Hello Kyrt,
I appreciate the response but its hard to share the thought the money has been used properly and only for SC. After pouring through Derek's information and the paper trails that have been uncovered in Chris's questionable film industry investments I have trouble sharing the idea that the backer money has been used wisely. What makes makes suspect even more is they stated while back even if money dried up they had plenty to finish the game. But they are continually are adding things to sell in game and outside of the game. I have been on the development side for years at IBM and other companies and understand costs and delays. It's just disheartening as I fully bought into Chris's pitch from the get go. For myself to see what has transpired over the past two years with SC its hard to trust or believe anything they state.
I'm not suggesting money has been wisely spent.
Far from it. Chris Roberts has...IMO....wasted millions. His decision to change genres to an MMO, for example, should have (IMO) necessitated a complete restart of the project and a total revaluation of the decisions made up until that point.
Changing to an MMO ensured that the engine he had selected was no longer viable and required extensive rewriting...at huge cost in time and effort...AND because he failed to communicate changes, rendered much of the work outsourced to other firms useless whilst eventually opening CIG up to be sued by CryTek.
That one decision likely cost CIG tens of millions of dollars that were effectively wasted.
One could argue that there were reasons...Chris might not have wanted to throw out all the work already done and his agreement with CryTek locked him into CryEngine and having been out of the industry for ten years and having noone with any experience or knowledge of MMO development he possibly underestimated the amount of work required to fulfil his vision and so on and so forth.
The sad fact is that I am aware that much of the money raised by CIG has been effectively squandered. The financial reports are also interesting....I'm not an accountant but it looks to me that CIG paid someone millions of dollars for the IP rights to the SC property. That "someone" has to be Chris Roberts since the Star Citizen universe is *his* creation. Now...assuming my understanding is right, that would mean Chris Roberts set up a company which received millions of dollars to develop a game and then had that company pay him millions to obtain the IP rights for the game CR created the company to develop in the first place.
That sounds to me like something perfectly legal and yet somehow extremely shady and morally dubious but it's also just as likely that I'm misreading the information.
The point being that despite what I wrote...which was simply to point out that CIG could indeed spend have amounts of money and legitimately have little to show... I have no doubt large chunks of the money have been wasted.
CR could have chosen to develop the game relatively cheaply, but he'd have to accept a loss of fidelity. Not so many polygons for the ships and bases and characters....not so many points of interaction such as switches...and so on. But the game would be relatively cheap to develop.
He didn't. He chose the uber expensive option...but he doesn't have the full resources of an established studio to do that, AND it appears its staff is skewed towards artists rather than coders. 6 network engineers of which only three are working on the so-called netcode for example...when they are developing an MMO.
Only 450 odd people means development is going to take much longer than at other firms....and be that much more costly as a result.
But 450 people is too many for the other development model....a smallish team that develops games relatively cheaply.
