Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

Unfortunately, the other tent pole Anthem wasn’t enough to hammer that lesson home.

I’ve finally managed to figure out how to get into the mindset of a Star Citizen backer. Who spends inordinate sums of money on stuff they’ll never be able to play in the future? We all do! We all have massive backlogs that we’ll never get to. And yet, hang the right sale in front of us, and suddenly we’re off imagining how fun that particular game will be when we get to play it one day. Also, without serious budgetary caps, I find that my backlog spending habits spin out of control. Now imagine if your hobby isn’t gaming, but rather, it’s Star Citizen itself. Star Citizens aren’t gamers – they’re Star Citizen hobbyists. Many of them will even say they don’t play any other game. And the ones who spend big bucks are just like us building up our backlogs, except they haven’t hit a budget limit (or just ignored it).

Amen. As much as I’ve played Fallout '76 (and I’ve played, and still play, a lot), the utter futility of trying to shoehorn a single player franchise into a monetizable MMO framework is breathtaking.

Interesting point.

I’m a gamer and might wait 6-12-24 months for the new shiny game to be released but I’m playing other games while I’m waiting. What does the average SC player do? I assume the ‘game’ isn’t in good enough shape to lend itself to playing everyday.

The thing is that these guys have misled themselves into thinking that I’m doing this Star Citizen thing because of jealousy, hate, hypocrisy and all that nonsense. That’s clear evidence that they know nothing about me. This despite the fact that I have been pretty consistently stated that I’m doing it because 1) they started war with the one person who never saw a hill he wasn’t planning on dying on 2) I have zero altruistic reasons as that would imply that I give a shit about them or how they spend their money.

Earlier today in a recent YT video, one of tribe posted that I was doing this because I was jealous of Chris, that I had sued him, lost, and that it was settled in his favor. This was my response.

The fact that the fiasco with the game has adversely affected the space combat sim genre in some regard, isn’t lost on me either. I mean, earlier this year Frontier disclosed that Elite Dangerous had sold only 3m base units from its launch date of Dec 2014. And unlike Star Citizen, and aside from being a more superior product, is also multi-platform. Plus it’s original £8m budget increased a bit from the initial estimate. Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, No Man’s Sky et al, are all low budget (in comparison to Star Citizen) games which are highly unlikely to generate even 25% of the Star Citizen haul in their lifetimes.

There’s a lot to unwrap here, but it’s pointless. When I report and/or write on this train wreck, I don’t pick stuff out of my ass in an attempt to throw shade. It’s not even my style - and those who have followed me through the decades know this about me. I have the uncanny ability to separate work from play because I never put any attention in a popularity contest. And it’s because, long before I was an engineer and dev, I was a gamer. I didn’t lose, nor give up my gamer cred just because I became a dev. Regardless, for some reason, there are those who have the opinion that I shouldn’t be opining on a game (even if it’s in a competing genre) because I am a dev. I mean, seriously? Who the came up with those rules?

For decades some have laughed at my games; but I kept on making them for those who bought them for what they are, not what they hoped they would be. It’s why I keep making games. If I wasn’t making a decent enough living, like so many before me I would’ve quit a long time ago to go work for someone else.

One thing I do know is that I don’t need to be a cook to know if the food tastes like dog shit. Similarly when I opine on technical things, it’s not because I’m talking out of my ass. It’s because I know what I’m talking about, as I have amassed extensive knowledge and experience in my field. It’s why I took one look at the Star Citizen game in Summer 2015 - after they increased the original 2012 scope beyond what most of us backed - and determined that there was no way in hell that Chris was going to make that game. In fact, what’s lost in translation is that when guys I know who were working on it reached out to me, I pinged Chris to ask wtf was going on. He ghosted me. I published the blog anyway. Then it all went to shit immediately after.

I’m not sorry that my writings about this obvious scam ruffle feathers; but these are just my opinions based on the facts as I see them. Proving me wrong (good luck with that) - about anything - is welcome because I am always open to reasonable discussions. But attacking me over opinions or because your feelz are hurt isn’t going to do anything to me other than strengthen my resolve.

Moving on…

So, back at the ranch, a disgruntled (they’re getting braver with each new build) backer created a thread on the official game forums.

He got censored by CIG mods.

We didn’t know what was actually removed (by the mod) from his post, until he posted it on Reddit.

Imgur

Yes, we know they do this on the official forums, but this is one of the very few times that a backer was brave enough to make it public due to the fact that they can get lifetime bans for arguing with a mod or disclosing stuff like this.

“implications that the game will not be released is against our TOS”.

haha. nice one.

We’re still waiting for the SQ42 video that was promised back on May 19th. The comments are pure Gold.

Here @ 17:40 one of the QA team members, back in 2016, claiming that he had in fact played through all the SQ42 missions. We know now that to be completely FALSE as per not only the game’s own public dev schedules, but also by the fact that, well, FOUR years later, it’s not out.

LOL! For the record, I had nothing to do with the making of this hilarious video

does he though

Well, there was that time in 2015 where he spent an 8hr plane ride responding to my blog and claims. Fun times.

Does that count?

Does anyone here disagree that SC is a clusterfuck and has zero likelyhood of achieving the original vision and maybe only a slightly better than zero change of actually releasing anything at all?

If someone doubts incredible statements that are presented without any proof but “anonymous sources” like CIG had to pay crytek millions of dollars to settle the suit that doesn’t mean they are a star citizen cultist who thinks the project is perfect and Roberts is great. Especially when the speaker has made prior claims based on anonymous sources that turned out to be wrong.

Well, yeah. There’s fleecing to be done.

I mean do you think schemes like this just invent themselves?

Maybe we should torpedo this thread and start one called “The All Positive Star Citizen Opinions Thread” where we are only allowed to say nice things about the project and other people.

“Congratulations to CIG on passing the 350 million dollar, nine-years-in-development milestone!”

“Ship cockpits are incredibly detailed, and unlike other games, Star Citizen runs at a frame rate that lets me truly appreciate the work of the talented artists.”

“Derek Smart is a nice, highly-motivated man. I desperately hope I never do or say anything that could be construed as a slight against him because I believe that he does not hunt people for sport.”

“Star Citizen is the funniest game I have ever played, and it puts the Portal and Borderlands franchises to shame.”

Here I was thinking that anonymous sources meant that the story was false and/or lacked credibility. I believe the media would like to have a word with those people about that particular thought process.

Every single time I’ve cited anon sources, eventually the facts were revealed. In fact, recently, the whole “Squadron 42 is finished” debacle is now playing out. Back in 2016 when anon sources told me that it was false that it was almost finished, coming out in 2016 etc there are those who made the same claims that anon sources aren’t to be believed. CIG even issued press statements in an attempt to debunk that. Back then, sources had said the internal schedule stretched all the way to 2021.

It’s now 2020.

Back in Dec 2018 when they disclosed having raised $46m in investor funding for it, and that it was totally going into Beta in Q1/2020.

It’s almost end of Q2/2020 and it was since pushed back to “later in 2020”

It was anon sources who told everything I have written about in my blogs. Including the biggest one from 2015 shortly after my blog and The Escapist article: That they were in financial trouble. This fact was proven when they released their first public financial “brochure” in Dec 2018 which showed that they were in the Red since month one, were burning more than they were making etc. And then came the $46m investor bailout - which btw - sources told me about in Jan 2018 and which I wrote about. The deal closed in Summer 2018 and they didn’t disclose it until Dec 2018.

I could go on and on and on. But no, citing anon sources doesn’t mean anything. You choose what you want to believe and move on.

ps: The source who told me that CIG paid Crytek in the settlement, is a well-placed source. And eventually this too will be made public. Seeing as CIG has to disclose it at some point, I will be sure to write about it when it shows up in a filing.

Honestly, I always thought it was likely just vaporware until I started watching some of the videos that Derek posted. I know his intention was to point out bugs, but all I saw was this amazingly beautiful game where you fly through space and land on planets, with an insane amount of details (and some bugs). So it was actually Derek’s videos that made me think maybe it’s not vaporware, since they already have so much to show, even if it is buggy. It’s much, much more than just jpegs of ships.

But I’ve started to come around to your point of view now, recently, thanks in large part to this post:

That and Lantz’s posts above kind of point to the scope changes, and it makes me look at the bugs in the videos above in a new light. That it really is a hollow shell, and that it will never be finished.

Honestly though, just judging from what’s already there, what they really need is a good Producer who can limit their scope and buckle down and put out a product. They have a lot of great assets there, clearly, they just need to finish putting the actual game together.

The project is beyond saving. It’s not the sort of game that you can just toss in a new producer, limit the scope, and ship something. It’s too far gone and is irretrievably broken. It will remain so until the curtains come down. It’s why we as devs and publishers know when to pull the plug on a project that’s headed nowhere. Chris doesn’t have a publisher or investor to do that. Plus he has free money that allows him to do what he wants - with zero accountability. If he had a publisher or investor, this project would have folded in Q1/2016. Just like what their own financials show.

There’s no way to climb out of this much technical debt. It would probably be easier to start from 0 than to start from wherever they are now. This is like a case study in how stretch goals can harm development.

The best case scenario is that they buy Elite Dangerous and reskin it. Elite is reportedly adding an FPS mode in the next expansion. That would give them a playable base.

As I mentioned above the character faces and idle movements in that recently posted video with the great soundtrack and editing look really good. They’ve definitely developed a lot of stuff that’s pretty neat, they just seem incapable of focusing on an actual game rather than producing neat stuff.

It’s like the whole project is ADD. It reminds me of random hobby projects I do sometimes with no goal but just to learn some new technology. I build neat shit until I get bored. Half of it is incomplete since I got distracted by some other interesting facet of the technology.

I wonder if they’ll be able to package and sell of any of the working little bits they seem to have when the jig is finally up.

Along with the general fact that they are still running on a decade+ old small map FPS engine to try and make a space MMORPG with an endless army of recent college grads, the other thing is that along the way they have promised basically everything.

They have not promised a really good space game, they have promised Ready Player One’s Oasis.

There’s a reason that they don’t have Chris Roberts talk anymore, every time he did he "yes, and"ed every insane idea like a beginner improve class.