Perhaps I just don't share your feel of entitlement. Maybe we've just backed the project on kickstarter for different reasons. Maybe you just have little empathy and understanding for other people in general. I don't know.
Perhaps I just don't share your feeling of gratitude over people doing what they've promised to do in order to obtain funding, and consider this normal behaviour and nothing especially praiseworthy. Maybe we've got considerably different ideas of what kickstarter promises entail. Maybe you are a ten kilometer tall purple invisible accordion-playing smurf, that likes to belittle people that disagree with you. I don't know.
[skipped a paragraph praising Larian, noting that LordCrash didn't care about stretch goals, and presenting LordCrash as a true philanthropist supporting a worthy cause.]
And I honor them because compared to the "industry standard" they do a lot more. They want to create more stuff even though the game is already "finished", without additional charging, not only for the 20,000 kickstarter backers but also for the 200,000 or more regular customer to whom they never gave any promise or whatsover.
See the above. I can admire people who
do more, but I expect people to live up to their words.
Most of the other companies in the industry would have just cut the product short or release paid DLC afterwards (e.g. additional companions).
Objection!
Given the currently low number of completed crowd-funded games in the industry, it seems very unlikely that you have a single example of a crowd-funded game where something promised as a stretch goal that was fully funded was instead released as paid DLC, and extremely unlikely that you have an example of that with companions.
Which means that you are more likely here thinking of comparing a crowd-funded game, where such companions have been promised to backers as part of the game for reaching a certain funding target, with non-crowdfunded games, where players might very well have such wishes, but would have no reasonable expectation of it. In the latter case it would be entirely reasonable to expect such companions as paid DLC, in the former not.
In an industry in which paid DLC and microtransactions are all around I honor devs who want to improve on their product and who want to make their customers happy without asking for your money again.
So do I. I just disagree with you that that is what is going on here.
I see it as sound business logic given the circumstances, namely that nobody but the most blinkered would consider the current two companions and umpteen henchmen in the game to fulfill the explicit "Henchmen becomes companions" stretch goal as presented in the kickstarter updates during the kickstarter funding period.
And I acknowledge both their quality product and their working ethics. It's not like they didn't want to deliver on those stretch goals, not at all. They just couldn't deliver on every goal in time which is a common issue in game development. You - as a game developer - should know that best.
If there is one thing I do not doubt, it is that they have done their best and would have loved to do even better. That is the one thing that is common in all teams I've worked with and otherwise known of. You do the best you can under the circumstances you labour under....
...and you accept that what you get measured by is not how hard you worked or how well you coped with adversity (because there's bloody well always something that goes wrong), but on the quality of the product and on how you honoured your promises, if you made any.
And thanks for ignoring the whole rest of my post about communication and effects..."You don't get off that easily" you would probably say. I say cherry-picking...
The rest of your post wasn't directly relevant to the points I discussed and hence I saw little point in quoting your wall of text as a prelude to my own wall of text, as I didn't see how that would help anybody, but would only obfuscate the issue.
