this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
184 points (95.1% liked)
PCGaming
6484 readers
193 users here now
Rule 0: Be civil
Rule #1: No spam, porn, or facilitating piracy
Rule #2: No advertisements
Rule #3: No memes, PCMR language, or low-effort posts/comments
Rule #4: No tech support or game help questions
Rule #5: No questions about building/buying computers, hardware, peripherals, furniture, etc.
Rule #6: No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
Rule #7: No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts
Rule #8: No off-topic posts/comments
Rule #9: Use the original source, no editorialized titles, no duplicates
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
OOTL, what happened with the backpack?
Warranty disputes between Linus opinion why it does not require a warranty and the actions of support speak for themselve (which I can partly vouch for.)
Context: Ordered a mousepad, a hoddie and a shirt.
Received a mousepad, deskpad and a shirt.
Contacted support. They send the missimg hoodie for free. It arrived but with a hole in the sleeve. I asked if they want it sent back. They refused and imstead send me a second hoodie (each hoodie is worth about 60€ + shipping + import tax to europe.
Anyway: Community basically demanded a written warranty and Linus caved with the TrustMeBro warranty which is kindly named after his earlier claim of "Trust me, community. If I bleep and backstab you up the outcry would be louder than I can protect against. Literally trust me". (not a literal quote but the gist of it).
Also he released a tongue in cheek joke shirt with a printed "Trust Me bro" and all following expensive items have this warranty name written.
Take from that what you want. His intentions are good, the actions are even for a tone-deaf like me poorly executed.
When he complained about the backpack there was a point where he was complaining about being liable for it, while arguing that he would do the right thing, he just didn't want to be legally required to do the right thing.
In practice, they've been good so far, handling what looks like frequent and inconvenient mistakes, but he explicitly wanted the right to not be good and folded when it justifiably angered/upset his trusting fans.
It was like a veil was lifted for a second.
I don't quite get what you ment with your last sentence. Could you elaborate further?
Not OP, but basically:
He wanted to not be held accountable by a written warranty. It's all nice and cool when he acts nice and cool and gives you the replacements, but ultimately, what he wants is to sell you stuff that lacks an actual warranty, which can only have one reason: you want to be able to say "fuck you" to the customer when the time arrives.
If you trust the product so much and you want the community (and your customers) to trust you and pay you like 300€ or whatever the cost of that bag is (which is very expensive for a lot of people), you do the right thing, which is writing down a warranty and honoring it. If your intentions are good, there is no reason to not do so.
Understandble and agree with every point.
If I remember correctly, the community and customers asked if the LTT backpack, with its premium price tag, could have a lifetime warranty similar to other backpack products. The response from LTT was "No," and the reasoning behind that answer didn't really convince people.
I remember Linus saying something to the effect that he didn't want to put any potential future burden on the LTT business, or his family (I believe Linus' wife is also a stakeholder in the business) in the event he was not around.
My hot take, I got the sense that Linus believed in the backpack as a good product, but didn't want to lock himself into supporting it for a long time.
pretty sure that's inaccurate, the main reason for his knee jerk reaction (that he acknowledged was stupid) was that he knows that those warranties are basically useless, it only matters whether the company behind it actually wants to uphold it or not, he said he wants to uphold the warranty so what's written in the warranty doesn't really matter, hence the trust me bro warranty.