Dude just had the dream he's been working on for the past several years fall apart. I think he's allowed to be stressed, angry, and incoherent. And probably not sober.
Protip for the gamers: Don't pay more for an unfinished game than you'd be comfortable spending if the thing never went any further than what you have now. Eight bucks should not be enough to make you ask for a refund if you've gotten so much as a good day's enjoyment out of the thing; anything beyond that is lagniappe.
Protip for the developers (and anyone else who has big projects in their computer): Back dat shit up. Automatically. Get a hard drive in an anonymous box, get a Time Capsule, have it back up to it automatically so you never have to think about it again. Cloud backups are dropping in price. Get some happening. Automatically. If shit happens - theft/disaster/whatever - you're only out the hardware and maybe one day's work.
I agree that if people lost less than $10, it shouldn't give them the right to call the developers all kinds of horrible names and whatnot. Gamers can be a rabid and venomous bunch.
And hey, nobody said the game was gone forever. The CM said they'd pick up and start working on it again. It will take longer, yes.
Should the dev have gotten drunk and start telling fans to fuck off and die and whatnot? No. Idiot move.
On the bright side, most indie devs appear to have a wonderful combination of professional decorum and personal, friendly sensibility that makes them a pleasure for the consumer to interact with. Cases like this appear to be an unfortunate aberration.
As someone who's been personally following the Project Zomboid thing on and off for months, this greatly saddens me.
We'd just gotten done about a month or so ago with what I'd dub "The Big Wait", in which the whole PayPal/Google Checkout thing tested the limits of many paying people's patience, and the stress limits of the community manager over how many people were hounding them with doubts, cynicism, and quite frankly some words that don't much bear repeating.
Yeah, these devs have been through a lot. And honestly, folks are being kinda unreasonable. AND I can see where he'd feel the stress, considering in order to even more forward, they'd basically have to do a mini-repeat of "The Big Wait" after they'd quite strongly promised that there wouldn't be another one.
That does NOT give the devs to act in the manner they did, though. Up until now, they've been pretty frosty about the whole thing. There -was- a post that was showing some cracks in the armor, but that was a post kindly telling folks to back off, and that they were doing the best they could. To pull something like this is not only extremely unprofessional, but you've now both -validated- your longtime naysayers, and completely blown whatever credibility you've had towards your most faithful and patient customers.
Having SAID all of that, though...
On the case of this being a black eye towards indie developers, I'd just like to say that this sort of thing happening to indie development wasn't a case of IF, it was a case of WHEN. It's a major shame it had to be these guys.
I'm really sympathetic, I really am. Getting robbed is total bullshit, and nobody ever deserves to go through it. I am a gigantic supporter of Indie games, and I routinely give $5 on Kickstarter here and there to random Indie games, just to support the art.
That said, there's just simply no excuse for not having backups. None.
Just imagine a scenario in which Notch tweets: "Guys, so sorry, my house got robbed and my laptop with all Minecraft source code has been stolen. No backups, sorry."
I'm inclined to say that their rise was a bit faster than Notch's with Minecraft. I think Notch and the rest of Mojang have had a huge impact on how Indie games are perceived.
while there's "no excuse", he does have SOME code left. It's not like it's all gone. He lost months of work. I refuse to believe some of us haven't gone through similar with Word documents or Excel spreadsheets.
Did he handle it unprofessionally? Yes. Do I empathize? Hell yes. I don't hold it against them. They're a couple people who have managed to hit it big.
Quick addendum here- when I say people are being unreasonable, I'm saying that the detractors were going overboard. I am NOT saying their overt anger at Indie Stone not keeping backups is unjustified. Stupid, STUPID move, especially with github and what have you in existence.
I refuse to believe some of us haven't gone through similar with Word documents or Excel spreadsheets.
Don't think many of us have been out soliciting money on the basis of those files though.
Not having some form of offsite backup for your businesses mission critical files is both incredibly stupid and utterly unprofessional.
But then this is the outfit that didn't feel it necessary to read the ToS for Google checkout and who's lead dev was throwing f-bombs at the userbase on twitter...
Just imagine a scenario in which Notch tweets: "Guys, so sorry, my house got robbed and my laptop with all Minecraft source code has been stolen. No backups, sorry."
Let's be realistic. Everybody thinks backups are somehow cheap and easy and a magical panacea, but the cold hard reality is: nope. People are saying that the guys didn't have any backups, but they did. They were mirroring the most recent changes between two independent machines. The problem is that both machines were stolen and were not sending data offsite every day.
People have this misguided belief that "real developers" have some sort of elaborate backup scheme with multiple layers of redundancy, but they really don't. I can't name names, but I know of a large house that relies on replicating between sites with snapshots. No tape, no offsite. If data gets corrupted, they have to be aware, then roll back to a prior snapshot. Corruption is replicated as-is between sites, meaning it spreads. Sometimes, they don't have a prior snapshot with clean data less than a week old. So they just lost a week of work. Until the game actually ships, they don't actually ship any data offsite at all. Others don't even have a second site; they rely entirely on snapshots and RAID. Maybe they burn a DVD once a week or once a month. Only shipped products get put on backup tapes, and usually for a rather short period. Maybe a few years at most.
Even if they had been shipping data offsite, which is not always reasonable either due to cost or complexity, they had a perfectly reasonable backup model. Most businesses only send data offsite once a week and don't keep multiple copies in independent locations with version control. Did they make OTHER mistakes? Yes. Did they lose the whole repo? No. They lost the data since the last offsite. Here's the thing: the key problem, the lost data and equipment, could happen to even 'professionals' - and has. Burglary is generally not something you expect or anticipate happening, and pretty much every system is vulnerable to it. If the media holding your backup is stolen or destroyed, that's that.
Does that forgive the way they handled it? Nope. Should they have been backing up more regularly? Hard to say - one one hand they say 'a lot,' I heard 'a month' and 'a few weeks.' They backed stuff up, they had a fairly reasonable strategy for it, and then some asshole made off with the original and the local copies. He took the media with the backups. If they'd put it on external drives, it wouldn't have helped any either. Laptops and portable drives, both easy to carry, pretty easy to sell on the street.
Don't worry. These guys made enough other mistakes that forgiving the one, doesn't make up for the whole. (Or maybe worry. I don't know. Up to you.)
I totally disagree. Real developers DO have elaborate strategies. Off-site backups are cheap, and their strategy was not reasonable; it was reckless.
My product's codebase is in a private cloud-based repository with every release also stored in two remote tier 4 data centers. Should a tornado take out my office, the most we'd lose is 30 minutes of work. When you're dealing with other people's money you have an obligation to protect their investment. These guys crapped the bed.
When I started my dev project we bought up svn service from codesion for an extremely reasonable price. I have every single revision of our souce code backed up there going through February. Meanwhile, 2 out of 4 dev workstations I use do image backups to a nas. That nas has a dropbox account for itself that copies over the drive images to dropbox twice a week.
Someone could kill all my developers (me included), steal all of our dev machines, nuke codesion's data center, and light my nas on fire. We would still have our code backed up and easily restored for the new living developers and in the worse case loose 3 days of work.
I think this system is costing me $40/mo and took about 4 hours to setup. Meanwhile I'm sure DropBox and Codesion have offsite data backups as well.
So, just another disagree vote based on my experience. Backups for small team development projects are cheap and easy and a magical panacea, but they take 4 hours of effort and a small monthly fee
Had I donated, regardless of the amount, I'd be pretty miffed myself.
Getting your stuff stolen is a bitch, don't get me wrong, but with cloud storage being as cheap as it is that's not an excuse. Had they maybe lost a week worth of work that would of been excusable, but not *months*.
As everyone else mentioned, Dropbox would of fixed the problem - likely for free. I use Dropbox, but I'm also a huge fan of BackBlaze which backs up your entire system (regardless of size) for a flat $5/month. Why the developer didn't take a step like this is beyond me.
It really does suck because as people on reddit are quick to point out, it will really make you think twice next time.
Dropbox would have solved this problem. $10 a month.
Risk versus reward. Dropbox has had numerous glaring security problems widely publicized. Would you trust somebody with Icrontic's entire life force when they've had more than 3 incidents where anyone in the world could have just stolen it? (Answer: oh HELL no.) I could see Amazon S3 or HP Cloud Services (if you got into the beta,) but they both have their own issues - one has no availability guarantee or data safety guarantee, and the other's a beta. Bleeding edge is cool and all, but not how you handle data that critical to your business.
Second, they've already said they had offsites. When you're dealing with version control systems, you can't just randomly copy things up into the cloud. Version control integrity takes priority, always and forever. And that's not a point up for debate here, either - that comes straight out of people at Bioware, EA, and Blizzard. And that doesn't cover your IP assets such as artwork, levels, and so on which are also kept under version control.
Not everyone is comfortable with keeping their source with someone else, and for good reason. My company uses replication and offsite tape because we read all the terms of service very carefully and understand exactly what it all means and consulted with a lawyer. Most of them have more holes than a sieve, where they can lose all your stored data and have no recourse. They can be down for 5 days, and you're just SOL. And still others end up with a perpetual right to more or less take your code and release it as their own product.
Either way, people are way to obsessed with the backups. As I said: it is fact that big publishing houses do about the same, or a worse job of it. These guys have made plenty of other, much larger, uglier mistakes in handling this entire thing from day one.
There is absolutely no excuse for not storing important data back ups off site. It's not backed up properly until then, it's as simple as that, I don't care what it is, if its important, you need an off site copy. If you don't trust the commercial cloud storage solutions, there are other ways to do it, but if its important you will find a way to get that data in two places. It's really that simple and anyone familiar enough with computing to code a game knows better.
There is absolutely no reason to defend these guys for not backing up off site. The only possitive thing I can say is that I actually think its pretty cool that he was candid about it to a point where it might help remind other people not to make the same mistake.
They're allowed to handle the situation however they want. One of the reasons they don't work at some corporation is so they don't have to handle everything with some BS PR statement - they can just tell you to STFU. Oh, and by the way, no one has a right to a refund. You can check their site, desura (for alphafunding) and anywhere else you can buy the game - YOU ARE NOT GUARANTEED TO GET ANYTHING (Besides the alpha). Alphafunding/Crowdfunding is a gamble, and you can very easily pay for nothing. That's how it works, and everyone knew that ahead of time. No one has a right to complain about the status of the game.
Comments
Protip for the gamers: Don't pay more for an unfinished game than you'd be comfortable spending if the thing never went any further than what you have now. Eight bucks should not be enough to make you ask for a refund if you've gotten so much as a good day's enjoyment out of the thing; anything beyond that is lagniappe.
Protip for the developers (and anyone else who has big projects in their computer): Back dat shit up. Automatically. Get a hard drive in an anonymous box, get a Time Capsule, have it back up to it automatically so you never have to think about it again. Cloud backups are dropping in price. Get some happening. Automatically. If shit happens - theft/disaster/whatever - you're only out the hardware and maybe one day's work.
I agree that if people lost less than $10, it shouldn't give them the right to call the developers all kinds of horrible names and whatnot. Gamers can be a rabid and venomous bunch.
And hey, nobody said the game was gone forever. The CM said they'd pick up and start working on it again. It will take longer, yes.
Should the dev have gotten drunk and start telling fans to fuck off and die and whatnot? No. Idiot move.
We'd just gotten done about a month or so ago with what I'd dub "The Big Wait", in which the whole PayPal/Google Checkout thing tested the limits of many paying people's patience, and the stress limits of the community manager over how many people were hounding them with doubts, cynicism, and quite frankly some words that don't much bear repeating.
Yeah, these devs have been through a lot. And honestly, folks are being kinda unreasonable. AND I can see where he'd feel the stress, considering in order to even more forward, they'd basically have to do a mini-repeat of "The Big Wait" after they'd quite strongly promised that there wouldn't be another one.
That does NOT give the devs to act in the manner they did, though. Up until now, they've been pretty frosty about the whole thing. There -was- a post that was showing some cracks in the armor, but that was a post kindly telling folks to back off, and that they were doing the best they could. To pull something like this is not only extremely unprofessional, but you've now both -validated- your longtime naysayers, and completely blown whatever credibility you've had towards your most faithful and patient customers.
Having SAID all of that, though...
On the case of this being a black eye towards indie developers, I'd just like to say that this sort of thing happening to indie development wasn't a case of IF, it was a case of WHEN. It's a major shame it had to be these guys.
That said, there's just simply no excuse for not having backups. None.
Just imagine a scenario in which Notch tweets: "Guys, so sorry, my house got robbed and my laptop with all Minecraft source code has been stolen. No backups, sorry."
People would be a bit angry, yeah.
while there's "no excuse", he does have SOME code left. It's not like it's all gone. He lost months of work. I refuse to believe some of us haven't gone through similar with Word documents or Excel spreadsheets.
Did he handle it unprofessionally? Yes. Do I empathize? Hell yes. I don't hold it against them. They're a couple people who have managed to hit it big.
Not having some form of offsite backup for your businesses mission critical files is both incredibly stupid and utterly unprofessional.
But then this is the outfit that didn't feel it necessary to read the ToS for Google checkout and who's lead dev was throwing f-bombs at the userbase on twitter...
Let's be realistic. Everybody thinks backups are somehow cheap and easy and a magical panacea, but the cold hard reality is: nope. People are saying that the guys didn't have any backups, but they did. They were mirroring the most recent changes between two independent machines. The problem is that both machines were stolen and were not sending data offsite every day.
People have this misguided belief that "real developers" have some sort of elaborate backup scheme with multiple layers of redundancy, but they really don't. I can't name names, but I know of a large house that relies on replicating between sites with snapshots. No tape, no offsite. If data gets corrupted, they have to be aware, then roll back to a prior snapshot. Corruption is replicated as-is between sites, meaning it spreads. Sometimes, they don't have a prior snapshot with clean data less than a week old. So they just lost a week of work. Until the game actually ships, they don't actually ship any data offsite at all. Others don't even have a second site; they rely entirely on snapshots and RAID. Maybe they burn a DVD once a week or once a month. Only shipped products get put on backup tapes, and usually for a rather short period. Maybe a few years at most.
Even if they had been shipping data offsite, which is not always reasonable either due to cost or complexity, they had a perfectly reasonable backup model. Most businesses only send data offsite once a week and don't keep multiple copies in independent locations with version control. Did they make OTHER mistakes? Yes. Did they lose the whole repo? No. They lost the data since the last offsite. Here's the thing: the key problem, the lost data and equipment, could happen to even 'professionals' - and has. Burglary is generally not something you expect or anticipate happening, and pretty much every system is vulnerable to it. If the media holding your backup is stolen or destroyed, that's that.
Does that forgive the way they handled it? Nope. Should they have been backing up more regularly? Hard to say - one one hand they say 'a lot,' I heard 'a month' and 'a few weeks.' They backed stuff up, they had a fairly reasonable strategy for it, and then some asshole made off with the original and the local copies. He took the media with the backups. If they'd put it on external drives, it wouldn't have helped any either. Laptops and portable drives, both easy to carry, pretty easy to sell on the street.
Don't worry. These guys made enough other mistakes that forgiving the one, doesn't make up for the whole. (Or maybe worry. I don't know. Up to you.)
My product's codebase is in a private cloud-based repository with every release also stored in two remote tier 4 data centers. Should a tornado take out my office, the most we'd lose is 30 minutes of work. When you're dealing with other people's money you have an obligation to protect their investment. These guys crapped the bed.
Dropbox would have solved this problem. $10 a month.
Someone could kill all my developers (me included), steal all of our dev machines, nuke codesion's data center, and light my nas on fire. We would still have our code backed up and easily restored for the new living developers and in the worse case loose 3 days of work.
I think this system is costing me $40/mo and took about 4 hours to setup. Meanwhile I'm sure DropBox and Codesion have offsite data backups as well.
So, just another disagree vote based on my experience. Backups for small team development projects are cheap and easy and a magical panacea, but they take 4 hours of effort and a small monthly fee
Only if the source is over 2GB, otherwise, FREE.
Getting your stuff stolen is a bitch, don't get me wrong, but with cloud storage being as cheap as it is that's not an excuse. Had they maybe lost a week worth of work that would of been excusable, but not *months*.
As everyone else mentioned, Dropbox would of fixed the problem - likely for free. I use Dropbox, but I'm also a huge fan of BackBlaze which backs up your entire system (regardless of size) for a flat $5/month. Why the developer didn't take a step like this is beyond me.
It really does suck because as people on reddit are quick to point out, it will really make you think twice next time.
Risk versus reward. Dropbox has had numerous glaring security problems widely publicized. Would you trust somebody with Icrontic's entire life force when they've had more than 3 incidents where anyone in the world could have just stolen it? (Answer: oh HELL no.) I could see Amazon S3 or HP Cloud Services (if you got into the beta,) but they both have their own issues - one has no availability guarantee or data safety guarantee, and the other's a beta. Bleeding edge is cool and all, but not how you handle data that critical to your business.
Second, they've already said they had offsites. When you're dealing with version control systems, you can't just randomly copy things up into the cloud. Version control integrity takes priority, always and forever. And that's not a point up for debate here, either - that comes straight out of people at Bioware, EA, and Blizzard. And that doesn't cover your IP assets such as artwork, levels, and so on which are also kept under version control.
Not everyone is comfortable with keeping their source with someone else, and for good reason. My company uses replication and offsite tape because we read all the terms of service very carefully and understand exactly what it all means and consulted with a lawyer. Most of them have more holes than a sieve, where they can lose all your stored data and have no recourse. They can be down for 5 days, and you're just SOL. And still others end up with a perpetual right to more or less take your code and release it as their own product.
Either way, people are way to obsessed with the backups. As I said: it is fact that big publishing houses do about the same, or a worse job of it. These guys have made plenty of other, much larger, uglier mistakes in handling this entire thing from day one.
On a side note: I DO trust Dropbox with a lot of very important Icrontic stuff. Hasn't let me down yet.
There is absolutely no excuse for not storing important data back ups off site. It's not backed up properly until then, it's as simple as that, I don't care what it is, if its important, you need an off site copy. If you don't trust the commercial cloud storage solutions, there are other ways to do it, but if its important you will find a way to get that data in two places. It's really that simple and anyone familiar enough with computing to code a game knows better.
There is absolutely no reason to defend these guys for not backing up off site. The only possitive thing I can say is that I actually think its pretty cool that he was candid about it to a point where it might help remind other people not to make the same mistake.
git commit -m "STFU"
git push origin master
git commit -m "STFU"
git push origin master
Or gmail.
Yet
So, the devs have rights but the people who fund them don't. Got it.
That's a complete fucktard contradiction, Evan. Are you a complete fucktard?
I have Catalyst 3.6 drivers and iTunes 5.0 and highpoint rocketraid 404 drivers and Abit BP6 drivers still backed up.
Of course, I say this but I rarely follow my own advice. Still, I'm not charging people for anything that relies on my data.