The first 5 years I was in SC's camp, I really want them to succeed and was pretty forgiving of their challenges.
But holy ****, they started in 2011.
8 years of development, and what is there to show for it? Not even a beta....not even close. They keep adding garbage and things that they developed early on (like their flight model) is having to be rewritten. I know that they have had a huge challenge ahead of them, but holy **** that's almost an entire console cycle to not even be out of Alpha. Entire generations of graphics cards and CPUs have been released since they started development.
The people who keep giving this game money are nuts, I'm starting to think. It's getting almost cult like....like watching people who advocate for an MLM.
I'm not sure what an MLM is, but I agree with you. I backed the game early during its initial phase because I believed in Squadron 42. At that time, Star Citizen was a stretch goal and all the nonsense that was talked about later on wasn't really on the table. The feature set for that seemed lofty, but not unobtainable. Now, what they advertise seems like its impossible to do or at least do well or within a reasonable amount of time.
Every project starts with lofty goals as they come from dreams of what could be possible. As the project moves forward, features are usually scaled back and the project comes into focus. That's not what we have hear. They never narrowed the scope of it, nor has the project had any focus. They keep adding ships, modules like Star Marine etc. without working on the core game play.
Not only that, but Squadron 42 would have been an easy slam dunk, and 8 years later, there is every reason to believe that it was only actually started recently when CIG got called out for not having delivered on what should have been something Chris Roberts could and should have had no trouble with. We should have seen that after two to three years of development and that's being easy on them.
My personal take on this, is that due to the lack of scrutiny and the mass amount of funding that's gone into this, it seems to me that without accountability, the higher ups,
(Chris Roberts specifically) have been dipping into the old piggy bank and living it up while the project's been mismanaged from day one. I don't think this started out as a ponzi scheme but I think that's what its ultimately degenerated into. Parallels with ponzi scheme cases are shockingly similar. Most of what we've seen from CIG over the years is smoke and mirrors.
Even if the game ends up completed in the next few years in some form that's even remotely reminiscent of what's promised, I think it will be safe to say that the game wouldn't have needed the billion dollars it took to finance it. I'll wager allot of that went into catered food, hookers and blow, cars, mansions, watches and whatever else the higher ups wanted.
The thing is, allot of the laws that cover ponzi schemes and other investment fraud is that few if any of them apply to crowd funded projects like Star Citizen. Right from the start backers understand they may not see anything from their contribution in the form of a game.
