Deadfire Physical Rewards
 

Has anyone received any physical rewards?

Still waiting myself.

They were supposedly shipped weeks ago, and still nothing…

They were not shipped weeks ago, on June 21st the update said the were close to be done with the process to be ready to ship them and said in the next few weeks (i.e. July) it should be shipped.

My order is at "shipping soon".

Ok, I was expecting an early July ship, but they were vague. Convenient.

Am reading the digital guidebook on my phone. It's a bit of let down that way.

I emailed Obsidian support about this issue last week as it has been quite disappointing. The response I got was:

Like Az, my order status is set to "shipping soon" now as well. Hopefully that doesn't mean mid-August!

Yeah, they keep moving the delivery time later and later. Sigh…

"Shipping soon".

Still nothing. At this point I'd rather just have my money back for the add-on physical rewards.

Posted by a developer on the forum today:

In our published updates, you may have read our attempts to update all of you on the shipping of physical backer rewards and we've used the word "soon" and others like it, but "soon" has come and gone. For this, we sincerely apologize to all of you - without your interest and faith in us, Deadfire could never have become what it is today and you deserve better from us. We wanted to have firmer dates to communicate with you before our last update, but we realize now that the lack of communication was worse than the lack of firm dates. With that, we need and must do a better job updating all of you on what's going on.


Where We Are

For those of you in North America, South America, and Oceania, our Ohio distributor has confirmed that they are sending shipments out starting early next week.

Unfortunately, our fulfillment center for the rest of the world let us know recently they can no longer handle fulfilling for us and we're working on an agreement with a promising vendor in the coming days, with expediency in mind.

Going Forward

Every Monday (and more often as news arrives), we will update this support thread with the latest information we have. If you're ever curious about what is going on, we will update this page with the latest status.

Thank you most sincerely again for your patience and we promise to do a better job of keeping all of you updated.


-Dan Ham, Marketing Project Manager

That is why a publisher is needed to handle distribution. It's a pain in the ass. Then again Obsidian had a publisher Versus Evil so can't see why they have problems again.

Also this why most crowdfunding games don't offer physical goods & releases. Can't say I blame them with the hassles & costs required to make and ship them.

Sounds like a major clusterfuck.

Well, crossing my fingers they get this straightened out "soon". :/

At least they responded with an update a few other crow-funded games went silent or never delivered them. Guess it's another risk you take with crowd-funded games.

Yeah, I contacted them multiple times about when they would deliver. All I ever got was "soon" and I told them that answer is totally unacceptable, and that they needed to get their shit together. Hopefully that's actually what's happening. We shouldn't be normalizing that it's ok that promised physical rewards are not delivered on time or at all.

Either Versus Evil failed and Obsidian took over at some point which caused delays or their deal with Obsidian never included dealing with the physical rewards to start with.

It would be interesting to know exactly what happened. They mentioned a delays on some of the items because of quality issues right before release, but after that they seems to have had issues with fulfillment houses directly. It's been more than a month that they said fulfillment house had all the items and were ready to ship.

It's like one person is making all the boxes.

I had read somewhere that the person at Obsidian in charge of doing all of the physical rewards had left the company unexpectedly and at a critical phase of the process, which is what started the mess. Prob just a rumor, but I imagined Obsidian management walking into her, now vacant office and seeing thousands of names of backers hastily scribbled onto Post-it-Notes stuck randomly around the office, being the only record of who gets what…

Anyway, physical rewards are/were critical for my backing many previous projects and will remain so for any future project. And I don't mean a T-shirt or map, I'm talking large, solid statue of Eothas for my desk or a remote controlled Nomad-- something unique. Instead of saying "it's hard" and forgoing that stuff, how about nailing it down with a reputable manufacturer from the beginning?

It's not that simple. Most manufacturers fill their calendars pretty tight. If for whatever reasons you need them to redo something, need more or want to delay delivery, you could have to wait weeks if not months before they can slot you in again.

After that, you got the fulfillment houses (the warehouse that accumulate the items, put them in boxes and ship them). Those places have more than one client and they can end up at "full capacity" not capable of handling your orders (physical capacity or other quotas).

All that stuff cost a lot of money too, especially if you do small volume which is usually the case for crowdfunded rewards.

People have started to get tracking numbers in the US. Looks like it is a Versus Evil email and not an Obsidian one.

Finally…

…still waiting.

Make sure you have white-listed support@vsevil.net in your emails.

I got everything yesterday without warning. Not that I needed a bunch of alerts, but figured I'd get an email or something. Either way, my Eothas is displayed.

That's really all I wanted out of this project, but I also received a sealed collector's edition and art book. If anyone's interested in these, let me know via PM and we can work out a deal.

Weird, I got an email telling me stuff were shipping and then a tracking number for a local postal service yesterday. :/

I should get my stuff in a few days (weekend not included).

I received the guidebook and the hard copy, which is a joke - a metal case containing only the backer code… the book is very nice, though.

Finally received my Deadfire Collectors Edition today in the mail.

The Obsidian hoodie is a bit thin compared to my Legend of Grimrock one, but it's nice to have.

The box is marginally shorter than the box from the first game; the mouse-pad is bigger and thicker which is good. The cloth map is of a better quality and I'm happy to have a decent sized manual to read to sit along with the one from the first game as well.

That said, this whole delay and mismanagment has soured my support for Obsidian and combined with what I felt were significant flaws in the sequel itself, I'm much more tentative about supporting anything further, not that I think we'll necessarily see PoE3 yet.
Anyway, here's hoping that once all DLC are out that the game is better overall.

So did anything come out of Microsoft trying to buy Obs? Surprised it was nowhere mentioned here.

Nothing recent as it was just a letter of intent to buy from Microsoft, and both company's would have to set the terms & sign the contract. It could take a while to go through.

Still it might just be a rumor as was the EA and other buyout stories over the years.

The rumor was discussed a while back. I'm not aware of it ever being more than that.