Star Citizen - The E.L.E.

[dsmart]

New Star Citizen analytics. Referral drive, so far a dud (about 12K new signups). So far about 100 whales bought the new Banu Defender JPEG; and so far sales have yielded about $500K during the sale period.

Backers still asking CIG to stop recruiting "Please don't recruit anyone... Explanation inside". Currently the most upvoted thread.

The other one from earlier, thus far has 4318 upvotes is pretty much saying the same thing. "CIG Your Marketing is Too Far Ahead of Itself"

[Flashwit]

If you knew anything about the various IP infringement laws, you'd know how ludicrous your post sounds.

Think what you want, I know that it's not ludicrous. You tend to make good points but then take them too far. I have serious doubts that if Sanrio even bothered to bring a case that it would pass a likelihood of confusion test. There are other avenues in a trademark case but I don't see it happening.

But in the end the point here is that it doesn't matter. They have so many other problems that potential (and real that we've seen) cases of trademark infringement are just fluff.

[dsmart]

New Star Citizen analytics. Referral drive, so far a dud (about 12K new signups). So far about 100 whales bought the new Banu Defender JPEG; and so far sales have yielded about $500K during the sale period.

Backers still asking CIG to stop recruiting "Please don't recruit anyone... Explanation inside". Currently the most upvoted thread.

The other one from earlier, thus far has 4318 upvotes is pretty much saying the same thing. "CIG Your Marketing is Too Far Ahead of Itself"

Please recruit everyone... Explanation inside

1) You are counting accounts. There are far fewer backers than accounts made total. We have around a million ships sold, and a huge amount of people have multiple ships.

2) Less than 800 people have played more than a single hour of Battle Royale in the past month. 4000 more played it less than an hour, and the other ~800,000 never even bothered. I guess the game is just so engaging and fun that people are too overwhelmed to even play it.

[dsmart]

If you knew anything about the various IP infringement laws, you'd know how ludicrous your post sounds.

Think what you want, I know that it's not ludicrous. You tend to make good points but then take them too far. I have serious doubts that if Sanrio even bothered to bring a case that it would pass a likelihood of confusion test. There are other avenues in a trademark case but I don't see it happening.

But in the end the point here is that it doesn't matter. They have so many other problems that potential (and real that we've seen) cases of trademark infringement are just fluff.

You are wrong. It doesn't work that way. As I said before, if you were an IP owner - like me - then you would be familiar with how trademark and copyright infringements work. Aside from the fact that there have been several in the games biz as well.

The general consensus is that Star Kitten looks too much like Hello Kitty. And given the IP owner's penchant for suing even ones that remotely look like it, my guess is once they get wind of it, they're going to get on CIG's case. What happens is up to them; so there is no point in speculating.

[dsmart]

1 year ago this month, after getting $112m, croberts announced he was going to deliver an MVP, instead of a full game.

And it seemed like yesterday when I wrote this on FDev on 09/20/2016

I think this was already covered in my original missive. However, let me elaborate a bit more, seeing as your excellent question requires further clarity.

• Think of CryEngine3 as paint mix color # 1234
• You are building a house; and you already know what color you want it to be. That being color # 1234-drywall (note that paint is texture specific)
• You continue building your house, still intending on using color # 1234-drywall
• At some point, the owner has decided that the back of the house will use a different kind of wall texture (e.g. drywall vs concrete); so 1234-drywall isn't going to work there
• The builders, with instructions from the architect, continue with concrete for the back of the house; even as the painters, having bought loads of paint # 1234-drywall, continue painting other parts with it
• Several months down the road, painters tell the architect that 1234-drywall simply isn't going to work on that concrete back wall
• Seeing as there is no way to make 1234-drywall work on a texture which would require 1234-concrete, the painters set out to create the closest thing to 1234-concrete as possible, by doing their own mix. Not unlike how you can walk into a paint store and ask them to color match (they have computers for this) as close as possible 1234-concrete, derived from 1234-drywall
• The end result is that, as drywall (vision 1.0) is totally different from concrete (vision 2.0), the chances of that concrete back wall painting ever matching the drywall used elsewhere, are close to zero
• So the builder and architect decide to mix their own paint in order to meet with the owner's specification. Along the way, they decide that the best way forward is to probably rip out the concrete wall or plaster drywall over it so that 1234-drywall works. There's your MVP (drywall for the back of the house, instead of concrete).

At the end of the day, as I mentioned in my missive, in order to come up with a custom engine which would make it somewhat possible to build vision 2.0 of the game, they would have to modify CE3 by a whole lot more than 50%. And even so, the underlying CE3 architecture is still going to be there because things like scene management, 64-Bit positioning, networking etc, are all the things they would need to either rip out and replace, or build on top of. And the time it takes for them to be doing all that, could have been spent building a custom engine which specifically does what they want.

It is hard for a none programmer to quite grasp how horrendous it is to go back and modify someone's code; let alone an engine built by several people. Which is why, last year when people were saying that opening F42-GER with ex-CryTek engineers was going to be the magic bullet, most of us who know better, just laughed. It's been almost 18 (?) months since; look at what they have now.

To be clear, I don't envision there ever being a time whereby their CE3 FrankenEngine ever powers vision 2.0 of the game. I simply don't see it happening. For that, would need to modify CE3 by 90% or more. Well, therein lies the rub.

Let the record show that in my very first blog back in July 2015, I did say that it would take at least $150 million to build vision 2.0 of the game; assuming they had the tech, talent, time, and money. We're at $124m and I have no reason to believe that they will ever achieve the promised vision 2.0 using that engine; even with $250 million.

And that's the reason why Chris declared the MVP. As I understand it from sources, he has been advised time and time again, that vision 2.0 is simply not possible with what they have. And the best they can hope for is to ship "something" (in this case an MVP, and/or SQ42) in order to buy more time. However, the risk there is that, given their burn rate around all these studios, contractors, overhead etc, there is no guarantee that they are going to keep this charade up for much longer. Once they ship whatever he thinks is an MVP and/or SQ42, it's going to immediately change everything for better or worse.

btw I don't believe that Chris will ever come out and say that any version (e.g. 4.0) is the final product, hence MVP. He has thrown the MVP word out there simply as something that he can fall back to in the event that he is ever accused of never shipping the finished product. Just like he did with Star Marine, where he said that "it's in the PU", he will simply say that he already indicated that they will first ship an MVP, then build on top of it. That notion of "building on top of it" is the part where he gets to justify more time and money in order to bring his vision 2.0 to life. The fact that he made a bunch of promises, while not delivering on even 50% of them even with all the money, is going to get lost in translation along the way. Especially if he ever ships the SQ42 promised; which, as I understand it, is on just as much shaky ground as Star Citizen, seeing as - this point - they still don't even have a complete "game" with everything promised in the stretch goals.

The upcoming CitizenCon is going to be more of the same. Neither Star Citizen nor SQ42 is going to be released this year. That's already a foregone conclusion. Whatever shows up at CitizenCon is going to be of the same smoke and mirrors vein. If they ship any aspect of SQ42, we're hearing from sources that it will be tagged as a "prelude" (most of us call that a demo btw) in order to keep the backers at bay, gauge interest etc. It will succeed as far as the hardcore backers are concerned; but most of us won't care, as it won't be the promised EP1 game.

At the end of the day, none of this will matter. As gamers, all we can do is wait, watch, dissent, speculate, argue, fuss, fight etc until they either ship as promised, or fail completely. Those who are trying to quash dissent are the ones helping to spread the ludicrousness of this whole thing.

[dsmart]

Meanwhile, over at FDEv...

Here's what I think, for what it's worth:

It isn't a scam in the usual sense. What happened though was sometime in late 2015 or early 2016 Chris Roberts himself came to the realization that Derek Smart Was Right. But to admit this would destroy him in a way that his prior failure with Freelancer, and his failure in the film industry, hadn't, because this time he ultimately has no excuse. He had to realize that the excuse that others had failed him would this time ring hollow even to himself, and that wouldn't do. But Derek Smart Is Still Right, so success is only a very remote option. And it must hurt to lose to someone like Derek, no offence. Failure would destroy him, and success was nearly impossible.

But a partial success would save him some face. This would be a failure in a fundamental sense, because the bestcase scenario was the release of a game which was only a BDSSE in marketing-speak, and not in any honestly realistic evaluation. And he had promised the be-all and end-all of space games. But a partial success, where they produced a mediocre or even moderately decent game, was a way out. To accomplish this they needed money and time, and it didn't matter how they got it because in the end what mattered was the release. If they lost faith from a lot of their backers during the process it would be fine as long as they could release something, because in that case they had some justification in downplaying the loss of faith on the backers' side, and could dismiss Derek as a loudmouth. They'd take a hit from not meeting most of their promises, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

But up to that point they had failed to produce even this because (a) they'd spent the money extremely unwisely, and (b) Chris's own obsessive interference inhibited progress. So:
1. Fundraise to get an actual game out, no matter how.
2. Hold off the backers' ire long enough to get it out.
3. Scale back the unnecessary spending.

I think 1. explains the terrible referral video from last Friday. I think 2. explains the attempt (and I do mean attempt) at a schedule for 3.0. And 3. is largely conjecture but I do get the impression we see a whole lot less of Chris going on boating holidays in Majorca or whatever, and they've stopped with the extravagant furniture/decoration rubbish in their studios.

But 1. is the scammiest part. "Get money to keep the charade going for long enough to get something out, and use every trick we can to do it." Doing this includes making promises they have no intention of keeping, hence the June 2016 TOS; in this way they get free money without the associated engineering debt. Besides, they weren't going to meet all their 'expanded scope' promises of 2013 anyway, what do a few more broken promises matter? Point 2. is thus meant to offset the irritation that 1. would introduce into the community. And 3. makes the 1. count for all it's worth.

tldr; I dont' think it's a scam in the sense that they're taking money with no intent on delivering at all, but that it is in the sense that they're taking money with the intent of delivering a scaled back product.

They'll fail even at this not because the development team itself sucks (it doesn't, by all accounts), but rather because Mr Roberts shouldn't be let anywhere near projects of any description. ...but that's another discussion.

I guess the question for me is whether or not he even considers his own efforts to have been honest, well-intentioned, productive and competent. If he doesn't, while still continuing the charade, then that's what would make this a scam. If he does, and there's enough evidence of his substantial ego to suggest he might be just as delusional as some of the more extreme backers, then in his mind there's nothing to 'get', nothing to correct or admit to or take responsibility for. What we see as his failures, he, like some of the apologists that show up here, might just consider part of the completely normal ups and downs of game development, of which he surely believes he has an (erroneous, out of date, but in his mind profound) understanding.
Either way it's all on him, no doubt about it.

^this

And that's pretty much the gist of it. At a minimum, the fact that he knew - years ago - that what he promised was neither possible, nor feasible - yet continued to promote it and raise funds while doing so, makes it a scam. There is absolutely no getting around that - at all. They could me or anyone today for that, and they would lose (and open a can of worms) right off the bat if we can show just one single (there a numerous, all cataloged) instance of this.

His undoing is going to come from the many people who have worked on this project, and who - as they have done in the past - can/will attest to this notion. Then it's all over.

There is simply no speculation here about whether or not they knowingly perpetrated a scam. The State & Fed officials have gone after, and shutdown other corps and individuals for less. All it takes is the digging.

And that digging will come when this project inevitably fails to deliver on promises because that's when everything will hit the fan. There is just too much notoriety and money for this to just die a slow and quiet death under the guise of "they tried".

As I said in my recent missive, trying and failing to build/ship a project, isn't illegal - at all. But all you have to do is sit down, do the research, compare the very public statements (written and verbal), then see just how quickly it is to deduce that something is definitely off with Star Citizen.

And when the post-disaster noise starts, that's when you're going to start hearing louder and more frequent allegations of fraud (especially wire fraud, due to monies going between their many shell companies), unjust enrichment (how the execs all benefited while never shipping a project) etc.

It's going to be a mess. And my guess is that, if 38 Studios fiasco is any indication, seeing how long that took, the fallout from this one is going to span years before all the answers come to light. And the bad thing about it is that there won't be any money to recover for backers, because anything recovered from people involved, will most likely go toward loans, investors etc - since they are first in line for any such proceeds.

The one thing that I am 100% certain that they are going to do, is what sources are telling me they are already doing - in stages. That being, as a cost-cutting measure, continue to trim the worldwide studios, while keeping some ops going. Even if they only have 5 people left at a single studio, they would still be under the protection of the game still "being in progress". And the only way to get around that, is if backers and/or State|Fed officials take action.

Also, just like how Croberts and a handful of CryTek guys - in their spare time - started doing promos back in 2011, it's the same way that I see this slowly collapsing - unless something major (which is already playing out) happens first.

And if they do get to ship the MVP (which I suspect is going to be 3.x), they would barely be skirting the "warranty of performance" clause because they won't have delivered everything promised. If they had delivered everything promised in some form or another, but the work was shoddy, broken, incomplete etc - they have some protection there.

It's going to be hilarious when backers find out that, in order to satisfy "planetary tech", their access to moons, is just another level - or a performance-hogging entity that's just a part of the scene like a station. It's coming.

[StanTheMan]

^ yep !

the thing is, If you went to a medical doctor, educated in a decent western country and he was performing operations of people with no anaesthetic and no infection control out of choice, most people and all professional medical bodies would have no difficulty calling them criminal/grossley negligent etc.

For a professional games developer to think you can just add technologically challenging features to a games spec and take millions of $ over years, mis deadlines, misrepresent deliverables so blatantly  etc is gross negligence and dishonest. .

[dsmart]

The April 28th newsletter is out. It hilariously reads like he is addressing a cult, or a rally maybe?

Yes - Star Citizen has blown through almost $150 million of backer money; and now Chris has sent out another newsletter stating why they need to keep raising money.
It's sad, atrocious, hilarious, and utterly despicable. No shame whatsoever.

Barely 4 years ago this month, 04/22/2013 Chris Roberts: I can be more profitable than AAA games on a fifth of sales



Apparently they now have 428 (!) people worldwide; which includes employees and contractors apparently.

Greetings Citizen.

This week was a busy one on the Community front. This past weekend was BritizenCon, which was held in Manchester, not far from our Foundry 42 offices in Wilmslow.

Backer funded events, like BritizenCon and Bar Citizen, help to remind us why we’re doing this in the first place. The developers who participated in the Q&A panels at BritizenCon really enjoyed interacting with the community and we look forward to next year’s event.

Speaking of events, tickets to our upcoming Gloria Theater show during Gamescom quickly sold out as well. It’s good to see that the community is just as excited to see us at Gamescom as we are to see you.

Then on Tuesday we held a Subscriber Town Hall where writers David Haddock and William Weissbaum joined designer Jonny Jacevicius to answer subscriber questions about the Banu culture and the Defender, which we unveiled last week.

This upcoming weekend is the last chance to pick up the Banu Defender during it’s “Concept” Sale. Please remember, the Defender is still in the concept phase, so while we will retain the spirit of the ship, there’s a chance that modifications will be made as the ship moves through the pipeline and previously unanticipated issues come to light.

Speaking of the sale, I wanted to take a few minutes to discuss why we do things like Concept and Flight Ready Sales as I see occasional discussion about why we are still raising money after collecting almost $150M from crowdfunding.

Simply put; because we want to create the richest most fully realized universe that Gaming has ever seen.

I made a commitment a long time ago to all of you that any additional money raised beyond the initial crowdfunding goals before the “Commercial” launch of Star Citizen would go back into making the game bigger and better. My challenge to the community was “YOU set the ambition by your level of support.” We have been holding our side of the bargain ever since. It’s why we have grown to 428 employees worldwide over the past year and are still looking for more talented developers. This is a very different approach than a typical Publisher, whose main motivation is to generate profits; more sales equals better returns for its shareholders. During this development phase, our “profit” is making the game better. A great example of this is the Planetary Tech that we will debut with 3.0 in a few months. If you look back on the initial campaign promises and stretch goals, we only promised to put a small team together to investigate Procedural Technology for the game, not to dramatically expand the game by making every planet and moon explorable. But because of the continued support, we were not only able to hire the world class team we have in Frankfurt, and then allow them to make rapid progress in developing technology that will deliver Crysis-quality planets, we were also able to make the decision to go all in and deliver fully realized worlds and moons to visit and explore.

The ability to land and explore any planet or moon opens up a new set of challenges if we want to maintain the incredible attention to detail that is Star Citizen’s trademark. Our goal with Star Citizen is that every location, every star system feels like it exists holistically in a universe with palpable history. We can’t rely on magic formulas to do this; we want human hands guiding the creation. And when you can explore a whole planet or moon, having just one landing location or point of interest doesn’t sell the promise of the incredible new universe that this new tech will allow, so we think about ways we can add additional content and points of interest; Outposts, wrecks, small settlements, farms, mining facilities, abandoned ruins and so on. While we are building tools to help the artists and designers build worlds as efficiently as possible, ecosystems still need to be created, modular building sets made, props built, VFX and sound created. Each of these elements takes months of work to design in a reusable way while maintaining our level of fidelity. Just one small example of this is the Outpost Set that we have been sharing the progress on its development on Around the Verse. And this is just one set, we plan to have multiple styles to help populate the many worlds we plan to build. If you checked out Eric Kieron Davis and Sean’s Happy Hour livestream in scheduling a “Space Whale” last week, you would have seen just how many elements go into delivering just one seemingly small feature. Most Sandbox games, aren’t trying to deliver a play area that has the scale or scope that we are going for. Most 1st person engines support a 128km2 patch of detailed landscape at most. We are aiming to deliver multiple star systems, populated with whole worlds and moons you can circumnavigate, all with living ecosystems and AI populations. The scale and detail we are going for is mind boggling.

This is a challenge that excites us and one we gladly accept. To paraphrase John F Kennedy, “We chose to do this, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.”

No other game has the opportunity we have. No other game has the support we have. It is a privilege to build something the likes of which has never been seen before. Our profit is seeing how many more gameplay possibilities there are in Star Citizen today compared to two years ago or even when I first pitched Star Citizen 4½ years ago, but it was your enthusiasm that inspired us and gave us the freedom to get it done right, rather than just get it done.

And you, the amazing Community that has come together to support Star Citizen in small and large amounts are our shipmates in this great voyage. Even in our alpha state, our ability to interface directly with you and get feedback on everything from content to network allows us to strengthen our engine and the game moving forward.

If you’ve bought a basic starter package, you’ve got a front seat to the development of most ambitious PC game of all time. You can dogfight in Arena Commander or run and gun in Star Marine or experience the beginnings of the huge universe sandbox that Star Citizen will be in the Mini Persistent Universe game mode. If you have Squadron 42 as part of your package, you’re going to get a First-Person Story game that will compete with the biggest AAA single-player games out there, with production values that only a few can touch.

You don’t have to do anything more than this. You don’t need to buy additional ships, or subscribe. You’ve done as much as we could ask or want.

But if you like our ambition and want to support further, if you think it is a worthy cause, if you want to make sure that all the features we are working on are given the time to be built right, then contribute how you feel comfortable. There are multiple ways to support, like submitting bug reports on the Issue Council or telling your friends about the game. The perks or rewards for people who go the extra mile are just that; us saying thank you for allowing us to build a game for all of you that could never be attempted in any other model. Additional contributions are about making the game better rather than gaining a personal advantage down the road. And that is why no matter what your level of support you should be happy if someone else goes above and beyond. After all, they are helping make the game better for EVERYONE.

This kind of enthusiasm and altruism is not common, but it is what is special about crowdfunding and is what allows something as ground breaking and ambitious as Star Citizen to happen. I can promise you that the team and I have no other goal than making a fully realized universe like no other. We go to sleep and wake up thinking about how we can make it better at every turn. It may be taking longer than we all wanted, but the game itself has become so much more. And while there are some who say they want a less ambitious game, I am skeptical. You didn’t back Star Citizen to be a ‘safe’ Space Sim. You didn’t back it for a game you would play for a few weeks and then discard. You backed it for its ambition, the shared dream of a seamless space sim where you can go from flying a ship to walking around inside one, to space walking, to touching down on a planet and stepping outside, all at a level of detail and scale never seen before. You backed it to have a destination to escape to with your friends for many years to come. I am 100% confident that one of the reasons why we have raised so much money is because we dreamed big. When we debuted the “Imagine” trailer back in Dec 2014, it was a dream of the future, but now with your support we are on the cusp of realizing that dream far more literally than anyone could have imagined.

And for this, I thank you all!

See you in the ‘Verse!

-- Chris Roberts

Point of note (which are in bold above)

1) So it's the backers fault that the game isn't out yet; because they kept giving money, thus controlling the scope. So basically, that nonsense about having money in reserves, SQ42 would pay for Star Citizen if funding stopped etc - were all the usual lies.

Overheard at the SA watercooler "Also, I went to McDonald's and they said over a billion people bought burgers from them, therefore the scope expanded and I had to wait longer for my food."

2) They are at 428 people worldwide. Well that explains the sudden tricks to keep raising money; and the on-going ship sales.

3) He "pitched" the game 4.5 years ago in Oct 2012; despite going on record and saying that it was in development one year before that. So this is actually YEAR SIX in Oct 2017.

4) So they're on the "cusp" of realizing the dream now then. I wonder wtf they've been doing all these years. Not to mention the fact that the game isn't even 10% completed yet, and backers don't even have 10% of 1 of the 110 systems promised, most ships are even in the game, no SQ42 etc. I wonder what his definition of cusp is. It probably has more fidelity.

Oh, and they now have new merchandise. It's hilarious. A $15 mouse pad, has $13 shipping. And no store credits - new money only. Plus, you now only get to buy one item at a time; so they stiff you for more shipping costs on each item if you want more than one. e.g. you can't buy a cap with a shirt. You have to buy them separately.



BONUS: Imagine buying two separate items, paying separate shipping. Then they both show up in the same box.  :supaburn:

Backers are well.....

[nightfire]

…as I see occasional discussion about why we are still raising money after collecting almost $150M from crowdfunding.

"Occasional"?  :airquote:

This must be the euphemism of the year.

[nightfire]

To me, this reads like:

"Previous price = current price + shipping. This means we overcharged you on multiple item orders all the time and you were fine with it, so why should we stop now just because we were stupid enough to tell you this?"

[StanTheMan]

If Backers dont realise they are being stiffed after this ....

Everything is a challenge ...when they sold it years ago.

They still need more money to do it at all never mind "built right"

[dsmart]

You guys do recall that I wrote a blog called "The Long Con" back in Sept 2015, right?

[Narrenbart]

This is so 90s marketing ....

[Beexoffel]

Quoting president Kennedy...
How will he top this hyperbole when he needs more money next year?

[dsmart]

This is so 90s marketing ....

Yes. It's the oldest scam in the book.

As to the 428 employee/contractor claim...

A well placed source and I were on a call yesterday; and he tells me that those numbers are somewhat close; and do in fact include all the third-party teams & companies. Those external third-parties are paid varying monthly (in some cases) fees. While he couldn't testify to the veracity of the 428 number due to not knowing how many people at the third-parties are working on the project, he tells me that he knows with certainty that as of last week, there were a little over 300 people (btw this slide showing 363 is from Aug 2016) working at the four primary studios (CA, TX, GER, UK). He also says that they still have a difficult time hiring quality people who want nothing to do with this train-wreck; and that most of the studios are a revolving door of talent which are replaced by under-qualified people who need to be brought up to speed on a five year project.

The pace of the development is attributed to all the R&D, issues with the engine etc. Notice how they have made little to no progress on the content side either.

And as of last week, they were still struggling with LumberYard because it's now become clear that merging their custom work with it, has proven to be more laborious than expected - and that it would take the better part of 2017 and well into the middle of 2018 to do what they want to do. There has been talk of completely scuttling their Star Engine, but some of the custom work is integral to the game design, and that work isn't implemented in LumberYard in any form. Nobody knows what that is; but my guess would be the scene sizes, and possibly some editor customization.

In 2016, aside from the dud that is Star Marine, they only released GrimHex, and some ships. The art pipeline itself is slow because key artist/modelers keep leaving; to be replaced by people who have to be brought up to speed all over again. I mean, they lost an entire team of 20+ content creators when Behavior Interactive exited the project in Dec.

They are spending most of their resources on visuals (ship concepts, models, commercials, R&D vertical slices etc); and in doing so, the key and more important areas such as Star Citizen and SQ42 suffer in part.

Note also that since he went from indie to a full blown triple-A production, those 300+ people are probably still insufficient; compared to the fact that most triple-A studios have over 500 people working on a single Triple-A project; let alone two in tandem. 

This particular source doesn't share much, but each time he does, he has been 100% on the money. So I am inclined to believe him when he tells me that they have over 300 people working at these studios, thus pegging their burn rate between $3m - $4m per month.

It should also be noted that from the 2015 financials, F42-UK alone burned through over $20 million - while reporting a loss (!). We won't have the 2016 numbers until later this year, seeing as they routinely file late. From those numbers, it's very easy to extrapolate the burn rate across the other three studios; especially since most of the highly paid execs on the US side are in CA and TX.

All of this adds up to the recent fund-raising shenanigans, the latest newsletter (which puts the onus on backers, instead of CIG) etc.

The project is never - ever - going to see the light of day. And the whales who still keep propping it up are in for a rude awakening before long. I haven't seen anything that would make me change my opinion on this. In fact, all signs point to a project that's going to be scuttled in the short-term. And it is highly unlikely that SQ42 as promised, will ever see the light of day.

As I mentioned in my earlier missive, this is all kinds of bad news.