Holy shit. Why does no one sue these liars? That's false advertising isn't it?
Lawsuits are expensive and the return is minimal. The best chance is to protest with Kickstarter directly, saying that they deceptively advertised to you and not delivering on Steam was not delivering on what was promised.
My bet is Deep Silver got burned on Metro Exodus pre-orders as pretty much everyone rushed to Steam to do that when they found out it was going on Epic.
I'd be interested in seeing some group like the ACCC's take on this. We all know how steams policy of 'lol, no refunds' turned out for them and it also reeks of something like a bait and switch to me.
You might have a chance to e-mail Kickstarter and say that the product wasn't delivered as promised and that they used deceptive practices since it was still on Steam and you never would have committed money to a project knowing it would be an Epic exclusive. That's the route I would take. If I recall correctly, the Fig kickstarted one did give refunds, because it did probably violate the terms of service. Too bad they can't charge back, that hurts a company way more than giving a refund.
I wonder if the bullshit with Deep Silver, both things we have and have not seen, is part of the reason why Sony appears to have distanced itself from S3. You’d think Sony would have been excited to show it off right now but nary a word about it. Seems awfully strange considering the Kickstarter for the game debuted at Sony’s E3 conference in 2015.
Its probably one of the reasons. If you watched E3, anytime something was announced on the Epic store it was like "It is on Epic k thx bye" and they rushed off the stage. Its very clear just how fundamentally unpopular Epic is right now. There's no avoiding it. The thing with Shenmue is its fanbase is fanatical and now supremely pissed.
Depends on your standards, but to me not selling much of anything is still a flop. You may have gotten paid, but you effectively just lost sales if the backlash sticks. Now judging if this was a good or bad idea in the end financial is literally impossible unless we can time travel or go to different realities where Shenmue 3 isn't an Epic exclusive.
Sure a publisher got paid, but what after that? You can't just keep signing Epic exclusive deals forever, can you? Do we even know what Epic paid? These are valid questions and I can not even begin to imagine why any of this happened in the first place. I guess the creator is just going to retire after this because, fuck how do you even put your name on something after this? Sony was already involved after the Kickstarter, why does Epic even need to exist in this? I can only imagine a development issue has caused this sudden change, which if that is true doesn't bode well for Shenmue 3's actual quality.
The summary for me is, if the remains of this deal by the end of development, becomes less than the possible profit that may have been projected on release isn't larger than the actual end profit. In simpler terms as that is a mouthful, the profit post this deal + epic's money needs to exceed the profit prior to this deal, end of story. If the former fails to exceed the latter this is a failure. Yet for all we know Shenmue was too niche to not just flop sales and profit wise anyway as it doesn't exactly seem like it'll be a huge stunning release with the early 2000s acting and not exactly stunning visuals, and a lot of people that actually cared probably already got it through the kickstarter. So maybe this was the actual best option as at least they get mostly paid anyway for sure.
This entire issue is so hard to put any figures on because it involves literally different time lines to figure out if this was a good idea. So I dunno, trying to piece this situation together actually hurts my head when I decided to actually figure out how good of an idea this was financially speaking. To me, the better alternative would have been to just be a timed exclusive and get some of the money if you really needed it. I also see little way Shenmue will continue after this or this studio really, part of me thinks this is someone who just wants to retire in the easiest way possible.
I mean, Epic is not putting out numbers. The only thing we have to compare Epic to is bullshit apples and orange comparisons that Ubisoft and Metro put out. My guess is they're doing worse than GoG right now, if I had to put a pin in it, so maybe 3rd, even with all the exclusivity. GoG doesn't have infinite money to inject into itself, hence the lay-offs and such. Which is why it wanted to knee-cap Epic somewhat by preventing their game from going on their platform right around the time the hype is the most. Exclusives don't just hurt Steam, they hurt GoG too. Cyberpunk is a huge hammer they can wield. If they chose not to put it on Epic, what the fuck is Epic going to do? Microsoft has already thrown shade at Epic exclusivity. Its too early to tell with Epic exclusivity, but with the way exclusives have become more expensive for them, the financials are not working out for these deals.
All we know is that the Epic exclusivity deals are getting progressively more expensive for Epic. Borderlands 3, for example, is only exclusive for 6 months and it looks like shit anyway. There are rumors that they compensate for Steam sales as well with projections. There's also the fact that one of the guys on the Fig team let it out that Epic basically gave them their entire budget for exclusivity for a year, which was 2.5 million. So I'd estimate they'd paid maybe, 4-5 million, since its a bigger game with a larger following. I think that any developer who uses the Unreal engine they are going to try and rope them with an exclusivity deal.
You have to understand, these checks aren't cut to developers, they're cut to publishers. So more than likely than money is going to Deep Silver executives and not the guy who made the game, even though he's going to eat shit for it. And he was praising Epic and 'supporting them' with Unreal. Yeah, just like you used Steam to shill your game faggot. The guy smells fishy to begin with, they opened a Kickstarter and then get funded by Sony. Smells of lots of greed and exploiting a fanbase.
And as far as we can see, Epic is going to continue to do exclusives. They aren't putting a single dime into the store, which is functionally worse than a game company's merch store because they've got shopping carts. The elimination of the development roadmap to their platform indicates that it is a secondary concern. They do not care about the store, only that it functions to take your money and has only the most bare-bones things. Its basically a key site with a Fortnite launcher. Their primary goal is to secure a foot-hold with extremely aggressive exclusivity deals.
On a side note, Steam has kept the game up, which means the Steam forums are still active with a ton of pissed off people:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/878670/discussions/
, but that's not going to do dick for the people who backed it in the first place unless they either hold off on fulfillment of the original pledge or grandfather them in like they did with Metro Exodus.
