Well, depending on how you define "promise" there are quite a lot who can't make their deadlines. Could argue that those are also the devil and whatnot. (Xenonauts comes to mind). Not that this issue bothers me, one of the benefits of KS is that the devs have more time to finish games and not get rushed.

And (while none of my games had any serious issues) aren't there any other examples of devs screwing up?

Touché :D

I still believe had all the cards been laid out on the table they would not have received the amount of pledges that they did. And they wouldn't be trying to wiggle their way out of the subsequential shitstorm that has ensued.

Those too!

By looking your posts, while I may be taking a huge guess here, not everyone on these forums is claiming to be a die hard DRM-free purist so who are we to judge those trades?

My point was that you can't dismiss all of the disappointed DRM-free pledgers by claiming that we get to sell Steam keys when some of us don't even want to receive them at all. Analogies are always bad, but what am I complaining when HBS is giving me drugs that are worth a fortune on the streets? Well, if they let us to believe this long that we were funding them to invent a cure for drug addiction...

TBH, he's just German, sometimes that looks like trolling. They just often times are incredibly literal and direct people.

In this case though, it's more or less indistinguishable from trolling.
Deadlines slip and in the vast majority of cases the deadline does seem to slip. But the reason is often times because they promised based upon assuming no stretch goals and once stretch goals come into it, it's perfectly reasonable to expect delays.

But, in this case, if you bother to read their FAQ from the campaign, it's abundantly clear that they were promising for the game to be available DRM free from their website. I personally wouldn't consider it a breach of terms if they had it available for sale in a DRM free manner from GOG or DotEmu, but having no DRM free option is just a slap in the face. I funded it in large part to encourage them to produce more DRM free games.

I've asked for a refund, we'll see if they're going to give it to me. If they do, then I might buy from them again, just not back or preorder anything they do.
Exactly, had they disclosed that they might not have control over where the game was distributed and might not be permitted to sell without DRM, that would be completely different. I might have opted to back anyways to encourage more RPGs of quality to be produced; but I can't say I was able to make an informed decision seeing as Steam wasn't even a certainty during the campaign.

Yes, there is one other I've come across that completely flubbed after getting their Kickstarter funded. It, not coincidentally, was a much smaller scale Kickstarter though. Of course in this case its a matter of the game likely never seeing completion which is a bigger deal IMO.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gentlemenstudios/rain

Apparently the guy who did the Kickstarter fired someone he brought on to do music for him, and the composer offered to do work for free. So yes this is an absolute flop of a Kickstarter and definitely a huge hit to the dev's reputation, since he featured himself in the Kickstarter pitch video.

It probably won't effect the reputation of gaming Kickstarters as a whole like Shadowrun, but it will ruin faith people had in the dev and might influence a few people in contributing further to smaller Kickstarters run by unknown devs.

This is what gets me. Why on earth didn't they tell backers during the kickstarter about this little detail ?. They didn't know? Or chose not to say anything about it?. Lucky i didn't back this KS.

Well, this thread has lost any sanity long before I joined it. And with the current state (or rather Dec 2012, but it doesn't look like it changed) of the forums, there really isn't a reason to take most of the people here serious any more.

Therefore I find masturbation jokes are mandated.

I heard stories about people going crazy after certain age. I thought they were just stories.

There are two possibilities:

* HBS decided that promising DRM-free content was necessary for a successful KS and decided to go ahead, even though they knew it would have to be curtailed.
* HBS thought they could do DRM-free, but failed to fully understand their licensing agreement until MS pointed it out to them.

If the first applies, that indicates cynical (and possibly contract-breaching) behaviour. The second suggests lack of competence, but an attempt to do the best they can for their backers.

I'm with Hedwards and those others who wanted a DRM-free release for the general public (not against Steam as an option, but definitely against Steam-exclusives). Unfortunately a refund is unlikely to be practical in my case (overseas backer who can't/won't use Paypal) so I've asked them to pass my pledge onto the EFF instead. Should do more good there.

In this day and age and for devs i would find this kind of hard to believe - surely they must have consulted their legal resources before they went ahead with any licensing agreement ?

Given that they're offering the base game as a DRM-free version, I'd tip on the first case.

If the licensing terms with MS required them to use DRM, they would have already been in the shit by releasing the original game DRM-free, unless MS has (theoretically) waived it on this occasion. I wouldn't be entirely convinced that a licence of this nature would stipulate distribution channels through (an exception being the use of GFWL in the past, as happened with Iron Brigade).

"DRM-free" has become the marketing tool of choice of late, and the few PC games that are actually DRM-free at retail nowadays make a pointing of advertising themselves as DRM-free.
More than likely, which is probably why they're releasing the base game DRM-free and then DRMing the rest of the content and deincentivising the use of the DRM-free version.

They're certainly operating within the confines of the agreement, but they're still exploiting a loophole.

I think the question is more whether this was designed as an outright bait-and-switch to begin with, or whether they chose Steam exclusivity at a later stage (most likely as a result of being approached and partly funded by Valve in exchange for exclusivity).

I dunno, anybody taking the view that the developers are fulfilling their promises is a wanker that shouldn't be taken seriously. I mean for god's sake the FAQ at the bottom of the campaign pledge pretty clearly indicates that they were promising that it would be available for purchase DRM free from their store. I don't think anybody is griping about that detail so much as it's not going to be available from GOG or any other DRM free sourche.

And yeah, as long as Mr. Gog takes the stance that there's no moderation needed the fora are going to continue to slide in terms of quality. It's pretty much inevitable when the rules are rarely, if ever, enforced and people realize that it's unlikely that they'd be enforced.

It's kind of like Canada. Obey the rules or we'll politely request that you stop breaking them, eh.

That's an interesting third option, which seems supported by Update #49:

"After a lot of prototyping and research, we decided that our best delivery option for OSX/Windows/Linux is to go the route that great games (like Skyrim!) have taken and embrace Steam and the Steam Workshop...."

which does read rather like Valve PR. In such a case, it could be HBS interpreting their license agreement as DRM-mandatory and casting MS as the villain.

While possible, such a situation does have the potential to backfire in the worst possible way for HBS.