Why would it depend on who you ask? Please explain that as best you can.
- I funded and designed the game
- I signed publishing deals for it
- Take 2 released it in Beta
- I took legal action, regained the rights, released it for FREE - while still working on it
- Take 2 went public with BC3K being it’s 3rd best selling title
- Ryan Brant (who died last year) went up on felony charges over Take 2 shares
- Interplay published the 2.0 sequel which did exceptionally well
- I have been making games ever since
Tell me again how BC3K was a scam. I’ll wait.
That’s how it’s always been, and nothing has changed. I am not making games for everyone and I never aspired to or I wouldn’t be here long after many of the people I started out with are long gone and doing other things outside of games. I mean, the list of triple A devs who have flamed out is longer than the number of games they’ve collectively made.
That entire script would be funnier if anyone envisioned you saying it with a straight face.
The “spearheading” part was particularly hilarious to me; especially seeing as how I got involved is well documented.
- Friends of mine on the dev team reached out to me as I was one of the prominent industry backers
- I looked into it
- I wrote a blog
- Chris read it, then put their PR machine to work
- That failed spectularly
- A War Was Born
And before you know it, years later others (in media and elsewhere) came to the same conclusion about the project. Including this explosive Forbes story from Summer 2019 which was even more critical than the 5-part series Kotaku released in 2016.
The argument that you can’t say the food is shit because you’re not a pro chef, is the sort of thing we used to lol people off Usenet for. Glad to see some things never change because evolution is still beyond reach for some people.
I too thought so at first; but the more I looked into it and the more I learned, the more I came to believe that it evolved into a scam. Especially when you go back and look at all of the documented claims. As I have said in some of my blogs on this, I don’t believe that’s how Chris started out. I believe that he believed that he could make that game. Once the money came, and he expanded the scope beyond his capabilities (not to mention the engine’s), it was all over. Exactly as I had said back in July 2015 when I wrote that first blog.
You don’t ask for $2M to make a game, get $65M to make a better game, then not ship either version. Then $340M + 9 yrs later, you neither have a $2M game, nor a $65M game or anything that remotely resembles a $340M game. Yet, money keeps being taken out of the project and into the pockets of Chris and his family & friends who, btw, were also involved in similar disasters including Origin, Microsoft, Gizmondo. These are all irrefutable facts.
Speaking of not shipping, um, shouldn’t you be working on Line of Defense?
I think Derek is an “atypical business person”, and there’s unfortunately no forewarning of this either on the Steam store page or the box art or whatever.
Back to Star Citizen
Thank you. Back in the day I was following your saga on usenet and the Qt3 thread(s), but not super closely, plus it’s been a while, so I wasn’t 100% sure of my position when I made the mistake of engaging Thrag, who I still think is largely trolling to reinforce his own position.
Yeah, people who follow me and my games, know that I haven’t changed my approach at all. I design a game, fund it, build it. Each game has always paid for the next one; so it’s the loyalty of my install base that keeps me making games to this day.
Lately I’ve been working on Line Of Defense which was to be my last big game before I retire. However, due to Microsoft screwing us over the Havok engine, I’ve been working to port it over to UE4. And it’s coming along painfully slowly because that’s what happens when you have game that’s 90% finished - and then you have to port it to an engine that doesn’t have feature parity. It’s currently in CBT after I disabled the Steam store page, though you can still go to the Steam info/forum page.
During that time, I did release an RTS spin-off, LoD Tactics which did exceptionally well (especially on mobile and XBox360).
Since I had no intentions of doing another Battlecruiser/Universal Combat game due to the complexity, costs, dwindling user base for complex games, some of the hardcore in the BC/UC tribe were up in arms that I had “abandoned” the franchise. So I decided to do another one in the title by updating the engines in last game in the series, add a new scenario etc to come up with Universal Combat 3.0, which also has a Trello dev board. As expected for these types of games, that’s turned out to be a massive undertaking.
Then there was that time back in late 2017 whereby I bought Alganon from the investors (who owed me money) who didn’t want to continue running it. I took it off-line so we could fix some bugs, localize it for international markets, migrate it to cloud servers etc. It’s still off-line because a publishing/buyout deal went sideways and I decided not to relaunch just yet because it would cost more than I was willing to put into it in the short-term.
So yeah, I’ve been pretty busy actually.
Could be. I haven’t followed it as closely as some here have.
I try to avoid being a thread cop, but there’s so much to talk about with the exciting universe of Star Citizen I was hoping y’all could make a separate thread so those of us who want to talk about how the procedural generated birds that SC is going to have are better than any feature in any other game and are also better than birds in real life can do so without distraction.
Sounds good to me, Lantz. I already back off on feeding the trolling that I felt was happening, at least directly, and Derek has apparently shot down the strawman argument. So we’re good as far as I’m concerned. Let us resume the SC trainwreck spotting!
“strawman”
Back in the good old days, when Computer Gaming World and CGS+/CGM magazines were out, I did a lot of coverage of sims, space games, and strat games for the mags. In the process I reviewed BC by Derek and also followed the whole story.
I didn’t give it an A/5 stars, I might have even given it closer to a C. But one thing that impressed me about Derek after I wrote the reviews is that, in our one on one discussions he was articulate and reasoned and didn’t try to argue with me about the reviews. In fact, he agreed with the negative parts that I discussed in the reviews. A LOT of developers took it very personally if they got a midrange to low review. We discussed (after the reviews were out) some of the issues and challenges and Derek has some interesting insight into game development. He was pretty much a one man development team. And Take Two did release the game in a beta state (I wrote about it as released as well as the 2.0 version when he got the game back and worked to improve it.
He developed a game and only took money from people who bought it. No massive press events year after year attempting to get millions of dollars in return for empty promises. I have also covered Chris Crawford games back when he made a game and sold it. But I’m sorry, there’s simply no excuse for selling jpegs of ships for $10,000 and similar practices. That’s pure snake oil. That type of practice crosses a line for me.