4991

LOL!! Yeah, I’ve been told :)

4992

Eh, it’s short enough.

CLOUD IMPERIUM RIGHTS LTD.
Activities of patent and copyright agents; other legal activities not elsewhere classified

I mean… lol… they’re not even trying to hide where they’re going with this when it’s right there in the company name. Yay, capitalism, I guess.

4993

Yeah, but here’s the thing, they already have THREE companies in the UK, anyone of them could have been used as rights holder if that’s what they’re going for. But it’s not. They’re up to some really shady shit which needs yet another shell corp in the UK. More soon.

4994

Maybe they have developed a new procedural technology to automatically push back an online project schedule and they are hoping to license it to other kickstarter projects.

4995

LOL!! That could be. You just never know.

4996

You mentioned what really makes me annoyed about this whole thing: Roberts has done this sort of crap before. Dragged his feet with a project that took forever, mostly because of feature creep and general mismanagement. When I first saw the kickstarter, I was excited… until I saw his name. I passed and said ‘no thanks’, and i’m glad I did.

4997

Yeah, this is me as well. Once I saw his name, I figured it was doomed and stayed far, far away.

4998

Well it’s a whole lot worse this time because he’s literally playing with fire, amid the accusations of fraud that are sure to come.

What this new shell company also highlights is how they have systematically taken money out of these entities.

Basically Chris took $75M of backer money and built/maintained F42-UK studio for his brother and lifelong friends (The Elms, Derek Senior et al). The corporation papers were filed in Sept 2013.

Then in 2014, at the height of the crowd-funding windfall, they turned around, and through CIG-UK, bought the company back from Erin et al for £440k, thus taking money OUT of the entity. Money which should have been spent on developing the games. Money which btw, is funneled from the US by CIG-UK via the RSI-UK subsidiary.

And during that time, they were putting the company into debt with not one, but two loans, even after taking money out of the entities for no good cause other that Unjust Enrichment.

All of the above in addition to Erin taking a larger than normal salary, even while giving himself salary raises - never having shipped a product.

The other question mark in their books is that in 2015, CIG-UK bought an IP “on paper” for £1.36m. That same year, it sold that same IP to the tune of about £2m, thus booking a “profit” of about £655k. Nobody knows what that IP is. But my guess is that, since they’ve never even mentioned it, and the fact that they “sold” it, points to them selling Star Citizen and/or Squadron 42 related IP among their shell companies. Hilariously, even with the profit, the end of year filing for the value of the aforementioned IP, is still £1.36m.

As there are no books to show who the IP was bought from or sold to, it stands to reason that it wasn’t sold to any of the UK entities (or it would be recorded there in the P&L which we have access to in the UK), but maybe to either one of the other shell companies in the US or in GER. Companies for which backers have no financial access or overview.

4999

As someone who feels this project is doomed, very charitably it could be a way of consolidating the IPs and thereby making it clear where they lie, in order to resolve questions relating to ownership and making it easier to get funding. There may also be cross-licensing and tax reasons. However I’m not sure they’d do this if these rights have already been locked up in an earlier loan.

This really smells though.

5000

At Gamescom we’re getting a good look at Star Citizen version 3.0. Are you in a state now that you’d term beta? What’s next?

Chris Roberts: The term beta in terms of Star Citizen - with 3.0 the game is moving into a phase akin to Early Access. It’ll build and grow from there, and then you could say ‘well, it’s not really Early Access anymore’. The price will probably go up a little bit and it will have much more of the features and content going on.

3.0 is the first time you’ll have some of the basic game loops and mechanics. It’s the first one which has proper persistence for your character, ship and items in terms of what their state is, their location is. When you log off and your ship is damaged, when you come back it’ll still be damaged. There are a lot of jobs and options. The AI is still fairly basic - there’s a lot more coming, but the AI… the previous 2.63 update was done the old scripted way. Now it’s a scalable, modular mission system which designers can build from different blocks. We have procedural missions so there’s a lot of ‘go deliver something to this place’, ‘go identify a dead body on a spaceship’, ‘go after this particular pirate’. It’s all templated up. There’s a basic buying and selling mechanic, hauling cargo, the ability to earn and spend money on clothes, weapons, ship items or ship weapons. 3.1 will let you buy ships as well. And then from there we’ll add more features for specific activities - mining, repair, building out more of the infrastructure for a dynamic universe.

5001

Thanks for the link. Good read.

I’m one of the minority in this thread who is not heavily invested but wanted to support the project and is happy to wait and see what happens.

There’s a subset of people who say ‘this thing is never going to come out, it’s a scam’. Which is plainly not true. It would be the worst scam in the world. We’re hiring all these people, we’re working really hard. We’re showing what we’re doing every week.

You could say 'I wanted it to be this big [small gesture] instead of this big [large gesture]. That would be a legitimate complaint. But some of the stuff is literally just like a fan trolling a match report for their rival team. It happens.

In all honesty, whether the game pans out our not, for me, all the Goons stuff is just that, background trolling noise.

They raise valid concerns at times and I can completely understand the concerns about scope creep and delays. But the constant this is a scam and the end is nigh cries from some doesn’t hold much more credibility to me than the SC release schedule.

5002

Chris Roberts:

“Outside the fact we’re not finished or released, the company runs like
we had an online game which was monetised every day. Which it
essentially is - we have people joining every day, buying a starter pack
or a ship.”

Emphasis added. This is quite a large caveat to hang out there.

I have no stake in the game, but have always been interested. Not so much in the tech, but to see how they handle the problem of procedural generation vs. fun. E.g. No Mans Sky, what Mass Effect 4 turned out to be, most survival games, etc.

5003

So 3.0 will be the “MVP”, and it will be treated as “Early Access”. Interesting.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but I sure hope they figured out how to have more than 20 people on a single server without crashing the whole thing, because if not, this will be a really interesting Early Access period. ;)

BTW, how will the “buy ships for money” work once it’s in Early Access? I thought they wouldn’t sell ships for money once the game was released? Does the game count as released with 3.0 or not?

5004

At their scale they are talking about I could care less if the high level people are taking home 200 or 300 thousand in salary. Or it’s small potatoes relative to burning through the whole pile anyway.

5005

The end of the interview summarizes the Star Citizen project as a whole very well.

Interviewer: “CR, I’d love you to answer your critics in a couple of sentences.”
CR: < dumps 30+ sentences >
Interviewer: “That was more than a couple of sentences!”
CR: “It’s not an easy thing!”

I’m not even paraphrasing. CR really doesn’t go well with limited scopes. ;)

5006

I know, that’s so weird. “We run like an online game, except for the game part.”

5007

Yes. It’s what I’ve been saying these past months since I wrote a blog about why his MVP statements were to be taken seriously. This interview is the biggest indicator yet, that they’re about to bail.

I like how he says the public schedule is the internal one. I guess 3.0 did come out in 2016.

I am also thrilled to see that he is still reading my articles because I was the first and only person to leak that the internal and public schedules were different. He’s a liar, a scam artist, and a fraud.

5008

The thing is, I don’t think anyone with a modicum of software engineering experience can take their plan seriously, and once you add their meager accomplishments over a five year period, one can’t help but think they’re way out of their competence zone.

5009

You’re forgetting one key element. He’s egotistic and arrogant.

5010

That’s not that important, Jobs was an unbearable twat that was so self-centered that he killed himself in the most stupid way, and yet was incredibly successful.