I posted this on another board. So I'm just pasting it here for posterity.
If I was Chris Roberts at this point, I would take one month’s income (what is that now, a couple million?) and secretly hire a smaller, talented, up-and-coming game development house to create a basic SP (with a rudimentary AI) version of the game with many (but not all) of the promised features. Give them two years to complete the basic, functioning game.
At the same time, hire another dev house to do nothing but create functioning 3D models of all of the ships that were sold as jpegs. Maybe budget another million for that. Give them the same two years.
Then, when the basic game universe is finished, import all of those ships into it and ship the damn thing. BAM. You’ve now got something impressive to show, and it’s playable. Your customers are pleased that they can actually fly around in the ships that they paid for. THEN you continue to milk them for money to make it even better. Such as adding multi-player functionality. You could milk them for years with that, and they’d be happy because they’ve got a fully playable SP game with their actual ships in it.
Hmm. Thinking further, this plan might have worked if it was implemented two or three years ago.
But even then, it would have been difficult to execute this in secret. How would you, for instance, explain why you laid off most of your own employees? Unless you kept them all employed just to maintain the illusion that they were working on the game.
Okay, I’m just free-thinking now. They long ago already had the talent in place to make this game, or some lesser version of it (that would have been better). So there was no need to contract a different dev house like I just suggested.
I suppose the reason I came up with that plan of mine was because I envisioned that a great game could have been made if only a solid plan for it was given to another dev house.
But being as they already had great talent employed, the real problem was/is the lack of a solid plan in place. Also, solid leadership would have helped.
MORAL: Make a plan and stick to it, else you’ll end up making something like this post.
It's almost as if you haven't been around [the game industry] for long. You are aware that over 90% of games just flat out fail, right? And that even the indies who make them on the cheap, tend to not even make enough money for another game? It's basically the reason that I kept making my style of games because I didn't want to take the risk of trying to do something else, then failing, while losing my pre-existing install base. It's why we have the likes of COD VII, BF XXI etc. It's why I kept making
sequels and derivative games for the past 30 years. You absolutely cannot underestimate the power that an existing install base wields.
Even if croberts had taken that $2M and built the original game, there's no guarantee that it would have succeeded; let alone made enough money for them to do another game.
e.g. I made
LOD Tactics, my first RTS game for under $500K. And for the entire 14 months, I hardly slept the whole time. Not from dev, but from angst associated with losing that money, let alone turning a profit. And why did I do it? Because after 6 f*cking years of tooling around with the larger
Line Of Defense game, and having Microsoft kill the underlying engine, I was facing another $1M and 18+ months
porting it to UE4. So I needed a Plan B.
Luckily, Tactics made its money back, and turned a profit (due to mobile and XB1 sales) - which, on reflection, meant that a publisher probably would never have made it due to the profit margin. But it was enough for me to say "
Screw this shit, I'm not making a sequel or DLC as planned". Instead, I went back to my gamers who were already harassing me for "skipping the current generation of space combat resurgence" because of Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, X4, Dual Universe, Infinity Battlespace etc. So I made a plan to improve on my last big
Universal Combat game (which was released back in 2009, and which shockingly was still selling) and came up
with a plan to just improve on it via DLC, rather than spending another +5 years and money I cannot afford to lose at my age (though all this, my daughter just graduated high school last month, and is off to college!), to build a new sequel from scratch.
So right now, the LOD port to UE4 isn't even 50% there yet, and I'm still pissing around with the UCCE improvement DLC.
Thing is, most devs will always try to get something else lined up before finishing what they are presently working on. If you don't have a Plan B in the works, you're literally writing your own death warrant. I mean, look what happened to CliffyB's Boss Key studios. They apparently saw it coming when Lawbreakers failed, but their Plan B (Radical Heights) was completely ineffective. So they shutdown less than 3 weeks after it went live.
The fact that croberts has two games in the works, isn't the issue. The issue is that neither one of them is anywhere near completion. And the one which was most likely to be completed,
Squadron 42,
cannot be completed because it relies on the same incomplete shitty engine and assets that Star Citizen requires.
And having been MIA for years, take a look at the SQ42 vertical slice from the Dec 2017 presentation, and see if you spot anything special which leads you to believe that it is in any way, shape or form, a title which would have made millions were it released as a standard game.
It's why those chuckleheads have
zero incentive to ship a game - of
any kind. The minute they do that, it's going to get judged - and subsequently trashed - on merits. So they've front-loaded a vast majority of the money - which they would never have earned in a standard sales channel. Which means that the vast majority of people who would have paid for these games, already have entitlements to them. And that they're selling EACH game separately for $45, is the pinnacle of hilarity.
So no, there is no way that croberts could have gone for any plan other than the one he embarked on. Selling promises, while generating and accumulating engineering debt, is how he made millions. His was a case of perfect timing and copious amount of luck. That he ended up perpetrating an absolute scam (knowing he was incapable of delivering on what he was selling) in order to raise money, is why he has failed.
As I said earlier,
because he made all this money by selling promises - not a game - he couldn’t simply go back and release a smaller game, having taken the money to make a larger one. So he's stuck. And the only way forward is straight toward the disastrous ending that he has plotted. Which, if you look
at the timeline (updated) of how they came after me (of all people!) when I sounded the alarm, it's easy to see that three years ago in 2015, they knew I was onto something. At that point, they were already three years into what is now a 6 year scam. And neither of the two games is near release.
Here's the thing. Him and his friends and family, made millions from this. And they are likely to get away with it. At least in the short term.
