Wow, I wonder what people will make of this article which has popped up on GamaSutra:
Star Citizen Has a Huge Development Cost Problem
Star Citizen: A Close Look at the Cash - PT-II
There is a
single hilarious comment in the article. See below.
It's very speculative, you only know the public crowd funded money and nothing else (and yes subscriptions and some other things are not reflected in that number). I find very likely CIG does have private investment in the back, it's rather logical if you look at Elite Dangerous, Dual Universe, Ashes of Creation and others all crowd funded yet most of their funds did come from investors.
One massive miss in your entire analogy is that companies can scale development, and unlike other companies where they have a set budget and once that runs out it falls into bankruptcy, CIG has one constant revenue generation from its ongoing crowdfund, so unlike other companies in said situation where mass layoffs lead to bankruptcy, CIG here can simply scale down the company to their income and continue development
So even if CIG runs out of money today, they can just adjust their operating costs to around 2 million a month, and the ongoing crowdfund would maintain their operations, this analysis (1) shows that steady income:
(1) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI
Another flaw of yours is that CIG already admitted that there is a dependency on the money they keep crowd funding and they already made statements that if they weren't to get any more money, they would be able to finish SQ42 and the completion of Star Citizen would depend on the sales of the SP Campaign game, as well statements that they scale the number of people that work in CIG based on their monthly income. While they have cash reserves they do have one crowdfund and they will focus on that and only use the reserves if they don't crowdfund enough to cover their costs.
My response was posted elsewhere, as I opted not to post it there, and have Shitizens descend on the guy's blog post.
I have now read both parts of that article, which does indeed paint a very bleak picture, however the lone (as of right now) comment below Part 2 raises some points that I’m curious about. Instead of re-phrasing his points, I’ll just quote him here. I have not been following this debacle enough to know the answers, but I know that you have been.
You can just discard the comment out of hand because it's all rubbish, no doubt written by one of the zealots.
you only know the public crowd funded money and nothing else (and yes subscriptions and some other things are not reflected in that number). I find very likely CIG does have private investment in the back,
I knew two investors, one pulled out last year and wrote a public post about it. That's not speculation - it's a fact. And that investment money, according to sources, was long since spent of course. These guys are acting as if CIG has a well full of Gold coins. This despite the fact that they continue to have these JPEG (one going on right now) sales, amid other flash (two going on right now) sales.
One massive miss in your entire analogy is that companies can scale development, and unlike other companies where they have a set budget and once that runs out it falls into bankruptcy, CIG has one constant revenue generation from its ongoing crowdfund, so unlike other companies in said situation where mass layoffs lead to bankruptcy, CIG here can simply scale down the company to their income and continue development
This is pure nonsense. Of course they can scale; that's a given. However, the way CIG has the 5 studios structured around the world, pretty much guarantees a catastrophic collapse if they scale to the point of leaving a skeleton crew at any specific studio. e.g. the engine guys are in F42-GER, sysops and PU crew at in CIG-TX, while F42-UK (which is Chris's $75M gift to his brother) is where SQ42 and other things are supposedly being developed. And a 5th studio also in the UK (Derby) is a bunch of guys working on, get this, facial tech.
Yes, they will be forced to scale down, and they have been doing that since last year and an a fashion that won't cause panic. This is also a fact because well, those of us in the biz, know everybody. The trouble they are faced with in this regard is that when key people leave, they have to hire new people who have to then have to get up to speed on such a complex and mismanagement project. That ends up in delays, and all the crap we're seeing unfolding atm.
When you look at the F42-UK financials (the only public one), it's easy to see that they've been bleeding/wasting money consistently since the very beginning. And the most they've scaled up, the more money they've raised and subsequently spent. It's that expenditure that's causing them to continue using all kinds of tactics to raise money from the 2K or so whales still giving them money.
The funding chart, which doesn't take into account refunds, investments, loans etc, is bullshit. What we don't know is, to what extent. I know with absolutely certainty (and challenged CIG to prove me wrong) that they used it to show interest in the project. Then it got out of hand. It's like that thief who keeps going to the same place because he gets away with it. It's the same thing that causes anything to do with metrics, to be speculative. e.g. Facebook can claim 1 billion users, regardless of duplicates. So too can CIG when they claim 1.5m citizens, when in fact, according to metrics scrubbed from their own file stats, there are barely 500K backers with various amounts.
And if you look at that funding chart, it never goes below a certain amount. In fact, they would have you believe that a bunch of gamers are CONSISTENTLY putting money into a tech demo. Gamers don't do that. So it stands to reason that the monthly subscriptions are probably part of that, hence the consistent bottom line number. If that funding chart were to suddenly be a low levels, it would send a clear message that the funding has slowed down.
And for a project in which lies, obfuscation, and misdirection are everything, that would shake the faith of the few. So CIG has to no option but to continue padding it. And it's perfectly legal too, as long as they don't use it raise money. e.g. a gamer looking at a website , has no legal recourse to say that he backed the game because of a funding chart. That's a quick candidate to get tossed out of arbitration. However, if an investor or banker gets financials from CIG that shows numbers which match the funding chart, and later is found to be false, that's fraud - and jail time.
So even if CIG runs out of money today, they can just adjust their operating costs to around 2 million a month, and the ongoing crowdfund would maintain their operations, this analysis (1) shows that steady income:
It's hilarious that this commentator thinks that merely scaling down will yield desirable results. It won't. Simply because, 6 years, $160M, and 500 people (off and on) in, they have yet to build
even 15% of the game promised. So how exactly are they going to finish the rest of the game with less money and less people?
Another flaw of yours is that CIG already admitted that there is a dependency on the money they keep crowd funding and they already made statements that if they weren’t to get any more money, they would be able to finish SQ42 and the completion of Star Citizen would depend on the sales of the SP Campaign game, as well statements that they scale the number of people that work in CIG based on their monthly income. While they have cash reserves they do have one crowdfund and they will focus on that and only use the reserves if they don’t crowdfund enough to cover their costs.
He calls it a "flaw" because he doesn't know shit.
The fact that Chris went on the record and said that if money stopped coming in, they could still finish Star Citizen from sales of SQ42, should be a huge Red flag for a lot of reasons. One of them being, after $160M, not only do they NOT have either game in any Beta state, but SQ42 hasn't been seen since Dec 2015. And to think that sales of a SPACE GAME which most of us believe will be disastrous if it ever gets released, is ever going to generate the $3M or so it takes to run all 5 studios, is hilarious AF. Not to mention that you can buy SQ for $45, and get SQ42 for an additional $15, for a total of $60 package. And to think they can sell SQ42 by itself for more than $29.99 to new buyers, especially since most of those who are entitled to it, already HAVE it, is the most hilarious thing ever.
"Long ago I stopped looking at this game the way I did when I worked for a publisher who gave me a fixed budget to make a retail game. I now look at our monthly fundraising and use that to set the amount of resources being used to develop this game. We keep a healthy cash reserve so that if funding stopped tomorrow we would still be able to deliver Star Citizen (not quite to the current level of ambition, but well above what was planned in Oct 2012)." Chris Roberts, Sept 2014 after raising
$54M.
"First of all, we always have a decent amount of money in reserve, so if all support would collapse, we would not suddenly be incapacitated. We plan the scope of the development based on what arrives monthly by the people to support. I’m not worried, because even if no money came in, we would have sufficient funds to complete Squadron 42. The revenue from this could in-turn be used for the completion of Star Citizen." Chris Roberts, Jan 2017 after raising
$141MThese are statements from the guy who raised $65M in Nov 2014 and which was all he said he needed to build the over scoped project. And after raising double that - even with the funding chart discrepancies - is talking about contingency plans if money stopped coming in. Because yeah, that's totally normally and not at all disturbing.
It's all so hilarious really. But wait for what comes next. It truly is hilarious. Can't say more about that for now.
ps: If you haven't yet, you should read my
The Fidelity Of Failure blog
