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 $141M
These 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.
The goalposts continue to shift. It started with the "we have all the money we need to build this huge project in a few years." Now it's "we can cover dev costs with forward sales;" or even "we have investors and potentially other revenue sources and can scale back operations to lower the burn rate."
Yeah. If you look at the key dates in
this article (points 3-6) I wrote, the pattern is very easy to spot from 2012 to now. It really isn't brain surgery; these are actual facts.
In Jan 2017, Chris Roberts made the following statements:
“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.” – $141M raised.
In Aug 2016 (at GamesCom), Chris Roberts made the following statements:
“..so, it’s our big end of the year release. er so er yeah, so we’re gonna get it out the end of the year; hopefully not on December 19th but, er, like last year….but it is a big one, so, not making er, I got shot for making promises, but er, that’s our goal.” – $118M raised.
In Sept 2014, Chris Roberts made the following statements:
“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).” – $54M raised.
In Apr 2013, Chris Roberts made the following statements:
“In the old model as a developer I would have captured 20 cents on the dollar,” Roberts said. “Ultimately that means I can make the same game for a fifth of the revenue, a fifth of the sales, and I can be more profitable, and I can exist on lower unit sales. I think that’s good for gamers, because crowdfunding and digital distribution are enabling more nichey stuff to be viable. It’s also allowing gamers to have their voice heard, and have their influence earlier in the process. You don’t really have your input into how Call of Duty’s being made.” – $8.6M raised
In Oct 2012, Chris Roberts made the following statements:
“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.” – $2.5M raised.
I have to wonder about SQ 42 as well. A lot of the systems and mechanics necessary for SQ42 are still being perfected in the Alpha. Chris let his imagination get way ahead of him on this and completely lost touch with what it would actually take to fulfill his promises.
We haven't seen any working part of SQ42 since the awful
Morrow Tour was trotted out in during CitizenCon in Dec 2015. Since that game relies on ALL the tech being built for SC, there is no way that they can release it before those currently incomplete and buggy systems are finished. That's why it is still MIA.
The issue is that they could simply haven't built SQ42 with what they had, and since it didn't have multiplayer, could have expanded on it into Star Citizen after that. But the problem is 1) they won't have made much money of it 2) once they discovered that more money could be made by selling ship assets (JPEG or not), it became more about raising money, than about making a game.
So now they're stuck with two largely incomplete projects, without an engine or features to power them.
The hilarious part is that, SQ42 takes place in the same universe as SC. And six years later, they still haven't built the space world, there is no jumping between systems, there are only three bases etc. So that pretty much tells you all you need to know about the state of SQ42. You can't build a game that has no completed engine tech, no completed world or no completed assets.
In all my games, the engines are always completed first, then the game goes on top. And back in 2007 when we started building an improved engine for use in a smaller game, we built two games (
All Aspect Warfare / Angle Of Attack), one a combined arms game, and the other an aerial combat game. Both from the same engine, world, and assets; and both released at the same time. So, I know precisely what they're trying to do, and what they're up against.
