We have been laughing about how this disaster has burned money. But we also know they would need so much more money to get this [MMO(RPG)-]ready. (And a competent CEO). In this (money-context) it’s interesting to see where all the other (scarcely) crowd-funded MMOs have ended up: on the pile of once well-meant rubbish. And it’s interesting to see there are no AAA-projects aiming for the World-of-Warcraft-heights. I guess it’s just too expensive nowadays. So what I like about this trainwreck it might signal other publishers/developers when the time is ready for a project of this scope. Then they will come up with an interesting idea/project, collect investors’ money and hire some competent folks and we will get the next big thing. 10 years from now for the real Star Citizen that is not CR’s Star Citizen? : )
The thing that seems to keep SC going is the promise of that other 99% of the content that never… quite… arrives…
Other new MMORPGs get compared to the big ones (WOW, FFXIV, etc) and come up woefully short. Using FFXIV as the example because that’s what I know, it’s got 10 years of content in it already. A friend of mine started playing before the last expansion it took her nearly a year of constant play just to get to endgame. New games just can’t compete with that and people leave once they exhaust the available content.
SC has managed to avoid that somehow, by monetizing people’s dreams. It’s an impressive, if utterly amoral, achievement.
There’s a simple question I’d love answered, that is really a proxy for a lot of other questions I have regarding question of whether the game is a “scam” or not, etc. - and it’s this:
How does SQ42 go from targeting a beta in Q3 2020, to still working on very basic aspects of the game like animations and uniforms according to their own roadmap in March 2023?
You’re not targeting ANYTHING for 2020 if 2.5 years after that window you’re still creating basic assets. You don’t say you’re targeting a beta later that year, and then go “oops, it turned out we still had 3+ years of work to do to reach even alpha state”. That’s not missing a deadline - it’s either a lie, or shambolic project management (or both).
And no matter which option you pick, they never deign to explain how such a statement could be so wildly and completely wrong. The window just drifts on by, and if you’re lucky months later you get some terse “it’s ready when it’s ready”, which completely elides the reason for asking.
Even if you’re having fun dicking around in the alpha, this kind of stuff should be immensely troubling to anyone who backs with the assumption that you’ll eventually get a complete product before CIG manage to burn through all of their funding.
I mean it’s not rocket science, that right there is your answer, with a 70/30 split to the former. They know their projections are a lie and they can’t give accurate release dates. But they don’t care as nobody who matters (people that continue to pay) hold them accountable. So they just kick the can down the road and point at the new shiny.
Help refresh my memory. Back in 2020 at some point, didn’t they make a big todo about finally showing a video preview of Squadron 42, and then the day of the preview there were “technical difficulties”, which became something something about “editorial problems” with the video but they’d for sure do that presentation soon. And then nada. Am I mis-remembering (or mischaracterizing), or did something like that happen?
How does a game go from almost complete in 2016 to hoping for a beta in 2020 to not being out of alpha in 2023?
*UPDATE: We ran into some editorial issues with the SQ42 update video so won’t have this out today. Cue the jokes about delay – we know! We’ll get this one out soon. Thanks for your patience!
They never released the video.
LOL, I paid $30 for this in 2012!
I also bought a starter pack around then. Wrote it off long ago. CRoberts and family are getting rich off this scam. Hope he goes to jail at some point.
That’s what I remember. Thanks.
For me, this was the moment, really. Yeah, I was plenty skeptical before this, especially about the MMO thing they were making. But there was always part of my mind with a tiny shred of hope that SQ 42 might actually happen, and after a bunch of patches it might be the modernized new take on Wing Commander that I’ve wanted to play. Even for a skeptic like myself on this project, that’d sure be cool to play.
But that “Sorry, the dog ate our homework” thing with the video on SQ42 from what will soon be 3 (THREE!) years ago made me think that this very much is a scam. It’s classic Nigerian Prince scam behavior – you give every confidence to your marks that there’s no scam, and in just a minute they’ll get some of their reward and they’ll know FOR SURE that everything is legit. And then at the last moment “Oh, sorry, just a small error. Hang on, and we’ll take care of it.” And then nothing. Ever.
Based on the roadmap content updates too, it’s clear that as the days ticked down to that video, people at high levels in the RSI/CIG chain of command knew there was no video. They had nothing to show, because they had no game to show. Worse: the video was a scam from the start. When they announced they were going to show it in May of 2020, they knew they weren’t going to be showing anything. When they hyped it up leading up to that date, they knew they were lying about that. When they said “We ran into some editorial issues” (what?) they knew that was nonsense as well.
They knew there was no video but announced it anyway.
They hyped the release of the video, knowing that none existed.
They then apologized for not showing the video for a weird, nonsensical reason, and promised it would be shown soon. Which, it never was.
That’s not poor project management, nor is it over-ambition. That’s a grift.
I mean I know nothing but it seems clear (to me) that he’s hired a bunch of dev studios all over the world to make random bits of content with no overall hope of scope or plan.
Like building a car by having one studio make wheels, the other studio make windshields, ect.
That way content gets made, “work” is done, but they’re no closer to making a car than when they started. Eventually people are told to glue the parts together. They don’t, and it falls apart, but they made a good faith effort, need more time and money, and this game stuff is hard, right?
It’s absolutely pervasive across the whole project. The more common approach is to promise these big projects that are going to be amazing and delay delay and when they finally deliver something it is just a fraction of what they promised. They even invent new terminology to obfuscate that. They call things “Tier 0” implementations as if that’s a thing.
On top of not delivering them, the other obvious scam part is how the big X is always announced right before another big ship sale is announced.
It’s comical the utterly complicated things they constantly promise are almost done and the hobbyist level things they manage to trickle out.
Yep. And there’s a difference between poor project management and “this stuff is super complex” and what was done with that video. They knew they didn’t have it and they lied about it beforehand and afterward. They should be thrilled that legislative bodies in the UK and the US have not yet decided to consider crowdfunding investment for future action. (And I say that as a non-backer who has NO monetary skin in this particular game.)
Tommy Tallarico wishes he were this good.
Server meshing is becoming SC’s version of “the year of the Linux desktop”.
I avoided bringing up the “Answer the Call 2016” stuff, simply because I wasn’t 100% sure if there was some later explanation given about essentially remaking the game to modernize it or something, like when they switched engines. Of course even that wouldn’t explain basic assets being incomplete.
Assuming there hasn’t, then yes - it’s more egregious. But even without that, going from announcing a beta aiming for Q3 2020 to nothing in 2023 is incredible.
More than anything else though, my simple question for the true believers who don’t think CIG are being dishonest or the project is completely off the rails is: How do you explain that? If it wasn’t a lie, and it wasn’t shambolic project management, then what was it? That’s not even glibly rhetorical - I’m genuinely interested to know how they mentally compartmentalize this stuff.
It matters because it impacts their credibility when they talk about how allegedly progressed the development is. And it should also give people pause that they just… don’t explain it. “It wasn’t a guarantee”, “It’s ready when it’s ready”, rinse repeat.
I just stopped by to see who else thinks this is my fault.
You know, I did write a series of blogs starting back in 2015 and said it was all bollocks and a massive confidence scam. Shockingly, 8 yrs later, here we are.
As to SQ42, I wrote a least 4 blogs - complete with insider info - where I said that it was all nonsense. Then it was coming in 2020 for which they got investor money from the Calders.
It’s never getting finished because that would be the end of the grift; aside from that whole tech debt thing.
Just to clear it up because it is confusing. They didn’t actually switch engines. What happened is that Star Citizen/Squadron 42 are based off an old version of Cryengine (3.8). At some point when CIG started separating Star Citizen the MMO from Squadron 42 the single player game that is still online only for some reason, Crytek went after them for not having a license for two games.
CIG tried to counter that they switched to Amazon Lumberyard but that is just a fork from Cryengine that Amazon bought. The huge red flag that they hadn’t actually switched to Lumberyard was that in CIG videos they showed shots of tools and code things like enumerations that were replaced in Lumberyard. Long story short there is CIG settled the lawsuit and paid for an extra license.
They have not actually changed engines in any real way.
Backer psychology isn’t really my interest on this. As a (non gaming) developer myself, I just find the disaster project captivatingly incompetent. I mean, I have seen huge projects at massive companies go off the rails w/ just incompetence instead of fraud. But to see it just zombie on forever is fascinating.
But what I have seen backer wise is there’s basically just a mantra that the scope of the game is so large that of course it will take a long time. They can’t or don’t take the critical logic step of asking if the scope is actually obtainable. Honestly I think most of them don’t even play games much. They just like to dream about a perfect game.
I knew I could count on a man of so few words for such a nice one sentence summary.
They spent a few years slowly making the TOS consumer/refund unfriendly but fundamentally as long as it zombies along I think that they are functionally immune to any legal ramifications. No judge or jury is going to give a shit what % of a space game is working or if it is behind schedule or whatever.