This week we reported on a rather big story regarding on a Kickstarter backer and the video game project known as Star Citizen. You’ve likely already read through the details, though if you haven’t, you can read our coverage on the matter right here. With all the recent reports and widespread coverage, could we see more backers attempt for a refund?
Again, to give the story its full justice we highly recommend checking out our complete coverage of the Star Citizen debacle. However, to give a quick bit of insight as to what had happened, we’ll briefly cover the basics.
A Kickstarter backer by the name of Streetroller had pledged $3,000 to a video game project known as Star Citizen. Despite missing goals in delivering their promised video game to their backers, Streetroller continued to allow the content creators involved, Cloud Imperium Games and Robert Space Industries, space to work on the project.
That was until a new Terms of Service was sent out that would give backers a tough time to request refunds. At this point, the project was well behind its slated release date and there have been rocky reports on the current product status. It was at this point that Streetroller declined the new Terms of Service and requested his $3,000 back.
After exchanging emails on how the backer was no longer entitled to a refund, Streetroller hired an attorney where he was able to secure the backer’s refund. Now, with all the coverage of this difficult to obtain a refund, we can’t help but wonder if there will be more cases popping up from disgruntled backers.
We recently discovered that Streetroller first approached Derek Smart, who detailed his involvement with Star Citizen, the content creators, and his coverage on the Kickstarter campaign. The latest posting, at the time of writing this, shares his point of view with the recent Streetroller refund and how he could not claim the refund as one of his victories.
“There is a lot of misinformation going around about the recent “Streetroller refund debacle“, as well as the involvement of myself and Goons in the whole fiasco.
As much as we’d like to claim this “victory” for a backer, truth is, we had nothing to do with the end result. At all.
The fact is that since July 2015 when I wrote my first blog, I have taken CIG/RSI to task over promises made to backers. Shortly thereafter I even got my attorneys involved in which I asked them – nicely – to refund backers who requested a refund as that’s the right thing to do seeing as they had broken every promise made to backers who had given them millions for a product they have failed to deliver in Nov 2014.”
Perhaps we’ll see backers request refunds if they have already declined the Terms of Service and we’re certainly interested in seeing just how many backers opted to decline the latest ToS in general. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see what else may come from this fiasco.
