2018-02-15 12:42:56

Actually no, or at least not until Breakerbox fulfills the promises it has made and that people have paid for in the way of preorders to see completed.

While the changes you note will benefit new customers, have you no thought or consideration for all those who paid for preorders of promised games only to see those promises never fulfilled and their money gone.

2018-02-15 13:58:09

Shrug I think it's just a matter of two many ideas at once. I don't think it's willful malice. My advice is to just finish what you have on your plate, people will be happier and be able to trust what you're doing as a company.

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2018-02-15 14:53:47

Right, you can want to do the right thing, and just not be good at managing time or ideas well.

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2018-02-15 15:06:20

In my opinion, if he was interested in getting positive feedback, he would have came here and explained the service as well as reply to questions. Technologies such as OCR are advancing well enough that this will be opsolete, and not to even mention you have a free service called be my eyes. Sure it is not exactly made for this, but they are very open to any kind of help and it has way more volonteers than this will ever have.

2018-02-15 16:08:01

I don't think I'd go that far, the last several times I tried to use Be My Eyes I was never connected to a volunteer even after several attempts. It was that lack of availability that prompted me to uninstall Be My Eyes and get Aira.

2018-02-15 16:40:28

Weird, I could always connect in a few minutes. I am guessing you use English as your language? If so, perhaps you were just unlucky and I don't think you should uninstall the app afterall. Also, I heard people use seeing AI for this job too.

2018-02-15 18:01:44 (edited by Orko 2018-02-15 18:03:09)

Since Aira is Be My Eyes, but with trained, professional assistants under a non disclosure agreement to protect your personal information, instead of untrained volunteers, now that I have Aira, what would I need Be My Eyes for?

Don't answer that, besides being off topic, it is just a rhetorical question that needs no answer.

2018-02-15 18:12:21

I agree with you, but be my eyes despite those flaws supports more languages and is free, so agree or not more people will use and like it.

2018-02-15 18:15:38

I've had nothing but good experiences with be my eyes.

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2018-02-15 18:27:33

We aren't going to disagree on the fact that BreakerBox has had problems. We are also not going to disagree, I hope, on the fact that they are working on at least some of them. The impression I have personally always gotten from this company is a matter of good ideas, bad execution, rather than a notion of malice or sheer greed. It has resulted in people getting screwed, and that's not good, but I don't think Jake is laughing all the way to the bank, if you catch my meaning.

And when I see comments like, "We all know this guy never keeps his promises", is it any wonder that he's not precisely a popular figure on the forum? If that was the kind of snark I was subjected to on a regular basis, even if I'd earned a great deal of scorn and anger for my behaviour, I very likely wouldn't be submitting myself for a whipping by posting on the forum more than I had to.
That said, have you noticed that the people who have pre-ordered or outright bought his games are getting emails? This means that he is reaching out, but largely to a client base he already knows and possesses. This is an issue of playing it safe, and while there are decent arguments for posting this on the forum, it's an interesting point that one of the community members went ahead and did it anyway. I don't think Jake's choice on this makes him a bad developer. There are points on both sides of that particular decision.

So yeah. I think moderation here is key. Not unflagging optimism, not snark, but realism. If you don't know the product's efficacy, don't judge it. If you aren't willing to acknowledge all relevant angles, maybe keep your opinions quieter until you are better informed. If you aren't willing to take a gamble on BreakerBox, no one's going to put a gun to your head or call you names or otherwise demonize you; it's completely understandable, since that negative rep didn't materialize overnight for no reason. Just consider the big picture. I say it all the time. Look at all the facts, not just the ones which selectively support your point of view.

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2018-02-15 19:57:45

Speaking of Breakerbox's bad reputation, for some reason I ordered the bundle yesterday morning and it's now evening here and I still haven't received anything. I'll give them a week then I'll try to get them down from paypal for fraud, even though I don't think his intentions are malicious either, but I just can't stand shady dealings, and neither should you.

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2018-02-16 01:54:58

Oh yeah, sending out emails about a new way for people to give him their money when many of those people paid for a preorder and never got it is a good way to show you aren't out to rip them off. Instead of coming out with new ideas to charge people for he should be working on fulfilling those orders he's already been paid for and has yet to deliver on.

Despite all his promises of making changes to correct the problems of the past, I still hear about too many people ordering stuff from him and never getting it, then having to file a dispute with paypal to get their money back.

It's easy to say nice things about him or to tell other people to give him a break when you have no money to spend on him. I'd be willing to bet that you'd be singing a very different tune if you were one of the many he's accepted money from for preorders and still haven't gotten what you paid for.

Considering your lack of involvement, your arguments don't really cary much weight with me.

2018-02-16 08:19:14

ANd adding to it after purchase he is sending the dropbox links. big_smile
Maybe better than a sendspace but still, crap.

From another side, their games are bugged as hell with screwed gameplay mechanics so again, i am out of their games land.

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2018-02-16 13:05:15

Excuse me, Orko, but now you've leapt without looking into the dangerous realm of assumption. Allow me to rescue you.
I have, in fact, dealt with BreakerBox games before. I was one of the first people to attempt to buy Airic the Cleric - as in, way way back before it had any voice acting at all - and so I know precisely the sort of difficulties this company is known for. I have actually bought that game a total of twice. As such, I'll ask you not to dismiss my arguments as weightless simply because you erroneously believed I have never had personal experience with this company. What's more logic is logic regardless of personal involvement. The only way you can get away with dismissing my arguments is if they lack context. They don't, as I have acknowledged that BreakerBox has definitely had many issues. I've acknowledged that people who have made pre-orders haven't gotten anything, and that people who have bought games often struggle to actually get their hands on them. This is bad, you'll get no argument from me there. All I have been saying is moderation. Not optimism, not undying praise, but moderation. You don't seem to realize that.

If the Paypal setup is still problematic, then that's an issue. People should ideally be able to pay via Paypal and then immediately (or within reasonable time) get some sort of download link. If that's not happening, then it quite obviously needs to be corrected.
The preorder issue is a little more difficult. If there is no product, there is no product. It's really that simple. To me at least, a problem with preorders is not grounds for criticizing a service which already appears to be available. One is about something yet to be delivered, the other is about a present-day service. If you claim that the preorder issue is a direct reason to criticize the GamerPal service, that is extremely illogical, and proves to me that you're not seeing the big picture.

Incidentally, the last version of Airic the Cleric I downloaded was actually pretty stable. Prior versions were indeed quite buggy, but that was later corrected. As far as screwy mechanics? I don't know quite what you mean there.

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2018-02-16 14:33:14 (edited by defender 2018-02-16 16:58:31)

Disclaimer: I have never ordered a game from breakerbox or played one of their games seriously, but I have followed many of the threads he's posted and talked to people who preordered them.


I agree with allot of what Jade is saying, but I can't just ignore what was brought up in posts 14 and 26.
Why would he come out with new ideas when he hasn't finished his old ones yet, why is he not devoting his time to improving his reputation and making his preorder customers happy?
Probably because he's decided not to do those projects anymore for what ever reason, (family or work obligations, lack of resources do to funding falling through or an unexpected increase in price, burnout do to criticism or an absence of motivation, ETC) and since they were only preorders, that's fare enough, disappointing maybe, but that's what you sign up for by doing that and it's common in the mainstream world as well.


Here's the thing though. To my knowledge he has refused to publicly announce the discontinuation of any of these projects, even those that have been delayed for years now, nor even give concrete updates on progress most of the time, and only after he's been hounded about it for weeks.
Not only does this mean that people must dispute the charges to get their money back, rather than being refunded as a group which is standard practice when a preorder goes bust, but it also means that he is actively fucking over the people who have been waiting for so long by wheeling out shiny new projects on a silver platter, which he has time to talk about apparently, while completely ignoring the reasonable concerns of those left in the dust, even when he is asked directly in those threads about it, something which he doesn't even dignify with a request to email him instead of shitting on his new game idea.


That's why your going to have a hard time getting people to agree with you when it comes to perceived improvement on any front, because that's exactly what we've all been trying to convince our selves of as it is, for years.
It's entirely possible for someone to use up all their good will and get run out of town on a rail, and with all the chances he's been given it's not all that unreasonable either, many communities would have flayed him alive for this much sooner, and warning potential new victims is just a natural consequence.
So at this point I don't really have much sympathy for his bad planning, because he clearly doesn't have much for his customers, and I've already seen too much willful ignorance from devs in this community over the years to cut him any slack, especially since he's charging for his games.


If you enjoy his released games, than by all means you should buy and play them, but when it comes to new titles he just isn't trustworthy, and it's only natural for that kind of crap to spill over and damage his reputation at large.

2018-02-16 15:29:04

@Defender

Exactly so! I suspect that he doesn't announce the abandonment of any of his projects he accepted preorders for because he knows that if he did, those people who paid for a preorder would rightfully demand a refund from him and he's already spent the money.

Eventually PayPal will catch on to him and kick him off their platform and that will pretty much put an end to his shinanigans.

2018-02-16 16:18:41

Yepp, I intend to help speed along that process if I haven't received my product in a week ... and that's a very generous amount of time. I realize people can be busy ... nevermind the fact there should be an automated system for this kind of thing but I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. Unless it is against the forum rules to do so I will make a topic and have people who have been screwed over by him let their voices be heard so that paypal can take a look at the severity of the case.

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2018-02-16 19:56:55

I'm sorry @jade and everyone else who supports breakerbox games but I simply cannot agree with you based on a lot of experience with jake and his service. I'll list a few points here. First of all. Where, pray tell, is steampunk neverland and clocktower chronicles? I preordered those for $25 a little over 2 and a half years ago, and since that original topic about the two games a grand total of 0 updates about their status have been made. Second? Edge of winter. I'm sorry but that's just an insult to me. I payed $15 for that, and how much of it can we play? A demo. Not even a functional demo, a buggy demo. This after again, two years of waiting. Also, the promises about edge of winter such as professional voice acting or sounds were never delivered. The acting is done largely by jake and some other people who I distinctly recall hearing from griff and griff2. Oh yeah, that brings me to my next point. the griff games were a disaster through and through. I swear to the god of pizza and beer, they bearly ran at all. They would unexplainably crash every few minutes, this would mean you'd have to start over from when you last saved. On top of that, your saved progress would sometimes corrupt in a way that didn't allow you to attack a boss for some reason. This means you have to play the entire game over again to that point. I'm sorry, but these are things that every beta tester no matter how incompatent would instantly notice. Also griff 2, just what the fuck? That was a total rip-off. It was basically another $16 for the exact same game. Go open up griff 1 and 2 side by side and play the first two levels. You'll notice the layout of all levels is the same in both games. That leads me to the conclusion that all he did for griff2 was to take the code from griff1, add the rune stone mechanic to it and then re-record with different sounds and music. Now, I come to his ordering system. Before, you had to wait months, yes, months if you wanted a game. That is if you were lucky to receive it at all. A few months ago, Jake said he would try to clean up his act and also stated that if you bought a game from him, you would *instantly* receive your dropbox! download link. Acording to what people like andreas have said, you still have to wait for indeterminate amounts of time to receive your link, which by the way has no protection on it so if you want to redistribute the games go ahead. There's no activation system, no licencing, and frankly, I would be totally ok with people doing this. If I want a side scroler, I certainly wouldn't play griff. I'd play bd, or some other great scroler which is free like battle zone and has more replay value.

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2018-02-16 21:09:28

Lord Lundin—just a quick note, personally I hope you've at least reached out to the developer about your missing link? That seems like an appropriate thing to do before telling PayPal someone is committing fraud. I just mention that because I just discovered a few emails from shortly after AHC's release, when we were having server issues and failed to send some of our automated welcome emails. They got buried in an unmonitored mailbox, and so I only now saw them. Let's just say, I'm glad those folks didn't report us to PayPal as fraudulent thieves.

Now, all of that said, it definitely sounds like people are justified in their strong skepticism about this developer. I do understand what Jayde is saying—that the service itself should be treated with an open mind. I agree with that whole-heartedly. What probably shouldn't be approached with too open of a mind is promise that "If you pay us, we'll give you something" from someone who has consistently failed to deliver on those promises in the past. Personally, I'm very troubled by the idea of someone doing pre-orders for a game without any sort of announced release date. Fundraising through donations, Kickstarter projects, etc. is different—but if you're saying that you are taking preorders for a project, the project should have a firm release date. That way users are justified in requesting a refund if the product is not delivered by that release date.

Anyway, I guess I'm just saying that I don't think this developer has earned the benefit of the doubt as far as money is concerned. If they want to say, "Here's a product we're preparing to roll out, so get excited..." By all means, give them the benefit of the doubt and hope that they'll follow through. But if it's "Here's a product we're working on...give us money, and we promise we'll get it to you some day," then I'd say they're well past having the right to expect anyone to take the bait.

2018-02-16 21:53:16

Agreed, Joseph.
In this case, GamerPal is a service which is already available, as far as I know. It's not a preorder.
If this was another preorder, I wouldn't even be having this argument. I might've suggested people cut the snark, but the skepticism is wholly earned.
For a project which isn't being released "soon" though? Well, presumably if someone wanted to gamble ten bucks, they could see if Jake is actually ready to deliver this service in some way and, from there, determine how good it is.

I'm all in favour of people not getting screwed over.

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2018-02-16 22:10:21

Thanks Joseph, I actually neglected to think about that - though I highly doubt he is getting spammed by order requests, lol. I also pointed out to him that he has a week to deliver or he's getting taken down for fraud. We can't mindlessly protect developers, we have to be concerned about quality as well. No one else would accept this behaviour so why should you?

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2018-02-16 23:25:11

Yeah I'm less concerned about him getting spammed and missing something, and more about the possibility that if he has some sort of automation set up and something went wrong, it's very easy for that sort of thing to slip through the cracks. Though again, this is just me giving the benefit of the doubt, partially because you're better off having exhausted all reasonable options before taking steps as drastic as reporting to PayPal. If you've reached out to him, though, then you've done all you could. A good developer would appreciate the effort. We had someone send a similar message—one of the folks whose welcome email got eaten by our server issues, and apparently did not see the notices of how to get their download link. We resolved it, and they seemed very happy with the process, and even went to bat for us at a later date when someone was (rightfully) grumbling about some of the issues that plagued our release. It'll be interesting to hear how your experience pans out...

2018-02-17 02:20:07

Hi,

after reading the topic after my first post, i will take on the question on reporting after trying out this service.

But this will have to wait for a bit. i am currently using an alternative laptop while my primary gaming laptop is under repair. If i understood from acer, news should be reported at the start of next week. I will keep you updated on when i am going to start. but the first priority will be that my primary gaming laptop is back in my posession.

@jayden,

my first post was not intended to sound harsh or something about this new service. I only tried to show that i am very curious on how this service turns out to be, not slamming the door tied shut before even getting more information about this, but i think my try failed misserably sad

But as said, when my laptop is back, i will give it a go.

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2018-02-17 21:12:07

Huge props to you, Mike, for being willing to give this a try. I will be extremely disappointed if it doesn't work out.

I'm definitely not on Jake's side in all of this. I am just the sort of person to exhaust all options before condemning (or indeed, before supporting) something. You're doing what I can't, and what others won't, so thanks hugely for that. And hey, it doesn't have to be done today. Completely understand your priorities. Good luck with the laptop.
And you weren't one of the snarliest ones, so don't worry about it too much.

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2018-02-18 02:18:46

@Jayde I agree with a lot of what your saying. My problem is that he's offering a service that I could get easily enough from my own home for no cost. Plus, I could play whatever I wanted for as long as I wanted. It seems like he's offering this just to make money. I don't care to much about his track record as I haven't bought his games anyway.

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