Star Citizen Boss: “It’ll Be Done When It’s Done”

Tsing

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Image: RSI



Let the “Scam Citizen” jokes commence. Star Citizen staff held an AMA this Friday to celebrate the Space Sim MMO’s eighth anniversary (yes, the “game” was revealed nearly a decade ago), and Cloud Imperium Games boss Chris Roberts had plenty to say about his long-gestating project, which was born out of a successful crowd-funding effort in 2012 and continues to rake in the cash via exotic (i.e., expensive) starship DLC and microtransactions.



Something that many backers have been wondering is when Star Citizen’s epic, celebrity-studded campaign mode – Squadron 42 – would be released. In response to one user, Roberts admitted that the game was nowhere...

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They can still beat DNF as that took what? 15 years?
 
Sadly "scam" is no longer just a jab or joke. It's dead serious. How many times were we shut down when we raised the issue of SQ42 being vaporware? Despite their endless promises of beta alpha and final releases every year going back at least 5 years. Now finally they admit it is nowhere near being a complete game if it even exists. So how can you say it's not a scam, when they deliberately advertised false release dates they knew were unattainable?
 
If freaking 8 years in you have no time frame, wow, and you call yourself a professional?
 
I'll be honest... they took me for ~$200 from the KS days. 😞 I think I even installed it and attempted to "play" it at some point some years ago. I won't be making that mistake ever again.
 
Prosecutable?

I highly doubt it. Ponzi schemes are illegal for a number of reasons. When you look at how they've handled Star Citizen, you can see several similarities between what's going on with the game and how investment banker's in the 1980's and 1990's handled Ponzi schemes/mismanaged hedge funds, etc. The difference is the law hasn't caught up with things like crowd funding. The law probably doesn't enforce any fiduciary duty to use the money precisely as intended.

It will be awhile and it will probably take years if not decades to structure laws to handle crowdfunding the way investment banking is dealt with. That's assuming it ever happens. If it does, you can bet that Star Citizen will be the cause of laws springing up around crowdfunding. The reason why Crowdfunding is great for people like Chris Roberts (and the reason why I think the law hasn't caught up with crowdsourced funding in general) is due to the fact that the contributions from each "investor" is usually very small. The products advertised in return do not yet exist and their projected value is equally small. That is, the total value of what your trying to fund and what you put in is usually so small that taking anyone to court over your contribution would be absurd.

I backed the game initially for $45 based on the initial Kickstarter presentation and the fact that I wanted space combat / space flight sims to return as the genre was effectively dead at that point. My thinking was that if nothing else, interest in Squadron 42 would be sufficient to let other game companies know that gamers wanted more games in that genre. To be clear, the original Kickstarter was for Squadron 42. This was a game that was advertised as a spiritual successor to Wing Commander and it seemed like something that would be quick and easy to make by modern standards. Despite it's "issues", I'd say that's absolutely true as Star Wars Squadrons was made and released relatively quickly. It's basically a Wing Commander rip off with a Star Wars skin. It's not that good necessarily, but conceptually it was easy to create. Even EA knew it wasn't worth $60. There really is no excuse for the fact that SQ42 doesn't exist or hasn't released by now.

Squadron 42 was the promise of the Kickstarter campaign. Not Star Ponzi. Scam Citizen was touted as a stretch goal and something that would be built off the physics engine and assets of Squadron 42. The fact that we haven't seen Squadron 42 after 8 years of supposed development tells you that this project was mismanaged from the start. As soon as that stretch goal was released, it became all about Star Ponzi and SQ42 wasn't mentioned again until a couple years ago when people started hammering CIG for updates on it. My take on the news, what was said etc. is that CIG had pretty much forgotten about it.

Likely, they had figured if they could make the frame work and underlying physics, combat systems, etc. for Star Ponzi, SQ42 would be an easy thing to churn out. There are lots of people that defense Star Ponzi as an actual product citing progress on the beta, and while i wouldn't say that the product is totally non-existent, the fact of the matter is the project has been horrifically mismanaged. Supposedly, CIG higher ups like Chris, his wife and some of their closest cronies that work there are living it up like they are loaded and there have been enough accusations of mismanagement of the project and its funding that you can only conclude one thing: Where there is smoke, there is fire.

Unfortunately, like Ponzi schemes until the funding dries up entirely this bullshit will go on and on. Suckers will continue to throw money at the project. It's reached a point now where it could never live up to the hype even if it did release.
 
Just to add, I don't think Chris Roberts and Co. created Scam Citizen with the idea of using it as a personal piggy bank. If you look into a lot of the Ponzi scheme cases, it often seems as though few people start out that way. What ends up happening is that they end up with access to huge sums of money and can't resist the temptation to use it for their own personal gains. Once they start doing it, they can't seem to ever stop. Sure, there are some people who's starting position is the con game, but I honestly don't believe that's the case here.

You can tell by the initial Kickstarter video that Chris Roberts was passionate about his project. I just don't think he knows how to manage the project without someone above him to hold him accountable for what he's doing. That and the fact he was out of the game development business for over a decade when he got back into it. The world of AAA gaming is vastly different technologically and he may flat out have zero idea how to manage a project with an ever increasing scope.
 
Just to add, I don't think Chris Roberts and Co. created Scam Citizen with the idea of using it as a personal piggy bank. If you look into a lot of the Ponzi scheme cases, it often seems as though few people start out that way. What ends up happening is that they end up with access to huge sums of money and can't resist the temptation to use it for their own personal gains. Once they start doing it, they can't seem to ever stop. Sure, there are some people who's starting position is the con game, but I honestly don't believe that's the case here.

You can tell by the initial Kickstarter video that Chris Roberts was passionate about his project. I just don't think he knows how to manage the project without someone above him to hold him accountable for what he's doing. That and the fact he was out of the game development business for over a decade when he got back into it. The world of AAA gaming is vastly different technologically and he may flat out have zero idea how to manage a project with an ever increasing scope.
Roberts has a long history of mismanaged products. He has grand ideas, but has never learned what it takes to bring those ideas to life in the real world.
 
Roberts has a long history of mismanaged products. He has grand ideas, but has never learned what it takes to bring those ideas to life in the real world.
Yes, basically every time somebody had to step on his dick to end feature creep and put out a game. The problem here is that there is nobody above him to do that.

I'm sure they didn't start this with bad faith, hell I don't think they have bad faith now, there is just gross mismanagement and cronism. Star Citizen development is ran like a country (by politicians), not like a company. The product they are making is not games, it's promises.
 
Unfortunately, like Ponzi schemes until the funding dries up entirely this bullshit will go on and on. Suckers will continue to throw money at the project. It's reached a point now where it could never live up to the hype even if it did release.
It is released. I'm pretty sure what you can see in the actual released version is no more than a few months behind their actual progress to that date if there is even that. They claim to have everything almost ready, but they claimed that about SQ42 for years. I argued with anboys who were convinced that SQ42 is complete and will be releasing soon years ago.
 
It is released. I'm pretty sure what you can see in the actual released version is no more than a few months behind their actual progress to that date if there is even that. They claim to have everything almost ready, but they claimed that about SQ42 for years. I argued with anboys who were convinced that SQ42 is complete and will be releasing soon years ago.

It isn't released in a finalized state. So long as the game isn't complete, fan boys will continue to make excuses for it. What has been released is a pre-alpha at best. I don't give a **** what they call it, that's all it is.
 
It isn't released in a finalized state.
I doubt it ever will, if funding dries up first they'll start throwing people overboard, then when the **** hits the fan, they'll let go of the reins and let the whole damned enterprise go off a cliff. This is not a ship where the captain will go down with it.
 
Someone needs to lock CR in a closet and ship the thing already.
 
Someone needs to lock CR in a closet and ship the thing already.

They've probably already released most of what they've done on it. They've probably got bits and pieces under development I'm sure. It's not that they aren't working on it. It's that the project has always been grossly mismanaged and what they have behind the curtain probably isn't anywhere near the amount of material fan boys think it is. Certainly not enough to constitute a full game.
 
They've probably already released most of what they've done on it. They've probably got bits and pieces under development I'm sure. It's not that they aren't working on it. It's that the project has always been grossly mismanaged and what they have behind the curtain probably isn't anywhere near the amount of material fan boys think it is. Certainly not enough to constitute a full game.

I get the email newsletters about it. Just seems like slowly incrementing alpha builds. Apparently the flight engine / model part has been done for a long, long time... now they just need to put it in a game?
 
I get the email newsletters about it. Just seems like slowly incrementing alpha builds. Apparently the flight engine / model part has been done for a long, long time... now they just need to put it in a game?

I've played some of the alpha versions over the years. It's a glorified tech demo. The engine has been there for some time. That's true. Behind simple flight mechanics I can't tell you how good it is. It's fairly realistic, so I have nothing to compare it to. I haven't done any ship to ship combat in it so there isn't anything to say on that either. More ardent fans of it would have to chime in on that.

The problem is feature creep. They keep trying to add more crap into the game so that it's something for everyone and that's just not realistic. They've spent a crap ton of time and presumably money on some cargo handling nonsense so you can be a glorified dock worker or UPS driver or something. Stupid **** like that keeps getting all their time and attention. They started with SQ42, moved onto Scam Citizen, than Star Marine, then back to Star Ponzi, and then back to SQ42, then whatever. Who knows anymore? The project has become so big that it would take another ten years and probably another 200 million dollars to finish it. By then, they'd have to change engines or something (again) just to bring it up to modern graphics standards.

Speaking of which, they've been doing that too. The original graphics and ship models people bought are so old now that they've had to go back and remake them. When your project is taking that long, you know the project is off the rails. It's Duke Nukem Forever all over again. The only difference is, fans of the games are prepaying for this madness.
 
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