Oh come on, putting family in stinks when it’s not more than a small family business. My father in law owns an insurance brokers employs around 80. He got a few decent offers for the business over time and he said he always got asked how many family members on board, what are their bonuses and how many have company cars and expense accounts. He always said none, I would only employ family members if they could really do the job I need not as some sort of gravy train.
The first family member to work for him was me, he is insurance and I am document management, I am only there till the project finishes.
The family stuff smells whiffy to me especially if you are trying to cover aspects of it…
Precisely. There are many - many - businesses (mostly small businesses) which employ family members. The issue with CIG is that, using crowd-funded money, Croberts enriched his family and friends, most of whom are OVER PAID, in the furtherance of this scheme. There is a reason why “Unjust Enrichment” is a thing.
And aside from Erin, he did try to hide the fact that he was married to Sandi.
Of course, it wasn’t until I did my investigative blog that it came to light that all the people currently involved in the project, are the same same friends (excluding Ortwin) and family (excluding Sandi) who were involved in previous train-wrecks, namely that whole Gizmondo fiasco which I wrote about back in 2015.
Basically they are Roberts (all three), Elms (all three), Derek Senior, Tony Zurovek, Ortwin and others on the fringe like David Swofford (marketing), Eric Peterson (who bailed earlier on) who go all the way back to the early days with Croberts.
If you don’t think that’s shady enough, they even removed her “Meet Sandi Gardiner” entry from the website shortly after my expose. This is the last capture from March 2013. And this was around the time she was going on interviews and claiming to have two degrees in marketing, so she was totally qualified to be VP Of Marketing for the project. All of which have proven to be false.
I don’t see how anyone thinks that if they had gone to VC for money, how any of this would have passed due diligence.
ps: There is only ONE director at that studio. Erin Roberts. It’s right there in the filings. Basically, using backer money, Chris built an entire studio for his brother. There is NO other reason for F42-UK to exist, when that team could have been based here in the US.
Yes he did. It’s hilarious actually. And when I wrote about it, complete with details, and even after other people did their own leg work, I got accused of stalking, harassment etc. But my attorney made quick work of Ortwin after he sent me a C&D. We never heard from them again.
There is only one “paid” F42-UK director. Erin Roberts (the only one with a paycheck). Which part did you miss?
Neither Chris, nor Ortwin, get a paycheck from F42-UK. Read the filings.
ps: The way “directors” work over there, is the same that “partners/president/ceo” work here in our corp structure.
pps. Also read p16 of the 2016 filing. Pay close attention to the line that says “amounts paid to the highest paid director” which went from 192,915 (2015) to 236,000 (2016)
Yes it’s very high. In fact, he is the highest paid Director of a video game company in the UK. And that’s an actual fact. And the fact that he took a 22% pay increase in 2016, having not even shipped a fucking game, is even more worrisome.
And if Erin is making $300K, how much do you think Chris, Sandi, Ortwin, Nick et al are making for being part of the friends and family program?
When you consider that the F42-UK studio has NO reason to exist, other than because Chris wanted his family and friends to benefit from this project, it’s even worse. And it’s the largest of the four studios; which is why they are burning through almost $24M a year, for a project that’s averaging $30M a year from crowd-funding.
Nepotism isn’t the issue so much as the amount itself is. Erin Roberts is probably the best thing that happened to the project in terms of leadership, for what it’s worth:
The brothers took a step back and saw that while there were production problems for the company as a whole, “rating it on who was delivering, the UK was being much more consistent,” Chris Roberts tells me. He took a closer look at how Erin was running the UK studio and realised how rigidly the team adhered to their production schedule, and how closely the production staff tracked the developers’ work. While Foundry 42 was a new studio, the core team of developers had all worked together for years making Lego games at TT Fusion. “They did so many of them […] they had to be super organised,” Roberts explained. “Sometimes they had six months to do something.”
Roberts mandated that all the CIG studios would adopt the UK method. It wasn’t a decision taken well by everyone: “The ship pipeline was run out of LA at first and then it just wasn’t working and the UK was frustrated, so we moved it over to the UK, and then the folks in LA felt like they had been demoted, and they were upset with that,” says Roberts. “There was some fallout, some people left.” Erin Roberts became responsible for CIG production globally and CIG hired a lot more producers to cope with the finer detail scheduling Erin’s system required.
I can understand if you think the pay is too high, though.
It’s funny how obsessive you are about other people’s obsessions. I mean at this point you must have spent an enormous amount of time (and thus money) on Star Citizen, making this whole thing pretty ironic.
How do you figure that, exactly? How has his involvement benefited the game when after 6 years and $156M they still don’t have a Beta, let alone a vertical slice of either game? Please explain your logic to me.
