Everything else aside, I’m pretty sure the kind of people who are spending money on Star Citizen at this point are by and large not the kind of people whose jobs have been negatively affected by this whole thing (yet).
On the other hand, until they deliver on the 275$ I sent them… :-)
And if zealots get burned for 1000s of dollars, maybe there’s some justice in that also.
Just shame someone gets rich from this, instead of them doing like the KLF and just burn the money.
Can’t agree with this more. The business model is no longer releasing the game. It’s dangling the imaginary carrot.
I actually disagree with this. Money didn’t corrupt this project. The problem is CR himself, and his incompetence. Remember that he was kicked off of Freelancer by Microsoft and the project was semi-rebooted in order to release it. Had CR not been obsessed with useless details, like animating the player getting in and out of the ship or drinking from a water bottle, the project would have had a much better chance of success. CR chronically allocates resources incorrectly, hyper-focusing on small details that don’t matter, while delaying the critical paths that need to be worked out first. That’s his first problem.
The second problem is that he promises the world, regardless of the technical issues involved. In this case, the promise is a universe with maximum fidelity with hundreds or thousands of interacting players. He’s Peter Molyneux. It’s one thing to promise the world to a publisher who’s willing to risk money for a possible reward. It’s quite another to risk the money of public ‘donors’ by promising them dreams. Of course, his incompetence (see above) means that everything is much higher-risk than had it been done by a normal manager.
The third issue is that he doesn’t even really care about games. The real love of his life is movies, and he longs to direct actors and mo-cap them, despite having failed in Hollywood. I wouldn’t be surprised if SC was conceived as a means to keep SQ42 shooting forever: if you have a living galaxy, you can constantly produce assets for SQ42 games.
The money issue is a relatively late addition to the equation. CR’s incompetence would have led to this project shutting down, just like hundreds of other kickstarters. Instead, Ben Lesnick came up with the concept of selling imaginary ships in a dream world, and suddenly CIG was printing money. The project has indeed been turned into a money-making machine, but it’s not like it was on a good path before the money showed up.
Right. And, between consenting adults, if no laws are being broken, maybe that’s okay?
(I’m playing devil’s advocate a bit, perhaps because one glance at the front page suggests there are bigger fish to fry.)
Meanwhile, as puzzled as most of us are at this funding rate, the tribe are, well, look…
As I stated on my forums, I’m going with #3 because nothing else makes sense at this point.
It’s either :
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real, and with no shenanigans
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real and they’re just smoothing it out over time using backer funds and investment
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totally fake
Meanwhile, over at the “hate” sub
Also, I wrote a thing a few days ago in response to this article
Words fail me. Please, just read this. Then you will have a glimpse into the mindset of some of these backers.
Yes - it’s a cult. We know this already.
Yep if there is one thing rich people have no interest in it’s making more money.
I guess a fool and his money are soon parted. But that said, I’m less about protecting the fools than feeling annoyed that taking advantage of others is a richly rewarding exercise. Yes, that means designing bad bank products too!
I will also concede that watching this train wreck has provided me almost enough entertainment to get over having forked over cash to Chris Roberts when this first started out.
Any cinema fans here? This reminds me of a line from Glengarry Glen Ross … oh-so appropriate for SC:
They’re sitting out there waiting to give you their money! Are you gonna take it? Are you man enough to take it?
Well, fleecing and indoctrinating people with the promises of beautiful lies that they want to believe has been a thing for about as long as civilization, in some cases with notably more success than Star Citizen.
Well, Star Citizen sure got them to sign on the line which is dotted. But I think in the end, Roberts isn’t getting the El Dorado.
I’m so shocked, I need to go have a lie down to calm my nerves.
So basically they lied about the whole thing when - over 3 weeks ago - they promised (which got the tribe all excited and in a collective tizzy) a video for a game that was supposed to be in Beta this quarter
That’s not even the half of it. The other part is that they were making a bullshot video of a game nobody has seen in years. Yup
haha, can’t even deliver a promo vid on time.
They dance around it hilariously but in the end they admit that they don’t have any game to show.
I love how hilariously incompetent they all are.
Isn’t a video just a collection of sequential JPGs? They should have mastered that by now. ;)
I’ve never seen a team with so many excuses for not delivering just a silly little video lol. if they cant string together some footage what does that say about the game
Hire some teen TikTok girl and she’ll have a nice video done by the end of the day.
I have seen individual developers do this with projects stringing it along and eventually getting fired (or reassigned) and it turns out they have done basically nothing. So all the excuses and delays and shifting stories ring so familiar.
But I have never seen a whole company do it before.
Either they 1) stoked the whales right through the sale period or 2) figured it was crap and didn’t want to risk whales getting mad.
So the day before the whaling ends, they make this rather convenient announcement