A
post to the RSI Community Forums from Ben Lesnick addresses the question of
whether Cloud Imperium will offer refunds for other
Star Citizen
customers following
the
news that they'd refunded the pledge of Derek Smart due to his outspoken
criticism of the space game's crowdfunding. He says: "We refunded Mr. Smart’s package
because he was using Star Citizen as a platform to gain attention as part of a
campaign to promote his ‘Line of Defense’ space game." Smart disputes this to
PC Invasion, saying that he's never posted to their website and calling the post "pure
libel." For those looking to get a refund by getting Smart with them, Lesnick
adds a warning: "that is not to say you can get your money back by simply being
as obnoxious as possible; we’re also able to ban accounts from the forums
without requiring a refund." Here's the post:
I believe I can clarify
this. We refunded Mr. Smart’s package because he was using Star Citizen as a
platform to gain attention as part of a campaign to promote his ‘Line of
Defense’ space game. Our ToS (or in this case, the Kickstarter ToS) allows us to
refund troubled users who we would rather not have interacting with the
community. The process lets us entirely disable their accounts, preventing them
from playing the finished game. Think of it as the video game equivalent of a
‘we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone’ sign in a restaurant. We’ve
used this ability a limited number of times in the past, always with the aim of
improving the community (until today, the most famous example being our old
friend jcrg99/Manzes/PonyMillar/he of many other alts.)
I do now want to stress that that is not to say you can get your money back by
simply being as obnoxious as possible; we’re also able to ban accounts from the
forums without requiring a refund. But sometimes we take a look at a user and
decide that they’re so toxic or their intentions are so sinister that we simply
don’t want them associated with Star Citizen.
As for refund requests working the other way: per the ToS, we’re not required to
offer them. We do try and work with backers who are facing hardships, but the
hard truth is that the money is by necessity being spent to develop a game
rather than sitting unused somewhere (that being the significant difference with
Steam; those refunds are taken out of their games’ profits rather than their
development budgets.)