Gorf has another effort post up
It’s been a while since I’ve done this, but as a courtesy to our newer posters and lurkers, I wanted to offer one admittedly subjective summary of the present malaise, particularly with respect to the Star Citizen brand and Chris Roberts reputation as chief architect and spokesman.
(As a disclosure for those unaware, I don’t root for the failure of the project, even if I root for the failure of a select few. I genuinely believe there are hundreds of people working on the project doing their level best to deliver even though goalposts are forever shifting and many dysfunctional processes are both set in stone and protected by the lunatic leadership. That I am pessimistic about the future is not meant as blanket condemnation of the lot; it arises as grim acknowledgement of how densely concentrated organizational power is into the hands of the very worst of its members.)STATE OF THE GAME - Q1 2018Despite the claims of the funding tracker, I think parties at the very top of CIG see themselves looking at the downward revenue slope of a
saturated market. A couple of years ago, and before many joking embellishments followed, I put up the old bell curve model:
No real inputs — I just grabbed a traditional bell curve off google images and made a guess where things were in late 2015. It was a little premature because I think the blowoff actually hit in 2016...
2016 - THE YEAR CHRIS LOST THE PLOT The fictive miracles of Gamescom / CitizenCon that year probably gave them the last truly meaningful boosts to organic new demand and deferential hype amplification from the gaming press, even as Roberts himself planted seeds of his own credibility destruction during that same critical period.
How interesting that the
Streetroller refund controversy (July 2016) broke a month before Gamescom and
“Inside the Troubled Development of Star Citizen” (September 23rd, 2016) broke right after. If nothing else, that series sent signals far and wide to others in the gaming press that this project about which there had already been much hype and controversy was at the very least struggling, perhaps mightily, under Chris’s chaotic leadership. Kotaku UK’s inclusion of the
Level story translation framed the controversial elements (Derek Smart, Beer, “goons”, War) pretty fairly as well, and sent signals via new sourcing that perhaps some of the smoke coming up from The Escapist had some fire under it after all.
The net impact of that exhaustive series — coming as it did between two gollywhopper megahyper CIG events — was a very loud signal to the more serious writers at the more serious publications that perhaps the era of fawning deferential coverage of this Hype Train needed to slow because
perhaps there were serious organizational/developmental/ethical problems still challenging it.
One can see the impact of this starting in 2017. Coverage didn’t stop, but it certainly slowed. A new caution and sometime snarkiness started creeping in to the coverage . Kotaku UK made it much safer to call Chris’s project “troubled” and “mired in controversy” and all the other qualifiers so common to stories nowadays. Even Charlie Hall does it, though usually as buried lede.
Yet the greatest blows to CIG during that incredibly consequential period of both hype and controversy were new self-inflicted wounds inflicted by the master himself.
Chris Roberts, with the note perfect timing of a Savant Self-Owner, helped confirm the “Troubled Development” narrative of Kotaku UK’s coverage at CitizenCon 2016, when the long-awaited, much-hyped Squadron 42 demo was a last minute no show after months of build up. Instead we got a ginormous Sandworm as the biggest, baddest symbol for hope yet. It was as fictive as phallic yet for some neither were enough to compensate for the MIA Squadron 42.
The Road to CitizenCon was quickly released as a palliative for the faithful, yet a deeper reading of the work shows only too clearly how damning it is of the development itself. In fact, it is one of the most inadvertent self-incriminating pieces of self-congratulatory agitprop since
Sandi Gardiner’s disastrous Sunny’s Diner appearance years prior.
The purposefully manipulative “documentary” showed key developers losing sleep, highly stressed and enduring up to two months of constant crunch to deliver two demonstrations for CitizenCon. The Squadron 42 demo was meant to update fans on the actual progress of the two years late game yet
could not be completed in time. The “Homestead” demo was crafted
expressly as a fiction starring a fake sandworm, fake enemy NPCs and fake combat, was CitizenCon’s redeeming ‘triumph.’ How perfectly appropriate.
—A BRIEF :tinfoil: TANGENT(This will read as bridge too far for some, yet I have trouble shaking the sense there’s truth to it.)
I am cynical enough now about Roberts vanity to believe that the Squadron demo never really stood a chance and that Chris and a trusted few knew long in advance he would not show it at CitizenCon.
Yes, that’s pure :tinfoil:, and I’d never fight to defend it, yet the circumstantial case is quite suggestive and it’s hardly unlike Roberts to craft fictions with cynical intent. That is in fact one of his only proven talents and has been key to their stratospheric fundraising (yet at this point of waning appetite for the game even that fundraising itself
appears partly a work of manipulation.)
So it’s very worth asking ourselves,
”why would CIG be filming a mini-documentary weeks in advance of CitizenCon 2016, one so maudlin, manipulative and expressly framed as a ‘it’s for the best’ so ’sorry not sorry’ about a demo they fully expected they would show up until two days before the event?”It makes no sense to christen so dramatic a production so far in advance absent foreknowledge that you were going to need it. And indeed they did need it, as the CitCon 2016 rage was real for many until the opiate of “The Road to CitizenCon” was administered and all way forgiven.
It is more plausible to me that Roberts decided well in advance that Squadron would not be previewed at CitCon because he genuinely feared further humiliating comparisons with
Infinite Warfare. It’s Wing Commanderish campaign was as slick, bombastic and cinematic as you’d expect from a AAA powerhouse, the motion capture was often near photoreal, and the prospects of either the media itself or “the anonymous hate campaign” juxtaposing clips from his Squadron demo for a game he himself once described as
“the equivalent of huge AAA Call of Duty but better” legitimately worried him. Even the
Fanboys had taken to reddit that summer to praise what they’d seen at E3 and chide CIG using Infinite Warfare as rebuke.Roberts was fortunate that COD futurism fatigue and a bumbled multiplayer launch kept
Infinite Warfare from being a franchise triumph, but the single player campaign itself deserved the ample
praise for its ‘World War 2 story in space’ received and oops,
Infinite Warfare even delivered the emotional payoff Roberts thought was only his to deliver.
(BTW- if his RTV claim about touching emotional territory rarely reached with video games was not Roberts telegraphing the self-sacrifing death of ‘Old Man’ at the end of Squadron 42, I’d be amazed. You have to wonder if that’s what
Lando is referring to here. It’s the easiest, most obvious possible way to emotionally manipulate the Wing Commander nostalgiacs, so I’m calling that big mashing of the FEELS button here now.)
—END OF :tinfoil:The absence of a Squadron slice denied the media and his mockers a chance to put his “Call of Duty but better” claims to the
Trial by Memes Roberts rightly feared. The ‘presciently’ sanctioned documentary about its absence turned the legitimate anger about the
no show demo back onto the victims, provoking yet more guilt they shouldn’t feel for Roberts’ sins. HE was the one crunching devs on show demos. HE was the one demanding that ‘not a joke’ sandworms be grabbed from the sci-fi trope box and inserted into his fundraising fictions. HE was the one selling things not in the game.
With refund dramas and “troubled development” narratives competing directly against Roberts increasingly tiresome
flyboy swagger at Gamescom and CitizenCon, it was Roberts who proposed the final test to determine whether a deluded bug mouth or a brilliant visionary helmed the enterprise.
Could he or could he not deliver the whole of Stanton by year end? 4 planets, 12 moons and a handful of new mechanics that could finally give long-suffering backers renewed faith in his competence, his genius, or trustworthiness?He said he thought they could, even though he’d never bothered consulting his Devs on that possibility and indeed, many were horrified to see him once again throw a gauntlet down they’d never be able to lift. Yet would this time be different? Was he just a guy with chronic mismanager with a runaway mouth running a Troubled Development, or might Chris actually deliver this time?
No, he could not.
No more than he
could deliver Squadron 42 at the end of 2015 as he’d said they do. No more than he could deliver Star Marine in
“3 weeks time” as he said that same day he’d do.
As with nearly all things but disappointment, Chris Roberts delivered much less, much later, and in the case of 3.0, even upon delivery, he delivered mediocrity at a fraction of the originally promised scale.
Let us remember, too, that Chris had justified the long wait of his all important 3.0 patch
because it needed extra polish and bugfixing. It needed to be friendlier than any patch prior because so many new users would be signing up. Yet a year and a half after it dazzled the crowds of the faithful, it finally arrived in the classic tradition backers had miserably come to expect — broken, empty, lifeless and stuttering.
With 3.0, Roberts failed the test he himself inadvertently proposed.In so doing, he confirmed for all but the most devoted faithful that his critics were right. The dichotomy that prompted so much uncertainty and debate in 2016 was over. It was not the cynics who bested Roberts, it was Roberts, and he did it as the cynics expected he would, by being himself.
2017 - THE YEAR OF LIVING DISSAPOINTINGLYIf 2016 was the zenith of years of cumulating hype and expectation, 2017 was the year of diminishing expectations and growing outrages. Until the “miraculous” turnaround of the anniversary sale you could see it in their own reported numbers. You could read it in the growing number of full combat comment fields under any Star Citizen news story. New voices of skepticism on the Star Citizen subreddit were sometimes catapulted to the top of the charts not with memes or praises but with criticisms, warnings, frustrations. The widely read /Games subreddit saw skepticism about the project flourishing amongst the mainstream gamer population.
In 2017, CIG’s efforts to bolster the faithful at the usual venues only compounded the damage further.
Gamescom 2017 delivered cringe so real it hurt, reinforcing further still the “Troubled Narrative” claims and sending the “Chris Roberts, Savior of PC Gaming” myths up in glorious self-parody.
CitizenCon 2017 delivered this year’s model Sandworm, a planet covered in buildings melding the newly released Blade Runner with the prequel’s Coruscant signifying little beyond “Chris Roberts Fever dream hype demo, 2017 edition. Was it cool to watch? Sure.
Was it coming soon to the game? Not a chance,
and even the Believers know that. It was simply the latest in a long line of
golden calves Roberts erected before the people that they might worship false divinity as he lead them once again in circles through his wilderness. That some will still do it though they know the calf wrought of their own melted wealth speaks more to their desperation than true faithfulness. Yet what other choice has Roberts left then?
2018: CAPITULATION TO THE OBVIOUS FOR ALL BUT THE OBLIVIOUSThough the year-end numbers managed to mask it, 2017 was the year Chris Roberts faced down his mortal enemy — himself — and lost.
Those looking ahead in 2018 for truer hopes to cling to than bygone show buzz and the 100th rewatch of the Imagine video will find an emptier horizon line than in prior years.
That we’ll see no Squadron release in 2018 is obvious already. Chris Roberts is unlikely to explicitly state the infuriating obvious and instead will just show clips and progress on a monthly basis like the carrot on a stick it has been since 2012.
The decision not to attend Gamescom this year is itself a telling sign, yet lest we risk missing it, CIG explicitly stated their reasoning;
they don’t want their developers distracted with all the preparation work such an event demands of them. That this concern never stopped them before and was glorified in “The Road to CitizenCon” suggests a deeper reading, and that reading is capitulation.
What good might such an event be when they’ve saturated the market and hype fatigue plagues even the faithful? When the very game itself has become so unplayable that marketing it courts frustration and mockery? There is too little to be gained this year in so exhausted a marketplace with so damaged a brand, so tired a narrative, so broken a game.
So with Squadron and Gamescom off the calendar, 3.1 aiming for performance improvements only (if they can get them) and the features of this summer’s 3.2 so uncertain that
Community Manager Disco Lando scoffs at community attempts to nail them down, what else might we expect this year?
SPECULATIVE: Player housing for saleCash purchasable player structures may be a high priority now, though Chris has said nothing recently to explicitly affirm that. Land claims were the thin end of
that wedge and
Lando’s very first question on the very first episode of Calling All Devs was about Land Claims.How curious that something which earned them bad PR and a fan backlash goes to the front of the question line. Stranger still that Dave Haddock was the one being asked as he will have absolutely nothing to do with its implementation. The cynical reading would be that Land Claims (and later structure sales) are a
Chris Roberts priority being fast-tracked out of LA at his insistence for financial reasons. Roberts himself went into
his rationale for Land Claims and pitched it as the protection racket it so clearly was designed to be. Land claims bore all the hallmarks of a new feature made urgent priority not because the game needed it so much as because Roberts wants new revenue lines ASAP.
Since he employees a gigantic army of modelers and artists it would not be surprising if a subset is already working up models for shacks, hideouts, condos, bases, rest stops, whatever... I’d also not be surprised if he’s bent Garriott’s ear for tips but even if not there is a lot that can be gleaned just from playing SOTA and exploring their cash shop. Where Garriott sells castles, Roberts would sell space mansions, and the rationale would be “you don’t really want to park your 890 Jump at just a sad little outpost, do you? Poorly matched AND unprotected? Well have I got a deal for you!”
SPECULATIVE: For Sale By Owner, a piece of the Dream Factory itself?Similarly, it wouldn’t be surprising if Garriott’s seedinvest experiment hasn’t been studied for replication by Roberts as funding sources decline. It wasn’t a barn burner but they hit their minimum target, and Roberts being Roberts, he’s probably doing napkin calculations already to map out worst and best case yields.
These aren’t explicit predictions so much as cynical hunches, and the cynicism is rooted in seeing last year defy worst case scenarios. There are obviously some big fires they need to put out too this year, not the least of which is basic playability.
As much as it probably hurts Chris to put player needs ahead of his own wants for a change, until they fix their networking / performance issues, they’re pretty much in a tar pit unable to get back to the good work Chris prefers; selling things, redesigning things, polishing things. It remains to be seen if and to what extent they can clear those obstacles.
Even assuming they clear the Stability / Performance hurdle, a hurdle they’ve given little confidence they can overcome, the next hurdle before them remains no less vexing — can they start to design a game worth playing? Roberts himself is no ally to such an endeavor; indeed, he has proven only too clearly how much it disinterested him, for during the six years he could spent designing and refining The Best Damn Space Sim Ever, he instead was focused on an entirely different game and still it consumes him. Selling an unbelievable future at an unjustifiable price to anyone still foolish enough to trust the industry’s biggest underdeliverer will somehow deliver it.
