Pretty much.
Don’t look now, but I small a sale coming any day now.
Possibly. But I learned long ago to never underestimate the depths of incompetence to which even organizations of talented people can sink.
This one will give you whiplash. He lists all the claims that CR made over the years. What’s even more hilarious is that I have outlined ALL of this - and then some - in my blogs on this disaster.
I don’t know if you mean embezzlement in the legal sense or in a more moralistic way. I can’t speak at all to the legal side, but there’s been many millions of funds paid out to the Roberts Family and friends. The total scope isn’t clear, but parts of the share sales and things have been part of public documents in the UK and they have extracted several millions in personal share sales. I know Erin Roberts (in the UK so a range is available) makes over $200k/year in just salary and I am sure Chris makes more.
They are all doing very well off this ‘game’
Meant more in the moral sense rather than legal definition, yeah. I mean it’s been years and now the most expensive game ever made and the videos I see look like pre-alpha work. I am just baffled at where all that money went. Coming up with a flight model or having working vendor NPCs doesn’t require crazy tech, I can’t understand how these things weren’t sorted years an years ago.
Gross mismanagement; using backer funds to pay overly high salaries to relatives; creating a motion capture studio; paying Hollywood actors for motion capture; modifying a crappy engine to try and do impossible thing; and gross mismanagement.
I think the basic thing is that this most of this project is actually pretty common. Publishers fund games, spend a lot of money on salaries/office space/equipment/etc and then the game doesn’t come together for whatever reasons and they cancel the game losing tens of millions of dollars w/o really anything to show for it.
The big difference here is that instead of being cancelled, just ludicrous amounts of money are being shoveled into the failed project by backers despite the fact that the whole thing is clearly off the rails.
I mean, the other big difference is that the project was sold with an impossible feature set and pretty much a total lack of ability to execute it combined with a complete disinterest in all of the important technology needs and an obsession with motion capture.
I have never worked in video games specifically, but I think that it’s pretty common for projects that start to go off the rails to get a certain amount of overly optimistic spin on status reports to stakeholders to try and buy time, but obviously the lies about progress for Star Citizen are unbelievable which makes it amazing that there’s enough backers who are willing to believe them to keep the money coming in.
True. The difference is, most projects have some ultimate oversight, an authority to which they have to answer. The bean counters will pull the plug if it goes off the rails too badly. With SC, though, there is no oversight.
Damn, that was 5 years ago!..
SQ42 really turned out great, it had a bit of a shoddy release in 2014, seemed like it was a bit rushed, but the latest updates turned out great, glad they made it in Unreal Engine 3 which made it fairly easy to switch to 4 when it came out, the DX12 build made the performance so much better also.
Good stuff.
Is funny some of the stretch goals in SC were added to Warframe (Multiplayer ship combat, boarding other ships/installations, different roles to have in ship, multiple designs, etc…)
– haha, that video, DS was right with SC burning in the canyon.
I remember Strike Commander was quite nice game back on my 486DX2.
If anything it shows to would-be developers that there’s money to be made from scamming people, with no repercussions.
Yet…
So… how DO you get out of this mess and if you’re Roberts and company?
What do you do when you realize we are never going to be able to deliver anything that is even close to what we’re promising. Never.
One path is let’s just keep taking money in as long as people give it to us and keep doing what we’re doing. And see what happens.
But what are the alternatives?
Well, there’s only one.
Don’t they have Star Citizens in Europe? Imagine that their authorities might be pretty big on investigating this.
Now? I think they’re hosed. Years ago i think they might have had an opportunity to turn off the money spigot and just focus on the core game experience (flying in space, say) and have a nice solid base to build off of. It was always more profitable to sell another pipedream, though, while they just kept digging their technical and design debt deeper and deeper.
I still don’t understand how we’re 8 years and $300+ million dollars in and from reports the flight model is still poor and very alpha-like in feel.
If he was smart he’d extract as much money as possible from CIG and then fake his own death and/or flee to another country. It’s not like his reputation is going to be worth anything after this.
Hell, he might even already done this seeing his recent absence.
CIG itself is fucked as are the people who invested in it.
I hope that’s a rhetorical question? Because the explanation is; Chris Roberts is an incompetent moron who shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near project management of any scale.
Yeah, it’s just staggering and hard to wrap my head around, if you know what I mean.
Let us say for the sake of argument that you are the biggest idiot ever to run a game studio (which is saying quite a lot) and that despite your long experience building space games you have no idea what is involved in building one circa 2010, either solo or as a MMO or whatever.
Let us say that for a couple of years you tell your designers every week that their ideas are too small, that they should shoot for the moon with absurd features that have nothing to do with core gameplay, and thus you develop a set of specs that literally can’t be implemented. However, to begin with, assume you’re too stupid to understand this no matter what other people tell you.
Then let us say (for the sake of argument) that after two or three years of development, long enough for anyone else to build a complete game, you have nothing but garbage. Absolute garbage. But by some miracle of human stupidity amongst your credulous backers and investors, you nevertheless have enough money to continue operations.
Even the stupidest CEO in the world would change course at this point if they aren’t malicious or criminal. It would be comparatively easy to create a new roadmap with a sensible, implementable game and say the old one has been shelved due to your engine partner not having delivered usable code or somesuch lie that no one will press you too hard on so long as you actually deliver something playable in a reasonable timeframe.
But no. Here we have a malicious CEO, not a stupid one. Or at least not primarily a stupid one; the stupidity may be contingent and secondary to the greed and the fraud, but the criminality is primary.
While SC is different in that the source of funds is kickstarter/crowdsourcing rather than VC, a doomed and/or mismanaged company that somehow keeps getting funding was a common story in the dot com era. While SC is an interesting modern take on the theme, it’s not entirely new or unique.
One company I worked for then raised hundreds of millions, burned through it all, and sold the tech for 4m. After 7 rounds of funding that were each way larger than 4m. Funding that somehow kept coming despite there clearly not being a large enough market for the product to justify it.
This is not really knowable.