Star Citizen developers allegedly wasting money

#5666522 Posted on: 05/07/2019 09:30 AM

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https://as.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/blb2y9/its-open-the-season-of-star-citizen-attacks-on/

Here we go again
Ps. hopeing HH would not post Forbes-bullshit

#5666525 Posted on: 05/07/2019 09:41 AM

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I have backed Star Citizen loooong ago, during its first announcement days. Now after all this time I still have my Super Hornet and a large pile of salt.

Personally, my hype turned into typical "meh". Yes, there is a lot of stuff that has been done, but overall the progress is way too slow for such a pile of cash they were sitting on.
The loyalty of their fanbase is beyond belief.

#5666526 Posted on: 05/07/2019 09:52 AM

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When developers start to buy houses worth 5 million and the game still is not finished, and probably never will be .. I think it is valid to raise questions. From the very beginning, SC has been looking like a big cash-grab enriching Chris Roberts and the likes, I still am not seeing that change.

#5666527 Posted on: 05/07/2019 09:54 AM

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I'm original backer, and I lost any sentiment to this game long ago. For some reason there is defense force by people who still are delusional, but going back in time the fact is, Roberts never actually finished anything by himself, maybe except first WC. It is nice he do continue his vision, but it is not so nice that there is no way to see this game finished in years to come. He simply is not a good manager, and this article shows it really well. I do not care anymore, I have real, working games to play, at least even Elite is better choice.

#5666529 Posted on: 05/07/2019 10:02 AM

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They DO seem to put an awful lot of effort into making new spaceships for people to buy

#5666530 Posted on: 05/07/2019 10:07 AM

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https://as.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/blb2y9/its-open-the-season-of-star-citizen-attacks-on/

Here we go again
Ps. hopeing HH would not post Forbes-bullshit

"Please don't post things I don't like about things I do like."

How about no? The game has been in development for 7 years now, had several kickstarters and ludicrous ship prices. It has also been delayed several times. Now it turns out that the guy in charge somehow has enough money to buy a house for several million dollars, even though the project he leads hasn't been finished, and won't be for a while? At some point, someone will start asking questions, and with good reason, so stuff your self-pitying Reddit thread.

#5666544 Posted on: 05/07/2019 10:50 AM

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Maybe it would be best if all media started to completele ignore this vaporware nonsense. Whoever is delusional enough to waste thousands of dollars on this stupidity most probably deserves it. Everyone else should move on...

#5666552 Posted on: 05/07/2019 11:16 AM

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#5666558 Posted on: 05/07/2019 11:28 AM

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If the development was given to a Polish startup you now could remember how the game play was.
Unfortunately SS will pass for the story like the most overestimated, over founded, and over hyped scam.
It seems that there are few words that let people make insane actions and they are: porn, espace, cyberpunk, androids and maybe few other more.
Take yourself a favor...get the lesson and try to do not repeat the mistake you did...you allowed a thief to be millionaire.

#5666560 Posted on: 05/07/2019 11:33 AM

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The $27.000 DLC must have sold well then :p

#5666562 Posted on: 05/07/2019 11:40 AM

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It's a little late but the Forbes article is 'interesting' to read...o_O

#5666568 Posted on: 05/07/2019 12:11 PM

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If Star Citizen didn't appear in various news every now and then, I'd have forgotten it even exists. It has been years since I tried to fly around, although I did download some version a few month back. I just never got around to launching the game itself. All in all, it's not like I wouldn't have ever wasted 50 euros in anything before. It's not really such a big deal, although it's kind of annoying to be a part of making someone a millionaire without getting anything much in return. But that's life, I suppose. At least it doesn't happen all the time since we don't have patent troll plagues and medicine price +3000% schemes here.

#5666575 Posted on: 05/07/2019 12:52 PM

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I would imagine Derek Smart is having a lot of fun tweeting about this news...

#5666588 Posted on: 05/07/2019 01:19 PM

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This is the big problem with kickstarting projects, they receive bags of money to create/develop a product but they have no one to answer so they can do pretty much do what they want without any responsibilities. In this case is "normal" that Chris Roberts is going to indulge himself with some of that money even if is still continuing making the game. The question is if the game is even going to be released or if it´s going to continue in "still in development state" forever...
I hope the game is released someday because it seems interesting.

#5666589 Posted on: 05/07/2019 01:19 PM

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If the development was given to a Polish startup you now could remember how the game play was.
Unfortunately SS will pass for the story like the most overestimated, over founded, and over hyped scam.
It seems that there are few words that let people make insane actions and they are: porn, espace, cyberpunk, androids and maybe few other more.
Take yourself a favor...get the lesson and try to do not repeat the mistake you did...you allowed a thief to be millionaire.

"Please don't post things I don't like about things I do like."

How about no? The game has been in development for 7 years now, had several kickstarters and ludicrous ship prices. It has also been delayed several times. Now it turns out that the guy in charge somehow has enough money to buy a house for several million dollars, even though the project he leads hasn't been finished, and won't be for a while? At some point, someone will start asking questions, and with good reason, so stuff your self-pitying Reddit thread.

FWIW he was a millionaire before he started this game - whether he could afford a $5M house, I have no idea, but even before CIG, I've read about him from after freelancer and he definitely had a ton of money from the sales of various companies he owned stake in.

The game is 100% mismanaged - they focus way too much on small details and not enough on game systems to make it actually playable. The reports about about devs working months on shields because CR wants like 500 revisions sounds about right.

Other complaints I don't find valid though - the 7 year development time for example. It's a real stretch it call it 7 years when they basically did their dev ramp only about two years ago. Plus he isn't crunching his employees. They also definitely crank out content a lot faster now than they ever have with quarterly patches bringing new planets/systems. Its pretty clear that a lot of the upfront work was focused on tech scalability and now that those systems are in place they can generate content way faster. That's not to mention that the scope of the game expanded with the crowd funding and essentially restarted the development several times.

I think my problem with a lot of these Star Citizen hit pieces is that they focus too much on "scam" and not enough on "game development at this scale is fucking hard". They gloss over the fact that the game is attempting things that other AAA studios, with established workflows & budgets, won't even touch - instead we get more Fortnite/MOBA/Etc clones. They don't talk about game workflows or how a constantly expanding budget would actually lead development to take longer because your scope can, almost needs to be, drastically expanded because your backers expect it to be.

If you were building a game on a $10M budget and you said it's going to have "X,Y,Z" and then the budget suddenly became $200M, 3 years later, you'd probably take a step back and reevaluate what you can do with the game. And it's not like you can immediately just hire 300+ people.. in a game like this where you need a bunch of base level systems to scale the game off of, you may only hire a few dozen at the start to build those.. once they are done you can start hiring the bulk of artists/gameplay designers to build out the actual game on those systems. Following the development over the past several years and that's exactly what happened here. My issue with CR's development is that they've focused way to much on random crap like the placement of beds in a ship, or AI interacting with lunch meals, or a HUD that shows up in game as 3D or apparently redesigning the look of shields and not enough on compelling gameplay content. Multicrew is in a shit state. Missions are essentially useless. The economy in the game is useless. There are like zero gameplay loops, it's all just visual tech nonsense - which is cool but not selling me on playing the game.

Idk - I just feel like a lot of these articles do a poor job of painting the whole picture. They just have a guy that's like "oh wowwee 7 years development long time!!!" ignoring multiple other AAA studio games that also took 7 years, had fixed budgets, had in place production pipelines with existing lore and content. Then you get a bunch of forum goers going "yeahh! 7 years is ridiculous!!!!11!" and don't learn anything about how shitty it is to be a game developer.