestly here.

 

Vaporware, development hell,you catch my drift, the game won't be out for quite some time, and when it does, a gigantic part of the original fanbase (and most likely me) won't give a shit anymore. i seriously doubt they will make half the money they made with the pre order for the beta on the full game.

 

If true, that'd be because most people who would want the game have already paid for it expecting the final release.
That isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I'm also not sure why anyone would consider themselves part of the 'original fanbase' if they aren't willing to stick around for release knowing the game was in Beta when they bought it.... Why would real 'fans' not stay with the game? That's not really a true fan at all.

 

Alright my lovelies

I'd say that most of you are having some pretty healthy discussion about development speed. But let's try to keep it a little more civil if we can.

The trend of reports is not promising for the future of the thread. If someone doesn't agree with you, remember that their stance is not a personal attack. Additionally, if you don't agree with someone, try to meet their mindset halfway before you respond. And lastly, if you feel compelled to lay down your opinions as facts; this probably isn't the thread for you.

Keep it dapper, peeps

 

I don't think they've intentionally abused EA. I think they decided halfway that they weren't as keen on EA as they were when they first started, so they left it hanging and decided to handle development normally (offering nightly builds as small compensation). Chucklefish doesn't really have much of a presence on the Steam forums; they handle that stuff here. To most people that sounds like: "I don't feel like coming in to work today, so I'll do it at home and get back to you when it's done." When a game is tagged as Early Access, there has to be a direct link between development speed and semi-stable updates; so it's not at all surprising that a lot of people are assuming that development speed has either stopped or at least slowed dramatically.

I don't really know what's gone through the collective mind of Chucklefish, but I'm fairly confident I know what's going through the minds of the many disgruntled customers on the Steam forums (even if many of them do act toxic).

 

I'd heard that there were vocal complaints about the "constant" updating and having to upload new stuff that would occasionally break the game (like the great Storage Device Wipe, that was a bear), thus the move to way-more-staggered big, heavily-tested updates. Which I can see leading CF to reducing their frequency even more and having the open "look this shit's g'un BREAK, y'all" unstable branch. Because testing everything takes a lot of time and thus delays the game further. I've worked with incomplete games both as a developer and a game guide writer; finding out what breaks a game is arduous.

How well was this communicated? We'll get to that...

Agreed, but again we're dealing with some problems above CF, namely Steam's lack of any sort of guidelines or protections or requirements for Early Access games. Again, yeah, buyer beware should ALWAYS apply, but Steam's incredibly-hands-off approach to what EA means hurts customers, hurts creators, and hurts Steam.

CF needs to communicate better there, but part of that is because Steam lets them not have to.

Problem is so do I. I've had a long, long time on varying fan-forums (ol' mid-90s dial-up AOL USENET days. Oy). And it is always, always, ALWAYS easier to complain and kvetch and go toxic with immediate impressions than to look into things. It's part of why there's usually a higher volume. And I've seen said exceptionally-vocal disgruntleds turn out to be the underwhelming-in-actual-action minority more times than I can count. So I admit, I'm gonna look at those with a more skeptical eye. As noted before, I'd LOVE the game to update stable faster, but I get why it doesn't. There's a discussion to be had, but sadly it more often gets drowned with hyperbole of the "this game hasnt updated in two years" variety.

This is not to say there aren't issues where CF needs to do better. There clearly are, and much of the broader problem IS Chucklefish's lack of presence on Steam, which they do need to work on. Here on their home turf, I'd say they're doing a pretty good job overall. But Steam?

Honestly, a DEDICATED PR person might be a good idea; someone whose sole role is to assemble what's being done and mete it out, without taking too much of the programmer/artists' time. I really think they'd earn back some real goodwill with a big, detailed ON-STEAM, EASILY ACCESSIBLE VIA THE BUY PAGE LIST of just what you're buying into: the contents of the stable update (plus its last update-date), what it lacks from the "final" version, the option of the broken unstable nightly build and a layout as to what all THAT entails (especially including warnings about needing to back up stuff with links to instructions on how to do that because shit g'un break y'all), better projections, goals for the 1.0 build (without pie-in-the-sky things like "surface wipes" and etc), and so forth.

But that's me.

 

Just to make a quick note: but I don't think they ever really wanted to do Early Access. I believe the only reason they even did it at all is because there was such a massively high demand for people to get into the beta-testing.
I could be remembering wrong, but I definitely remember them saying something along the lines of this before they even opened it up for Early Access.

I'll also mention that those indicating a larger concern on Steam forums is likely because those people don't realize there even is a nightly branch or dev-updates on the official website. Neither of these things were openly mentioned on Steam so it's likely that the majority of people who've never been to this site simply believe that development is completely dead since it's been months since the last stable update.

And as I've said before, an occasional stable update would resolve a lot of these concerns. I would hope the devs will consider this soon.

 

could be faster but i got smashbros to pass the time untill rebirth comes out

im gonna use tons of hours into that

 

If "ifs" and "buts" were candy and nuts, we'd all have a merry Christmas.

I'd be a liar if I said I was content with the way it's been handled so far, a couple of Charleston shuffles the past few months thats for sure. With that said they've been covering ground with the nightlies and dev blogs & it appears to be coming together at a steady pace again since the whole moving phase.

I've been waiting far longer than EA, I can wait a little more.

 

Yeah well, While they are still working on it and still showing that they are working on it, calling it vaporware is downright libelous[DOUBLEPOST=1412162647][/DOUBLEPOST]

Actually I think the reason they Did Early Access was because they needed the money.

 

They needed even more money, right after they got all those money from pre-orders on CF website? Don't think so.

 

Remember that the pre-order package included beta invite, and the best way Chucklefish saw to do that was to make the beta be early access on steam.

 

it would have also just been a stupid missed opportunity to not include EA. would have been a quite obvious, really dumb, business move.

 

Yeah, beta invite. I think non-steam version would be 100 times better.
In separate launcher you can select prefered builds from list, different branches, etc. So no problems with wipes, updates, updates size and such, every one could choose that they want. There you can also add build-in mod manager.
And in general criteria for non steam version would be lower. Less pointless criticism about not-important (or not yet important) stuff and such

Only reasons for Steam i could think of are:
- more money for moving to London
- centralized path distribution so CF doesn't have to deploy their own server or some kind of paths storage.
- my personal favorite, the tinfoil one. Steam doesn't offer refunds.

Yeah, great for business, but as it turned out - bad for customers.

 

not at all. just bad for the ones who love EA that hate EA that love EA, or something like that.

 

I feel like I'm missing something significant, but the way the above posters described it makes it sound like they did abuse the EA system (I won't say more than that because I feel like I'm walking on eggshells on this forum, no offense). That said, I'm not going to jump to conclusions based on things said about Chucklefish.

Steam offers refunds if something truly underhanded has been done. They did it for WarZ, they offered refunds for a game that lied about not having DRM (i think it was some Ubisoft game, maybe From Dust or something), and I think there's been at least one or two others.

 

If memory serves, there was/is a non-steam DRM free version if you purchase it through the humble store.
Secondly, I believe they plan to add steam achievments and such someday... so putting the game on the platform now so they could test such things when they are implemented makes sense.

And take it from me... any action a company makes, regardless of how innocent, will always been seen by an outside observer as shady. Why? Because people are un-trusting of those who have the money they gave them.
Back when I was on Terraria's team, and there was some random Steam pricing hiccup, everyone accused us of being greedy. But it was legitimately a pricing error which was corrected less than an hour later. Then people accused us of more stuff BECAUSE it was fixed. It was really a lot to deal with as a developer 'community' wise, and from my perspective it was unnecessarily blown out of proportion by that same community.

I would say the Early Access thing is the same.

The conversation at Chucklefish was probably this... as it was the one we had at Re-Logic (of course before EA and even green-light was a thing on steam).

"So how should we distribute the game?"
"Steam"
"Why Steam?"
Because Steam contacted us and wants to distribute our game for us."
"Sound good."

There was probably little mulling over. Steam is a great platform for releasing games. Not only does it now offer an EA system which keeps the game out of the 'normal store', to prevent people from assuming they are getting a full game (not sure how people can look at the Starbound store page on steam and NOT understand it's early access with those big blue letters saying so). But it also offers a great way to advertise and build a community around a game with little work on the Devs part. This allows them to work more on the game itself. Beyond that, Steam does all the hard work on behind the scenes store stuff for a Dev team whom doesn't want to build their own store into their website. Why would a Dev team not want to do that? Well, if you have a store you have to deal with international purchases, tracking purchases for DRM if you want it, attaching it to your launcher, making an account system to track that info, etc. You would also need to have a few people dedicated to reading emails about purchase issues and such, especially on a customer number scale as large as Starbounds Pre-Order created.

Honestly, (and not because someone is lazy) most Devs would choose someone else to do that all for them.

 

Nah, there WILL be a non-steam version on release (as has always been said). Humble bundle is still steam keys.

 

Ah I see. I was mistaken.

 

Well, i'm not arguing against EA and Steam, or about Starbound being in Steam in general. I'm trying to say that, IMO, in retrospective bringing SB into EA right from the start was huge marketing success (steam chart clearly showing it, trying to argue about it is pointless) but big mistake "in general"(?), sorry, but i dunno how to phase it better - i mean things like reputation, ppl opinion toward CF, EA in general and such. In short, the game wasn't ready for EA. At first it seems stupid - there are tons of complete shyte and even fraud in EA, and SB doing great in compassion. But thanks to huge hype around SB it started in leagues with best EA project - and in compassion with them SB progress in EA (not the original build, but progression) seems really bad. All aspects needed for "good" EA game were missing - pathing system were horrible (probably because SB data structure), communication through Steam was nill, info about game in Steam was severely lacking, constant wipes (yeah, i know about Stage system and wholeheartedly support it, but it isn't suited for EA well), and later lack of update - all those make SB horrible EA game.

If CF sold SB on their side first (btw, some successful EA games started this way), solve some of the original problems, and release game in EA later, right now things would be much better.