H83:

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.

Yet...David Braben did not have that 'problem' when Frontier developments made Elite: Dangerous.

shoja:

I called this a while ago, so not surprised, even a tiny bit. Stop defending this cash hog. This is probably one of the most wasteful projects ever. I was rooting for this game initially, but I eventually realized that they are just going to keep sucking cash out of everyone. Too many suckers out there.

SerotoNiN:

I said this from the start. Dude was a shyster and the game would never be completed. Everyone called me names and laughed. Secondly, anyone spending $3,500 on a virtual spaceship needs to be bashed in the head and hopefully loosen some sense, that they are lacking.

Lol yeah - you guys are such pioneers for having called this.. as if there wasn't a massive doubt bandwagon to jump on right from the start.

Loobyluggs:

Yet...David Braben did not have that 'problem' when Frontier developments made Elite: Dangerous.

Yeah because he raised, what, $250K more than what he wanted - $1.25M to $1.5M? CR raised $50M+ from an initial $500K? The issue with Star Citizen is that the scope expanded massively and CIG choose to redevelop around the new scope instead of shipping a finished game and expanding off it. ED never had the money to promise or expand the scope during the initial development - David didn't have that problem because that problem was literally never an option for him to take. It's a false equivalence.

Denial:

But like creating a smaller Star Citizen and expanding it from there wouldn't look much different than it does now.

It would be fundamentally and crucially different. Because now, for these years, he hasn't needed to release anything that works from A to Z (or let's say A to Ö for my Nordic brothers). That's why all the effort spent on little details that won't help anyone on their own, as has been mentioned in this thread. If he had released a limited game with limited assets first, it means he would have needed to concentrate on making every aspect of it work, even if there were far less of those aspects (like no free roam on foot, less ships, less planets, etc). Yet it would have been a wholesome game. Then he could have developed and released expansions. One of them could have added the FPS action. Such expansions would be significant and wouldn't be derided by the online community, like some horse armour.

Denial:

Lol yeah - you guys are such pioneers for having called this.. as if there wasn't a massive doubt bandwagon to jump on right from the start. Yeah because he raised, what, $250K more than what he wanted - $1.25M to $1.5M? CR raised $50M+ from an initial $500K? The issue with Star Citizen is that the scope expanded massively and CIG choose to redevelop around the new scope instead of shipping a finished game and expanding off it. ED never had the money to promise or expand the scope during the initial development - David didn't have that problem because that problem was literally never an option for him to take. It's a false equivalence.

Never said anything but I saw it coming. Quite a few did not. Considering the hundred million made. I do get entertainment out of you making excuses for a complete stranger as if you make anything from the game. "The scope is sooo big", people knew that when they handed their money to him. When I read it, I said that's a euphemism for, you will never get a finished product. I'm just happy I didn't support it, that's all I was saying.

Sempaii:

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

Wow... what a profoundly convincing rebuttal...

As always, starting on end of April until CitizenCon (October), Star Citizen will receive constant attacks from the media like: Vaporware blaming, the money is gone, you should not spend a penny in the game, the vision is impossible, articles showing CIG as the new Hitler and slavering its employees, etc. So if you are new here, don't worry, it a common practice for years already.

When you link to anything from any anonymous poster on the net, it must be true!

Kaarme:

It would be fundamentally and crucially different. Because now, for these years, he hasn't needed to release anything that works from A to Z (or let's say A to Ö for my Nordic brothers). That's why all the effort spent on little details that won't help anyone on their own, as has been mentioned in this thread. If he had released a limited game with limited assets first, it means he would have needed to concentrate on making every aspect of it work, even if there were far less of those aspects (like no free roam on foot, less ships, less planets, etc). Yet it would have been a wholesome game. Then he could have developed and released expansions. One of them could have added the FPS action. Such expansions would be significant and wouldn't be derided by the online community, like some horse armour.

I guess my point is he could have released stuff A-Z while continuing to scope the game out as he did currently. Like instead of adding a planet with a entire city and all that fancy jazz they could have been working on the missions and progression of that. I don't think the scope is the issue, I think his lack of focus on gameplay loops is the issue and still appears to be the issue. Like I get in the game during the freeplay and I'm like "wow it looks great and feels great but what is there to do?" then I quit. If I could get in it's current unfinished state with my friends, do some quests together, get a new ship, have them actually do things as copilots inside the ship it would be fine. I don't think it needs to be finished it just needs to be adding gameplay loops that people actually want to do and not just tech.

SerotoNiN:

Never said anything but I saw it coming. Quite a few did not. Considering the hundred million made. I do get entertainment out of you making excuses for a complete stranger as if you make anything from the game. "The scope is sooo big", people knew that when they handed their money to him. When I read it, I said that's a euphemism for, you will never get a finished product. I'm just happy I didn't support it, that's all I was saying.

Some degree of people that bought it gave money with the knowledge that it could fail. I bought a $40 game package knowing that the came could never come out but $40 isn't a big deal for me - I've spent more money on games I've played for less time. Regardless at this point I feel like I already recouped my $40 in entertainment (Drug run PvP was quite fun) and if the game fails I didn't lose anything. The people spending $3500 on game packages are a different story, those people are crazy. Anyway the idea isn't to make excuses but to understand why it didn't succeed or how it could be done better. simply summing the entire thing up as "scam lel" doesn't add anything of value. They are clearly trying to make an extremely ambitious game but their development process is unfocused at best.

Denial:

Yeah because he raised, what, $250K more than what he wanted - $1.25M to $1.5M? CR raised $50M+ from an initial $500K? The issue with Star Citizen is that the scope expanded massively and CIG choose to redevelop around the new scope instead of shipping a finished game and expanding off it. ED never had the money to promise or expand the scope during the initial development - David didn't have that problem because that problem was literally never an option for him to take. It's a false equivalence.

I was referring to someone else's comment regarding crowdfunding and lack of accountability, I believe. -David Braben did not have any issues or problems, and in fact, stopped taking donations when the goal was hit - CR did not. -David Braben refunded donations when certain donators did not get the functionality they wanted - CR changed the definitions of donations to make them sound like 'units sold'. -David Braben delivered the project into a fully fledged game under time and under budget, won some awards, created his own game engine and in general, just had a plan and knew how to execute it. I wasn't equivalencing, not even falsely; merely pointing out that when done correctly by professionals, it is not a problem, or rather, that the perceived problems by the other member, are not seen. I appreciate the comment, and I understand this is a minor bone of contention for members, but this article is just more C4 on the Kerosene, on the bonfire, on the match-book, on the lighter of gaming confounding moments over the last decade. I got respect for everyone here, I truly do...but, this article, this information...it's just so...damning. I'm sure there are those who just want to say 'ha ha' in a very Simpsons-esque manner, but I moved on from that now, and am more concerned with indie developers trying to put a game together and have next to nothing to do it. These people working away on there projects, streaming daily with Unreal/Unity/Cryengine/excel/word/MS Paint etc, trying to get their creative vision realised, yet, with reputations and abuses of notoriety like this...they are just aghast at this level of ineptitude. Go to here: Twitch game developers link And actually engage with these people...ask any one of them what they would do if they had $5m just lying around (allegedly and 'largely') in their bank balance...what this would mean to the development of their game?

Loobyluggs:

I was referring to someone else's comment regarding crowdfunding and lack of accountability, I believe. -David Braben did not have any issues or problems, and in fact, stopped taking donations when the goal was hit - CR did not. -David Braben refunded donations when certain donators did not get the functionality they wanted - CR changed the definitions of donations to make them sound like 'units sold'. -David Braben delivered the project into a fully fledged game under time and under budget, won some awards, created his own game engine and in general, just had a plan and knew how to execute it. I wasn't equivalencing, not even falsely; merely pointing out that when done correctly by professionals, it is not a problem, or rather, that the perceived problems by the other member, are not seen.

Fair enough - I did enjoy ED so I'm not trying to take anything away from the game.

I want to buy this Star Citizen but every free weekend I download this and the thing just runs at 20FPS in a lot of areas.Then I watch a youtube video with thousands of comments on how great the build is is but it still looks like it runs at 20FPS or less in areas.Especially indoors. For me I waiting until they can release a build that can run stutter free with acceptable FPS on GSync/Fressync and I really do not care about anything else related to this Star Citizen stuff.

I think SC is a prime example of the many things one has to do in order to ship a game - vision/creativity isn't everything. Blaming it on crowdfunding alone is simply unfair, as there are way too many examples of successfully crowdfunded games. But you can't simply throw money at a problem and expect it to fix itself. So, investing in a game simply on the premise of it being done by one/handful of good developers isn't safe enough, and here it shows. Mighty Number 9 is another prime example of that. Now, I don't think Chris Roberts is scamming people, but the sheer volume of promises broken/delayed seems to warrant the bad reputation this game has been drawing, and I think that's fair. If we let game studios/developers get away with behavior like this, it'll become the norm and we might end up on another video game crash like in the 80's. No quality in what is delivered means no trust and no money, simple as that. So an article like this, even though not 100% fair, is important to even the odds and inform potential new customers. When/If Star Citizen (or even just SQ42) is released in a 'complete' state and break new ground, I'll be the first to consider buying the game, but so far all I see is red flags, and can't recommend it to anyone. Even if there is a complete product being made, I simply cannot trust the management behind it and thus cannot invest in it - that's business 101, and is no different in video games.

Denial:

Lol yeah - you guys are such pioneers for having called this.. as if there wasn't a massive doubt bandwagon to jump on right from the start.

I have been dealing with projects for quite some time now. I have my undergrad and master's in business and IT. Am I a pioneer? No, but can I tell a good project from a bad one? Absolutely. This ain't it, chief. You are sounding like a blind fanboy right now.

Denial:

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 crap 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.

How many of those developers are buying 5 million dollar houses BEFORE the game is released? The problem with being delusional is you don't know you are delusional.

Ricardo:

Now, I don't think Chris Roberts is scamming people, but the sheer volume of promises broken/delayed seems to warrant the bad reputation this game has been drawing, and I think that's fair. If we let game studios/developers get away with behavior like this, it'll become the norm and we might end up on another video game crash like in the 80's. No quality in what is delivered means no trust and no money, simple as that. So an article like this, even though not 100% fair, is important to even the odds and inform potential new customers.

That's a reasonable point. One of the issues is also that this is all happening at a time when publishing is at its most egregious, nickle-n-diming the games industry, and price-gouging their way to obtain more money from consumers. If you factor in that we, as consumers and gamers, are at a point in time where the availability of playfield-levelling toolsets from Epic Games ét all are just 'there' for the taking, and people with zero budgets are producing 'AAA' standards...it makes this level of ineptitude all the more visible. CR and other like him (PM is another) can no longer BS their way out of issues that we know, are the fault of not having a coherent plan, and, not really truthfully knowing what to do, as you pointed out. As I have said before 'The Emperor is not wearing any clothes'. [spoiler] https://i.imgur.com/MjMFHED.jpg [/spoiler] I had to reach for this old story from my bookshelf of complete fairy tales, and it turns out I was misquoting Hans ! Apologies to all, but the parable holds true, me thinks.

shoja:

I have been dealing with projects for quite some time now. I have my undergrad and master's in business and IT. Am I a pioneer? No, but can I tell a good project from a bad one? Absolutely. This ain't it, chief. You are sounding like a blind fanboy right now.

My point is that you didn't need a business degree to tell the project was a long shot. Tons of people were saying it. His previous game Freelancer essentially failed the same way. It just amuses me that all these people always come out every SC thread and go "SEE I TOLD YOU IT WOULD FAIL!!!!1!" As if it wasn't the most obvious call ever. I don't get how that makes me a blind fanboy, especially considering the rest of my posts in this thread are critical of the game's development, but whatever

NewTRUMP Order:

How many of those developers are buying 5 million dollar houses BEFORE the game is released? The problem with being delusional is you don't know you are delusional.

I would imagine most developers who were millionaires beforehand? lol.. Again, I don't know what CR's networth was before starting CIG but he did own and sell several successful companies and served as producer for several films, two of which (Lord of War and Lucky Number Slevin) were quite successful. Was it enough money to afford a $5M house, maybe? Did he use CIG money? Maybe? What's his salary at CIG - if it's a reasonable salary and he partially used that along with existing money to buy an expensive house then I personally don't see the issue. If he's taking $5M out of the company to directly buy a house then yeah it's a problem.

Forbes is high quality toilet paper.

Denial:

His previous game Freelancer essentially failed the same way. It just amuses me that all these people always come out every SC thread and go "SEE I TOLD YOU IT WOULD FAIL!!!!1!"

Freelancer wasn't given enough time to be great, it was passable but the universe was seriously lacking in content and had no post story playability. And this was because MS took Chris off the job and put someone else who didn't understand the scope aimed for. That isn't the case with Star Citizen, theres no overlord publisher thats going to screw the final product in this case.

I don't know much about this saga, other than what I've read at wiki. But it seems to me it's hard to argue against the game's poor management. This is Chris Roberts in 2012:

Really it is all about constant iteration from launch. The whole idea is to be constantly updating. It isn’t like the old days where you had to have everything and the kitchen sink in at launch because you weren’t going to come back to it for awhile. We’re already one year in - another two years puts us at 3 total which is ideal. Any more and things would begin to get stale.

https://web.archive.org/web/2017*/https://www.themittani.com/features/exclusive-interview-star-citizens-chris-roberts

Think how much longer it would take if they didn't have a base engine to start building and modifying on. RDR2 took this long and they had an engine, script and established studio.

Loobyluggs:

Yet...David Braben did not have that 'problem' when Frontier developments made Elite: Dangerous.

Fortunately there are more examples of Kickstarter projects that worked out right, the same way there are plenty that flopped really hard but that doesn´t change the fact that those projects are managed in a very "obscure" way because there´s no one to control them. In this particular case, i think the problem is that Star Citizen gathered much more money that Roberts was expecting and because of that he tried to increase the scope of the game to match the money he gathered and apparently things have spiralled out of control because of everything is trying to add to the game. As for the house, i agree with Denial, he probably already had money for it because star developers like him make silly amounts of money nowadays but i could be wrong of course.

public conjecture about being out of control based on no knowledge of insider workings is laughable. they have been honest about the roadmaps and only slipped off course once because of instance containers being a bit more of a problem to introduce than first thought.