It’s knowable, it’s false. Again I think people doubting the depts of human stupidity, incompetence and mismanagement have clearly forgotten the dot com era.
True enough, but the time span is pretty unique, I think. Most of the .com stuff imploded far sooner than SC, as those bubbles popped more rapidly IIRC. But that was partly because it was, in fact, VCs involved, not crowdsourcing, and VCs call in the marker a lot sooner than fans.
My inclination is to believe that you are correct, but to be extremely pedantic we don’t really know how stupid the stupidest CEO can be, so.
Absolutely. Most dot com busts were ~3 years or less. How this has kept going is amazing. Even VCs were like “fool me 7 times…”
I think people don’t realize how easy it is to get caught up in an “it’s just around the corner” loop. When you’re working on a project, if you don’t have really experienced, competent people around, it’s so easy to feel like ‘all we need is this one thing and then everything will fall into place’, or ‘we can see the light at the end of the tunnel’. Everyone trusts the person at the top. At every point, there are excuses that seem legitimate, and valid reasons for delays. The biggest one is “we’re trying to do something that’s never been done before”. This excuse can cover for all slip-ups. What I’m saying is, it’s not just the backers who are gullible and don’t notice time fly – it’s the people inside the company too. And they’re each reinforcing each other. The fact that money keeps flowing into the company by backers serves to justify the amount of time taken for the workers as well. The scamming happened because CR was willing to use backer funds to pay himself, his wife and his brother completely inappropriate salaries, or to use those same funds to ‘buy out’ his brother’s company, or to waste so much of it on ridiculous motion capture with famous actors. But the rest is a predictable result of bad management with no leash. That monetary pressure is critical when you don’t have excellent planners.
I realize how easy it is to get caught up in that feeling because it happens to me, and I consider myself a decent leader. I don’t think it’s a matter of experience and competence – and in fact, that’s probably another trap that smart people fall into – but rather the ability to step outside of your own head and examine the situation as if you were a neutral observer.
This. It’s really, really easy - even for really smart, experienced and competent people - to get caught in that “almost there” feeling. I know that all too well.
Let me tell you about Wirecard…
I think early on, yeah, the people working on the game were skilled, many were industry veterans from what I gather, and it’s entirely likely that some of that ‘just around the corner’ mentality was there. But seven or so years in, I wonder. I’m guessing now the horizon has shrunk down to “next paycheck,” and rather than misplaced confidence in the project turning around, it’s an understandable desire to just get to the next pay period, and ride the train until it finally jumps the track.
I wonder what morale is like in the sausage factory?
You don’t need to be Smart to imagine how bad it must be.
I have to imagine that anyone who is actually involved with the progress must see it for what it is. Unless the environment is horrible, I’d totally work there. Clock in, collect your paycheck, who cares if you made any progress that week.
Under some of the compartmentalized areas a developer could get some real interesting experience under their belt. There is a lot of interesting tech going on in certain subsystems. For some it could be a technical academy.
I’ll venture a guess that morale is high among the developers. They’re working together on a team on with an agile development process to incrementally produce cool stuff. The reason I think this is because of the tone deaf roadmap process. The team thinks the real problem isn’t closure but how they’re failing to present the awesome output they’re creating every week. To us it seems insane. To them it feels like welcoming us to the exciting creative process.
Cool stuff that is siloed off and won’t ever be implemented properly in an actual shipping game. This sort of shit must be in service to the overall game design of which there is none.
I suppose it’s possible, though they’d have to be almost deliberately insulating themselves from reality. I mean, I know folks who have occasionally done that (ahem, maybe even myself, though not with programming), but eventually you have to come to your senses. Pretty much anyone working on a complex, multipart project knows that what their unit does is part of a larger goal, and that failure to meet the larger goal will, in the end, sink everyone’s boat, even if their day to day focus is proving that their little niche is doing its job.
For a lot of people as long as they believe they’ll still be receiving paychecks for at least a while and aren’t being burned out by constant crunch time a meandering roadmap isn’t a huge morale killer.
It’s a big company with lots of positions. There are likely people in the art department that are totally thrilled to keep coming up with new ship designs for jpgs regardless of whether the mechanics will ever be implemented. They will likely be happy to feature their work on SC in their portfolio regardless of how the project ends.
Derek, is there a video that you recommend that captures (up to date) the insanity that is SC development ?
Basically he can’t stop, because if he stops he goes to jail or flees the country and never returns.
Star Citizen will never end because at this point it can’t end. As long as he’s putting up a front of working on it, even if nothing is accomplished, it still seems like a good faith effort at building a game.
The moment he quits and declare the game to have failed is the moment a thousand lawsuits get filed against him.
It started right off the bat and in my blogs I’ve documented ALL the instances of “unjust enrichment” that’s been going on over the years.
It started when he used backer funds to build a UK studio (F42) for his bro. Then turned around and bought it from his bro, thus taking wealth out of the project.
Then the salaries (according to UK financials, his bro is the highest paid director in the entire region).
Then back in 2015 insiders had reported (to myself and The Escapist) that soon after the original Kickstarter windfall, he paid himself over $2M a “backpay” for the effort.
Let’s set aside the nepotism as well as the friends & family wealth builder he’s got going on, but look to the 2018 revelation (via UK filings) that ALL of them (Chris, Sandi, Ortwin) got a payday after the Calder loan. It goes on and on.
Now that they’ve apparently cashed out, neither Chris nor Sandi - rumored to have divorced again - have been seen in the community for months; even amid the on-going uproar that basically started earlier this year.
And to cap it all, the endless lies, fraudulent misrepresentations of the project are widely known. All of that was intentional by nature because that’s how you mislead the backers for them to keep giving money.
I’ve said this before, when the end comes, it won’t be pretty - and a LOT of shocking stuff is going to come out.
Not really. But you can try this series by an ex-investor (Bootcha) who bailed back in early 2015 shortly after my blog started gaining traction and The Escapist did their expose.
If you want to read, well, I’ve got you covered