Star Citizen – General Discussions
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THE STORY MUST BE TOLD; BUT THE STORY CAN’T BE TOLD – by a Goon
A mind-numbingly long examination of why the Gaming Press ignores one of the biggest stories in gaming history.
D1E post
“Serious question: have you thought about writing up a massive expose based on known facts or things which can be conclusively researched and submitting it to a news organization for review and publication?“The truth is, D1E, some of the big players in Gaming Media know enough of what we do to run hard-hitting exposes already. So rather than us serving up something for them to promptly ignore, let’s consideration explanations for why they mostly ignore it.
Admittedly, they may not know about eyeball rolls in video streams from fed-up female employees… About upcoming weekly shows will be dedicated to Space Plants when the Game Tutorial remains hopelessly broken… About “the fans won’t know, you deserve to be comfortable” sound bites… About the fallout from an email exchange between the VP of Marketing and a former backer turned apostate… Or about CIG LA’s indulgent spending on replica spaceship doors, $10000 espresso machines, and other high dollar furniture purchases…
But they know Star Citizen, the biggest crowdfunding success in history, is a project in trouble.
They are not they deluded about the current state of the game. It’s just easier for them and their ilk to keep giving CIG the benefit of the doubt in spite of what they know. When it comes to drawing blood, they’re as timid as manatees, yet if there’s blood in the water, they frenzy like sharks.
The exceptions tend to be when they’ve a recurring axe to grind (social justice issues, objectification of women in games, etc.) That they’d didn’t frenzy over the The Escapist story was because the story was too damn toxic, their poisoned blade tainted the meat. It was a truly shocking read, compiled of allegations as furious as they were anonymous. Had the story focused more on Financial Waste and less on the Toxic Workplace allegations, it would’ve been easier to follow up on. But it didn’t, so they didn’t.
So– how do you get them to write an expose when the following things are known to or suspected by many of the big players already?
- Repeated Delays, Missed Deadlines, and Vanishing Content
- Fractional Progress Against the Promised Deliverable… (Note: TenTonHammer deserves special recognition for raising tough questions, even if the Big Guys refuse to follow suit)
- Clear Signs of Financial Waste…
- A Staggering Amount of Engineering Debt…
- Dishonest Marketing Practices…
- Stonewall Policies Enacted on Refunds…
- Perpetually Buggy Updates…
- Troubling Signs of a Broken Development Process…
- Troubling Rumors of Workplace Toxicity…
These aren’t secret, arcane truths known only to the enlightened goons of an ancient humor site for alpha dorks… The Gaming Press knows it because it’s obvious to anybody paying attention by now, especially those paid to pay attention. This is the largest crowdfunding venture in history after all, and, adjusted for inflation, it’s the 4th largest gaming development budget of all time. The eyes of industry and the gaming press are upon it.
They probably gab about it in the break room, joke about it in story sessions. Snarky asides might get tossed into an unrelated article. Occasionally, they’ll even raise some skeptical questions– with generous allowances for defensive soundbites from the subject in question.
Polygon, wondering aloud if the Emperor is underdressed…
But mostly, the big guys will sit on it, content to crank out five new stories an hour on fluff about Fallout dlc, a rebuild of Bioshock in Unreal Engine….When they want to touch on controversy, they might make note of the noise about the restoration of a sexualized female animation in Street Fighter V. It’s pain-free, brain-free eyeball fodder– plus, with the inclusion of the offending close-up buttslap, they’ll get LOTS OF VIEWS.
The Story Must Be Told– yet paradoxically, The Story Can’t Be Told.
This strange Nether period — where it must be told but can’t be told — happens more often than we realize.
Here are some of the reasons:
1) Fears of being too early, losing subscribers, infuriating a militant and vociferous fanbase, or finding out later they were wrong about something– bind their hands.
2) Personal loyalties to or affections for at risk parties can be a factor. We’re sympathetic to that ourselves, right? Could Imperium employs a lot of seemingly decent, talented and hardworking people, all of whom might be collateral damage if funding implodes due to a total loss of confidence in the project by funders. Why should everyone at CIG have to suffer that, when most of the misdeeds and missteps have only a handful of authors at the very top? I know I wasn’t the only CIG cynic here who felt a real pang when Sean Tracy earnestly thanked the viewers on Meet the Devs for providing him the means to support his family. What rings hollow off Sandi’s, Ben’s, and Chris’s lips rings true from one of the many little people tasked with Mission Impossible– and there’s 200+ people there who could say it without sounding robotic, patronizing or entitled.
3) Fears of lost access or advertising — fears of lawsuits, all these factors and more turn watchdogs to lap dogs. Rewarded as they are for lazy, low effort clickbait, why choose anything riskier?
4) Intimidation by the research is a big disincentive, too. While many operations have ‘heard things’ and ‘suspect the worst’, it’s one thing to subscribe to a jaded view of Star Citizen’s triumphant narrative. It’s quite another to spend the money and time doing the investigative work to write a real piece that sings– with solid documentary evidence and as yet unpublished “scoops”. It’s a lot of work, and though there’s glory to be had in writing a Great Article That Challenges a Conventional Narrative, that glory doesn’t keep the lights on… Not when a Miku buttslap story will get you just as many clicks without all the headaches.
5) Beyond that, there’s the uncomfortable fact that the infamous Derek Smart! Derek Smart! DEREK SMART!, one of gaming history’s greatest mustache-twirling comic villains, beat them all to the punch. He gave them a roadmap. Told them where the bodies were buried. Demanded they start digging. The map checked out. The prospects looked intriguing. And editors throughout the industry promptly declared moratorium’s on any follow-up pieces because “like hell are we giving that troll Derek Smart the satisfaction of following his marching orders!”
I think all of the above help explain why we’ve had this long period of relative calm after the Escapist Story. The truth is, there are precedents for this everywhere, and by examining one of the Great Troubled Projects of Gaming Past, we make make better sense of the Great Troubled Project of Gaming Present.
Despite the title, this was a puff piece…
The Past as Prologue at Ion Storm
This same weird Nether period occurred during Ion Storm’s hype-fueled ascent, as some here remember.
While the national Gaming Media was hyping ‘game changing title from a boy genius behind Doom and Quake!’ to hell and back, and that narrative was echoed in punch-drunk biz rags, a counter narrative of wasteful extravagance, troubling nepotism, defections / intrigues, and outlandish behavior was served up daily by self-appointed gawkdogs like us– in Quake chat rooms and message boards– devoted to tracking Romero and whatever they could glean about the company and its mysterious new game. Battle lines were sometimes drawn there too, with pro-Romero vs. pro-Carmack camps engaged in endless wars of words about game development. Today feels eerily similar to 1998.
Romero made it all easy– he too engaged in rockstar posturing non-stop for the sake of boosting the hype for his game, garnering free publicity and stoking the confidence of investors. Today, Roberts plays the Boy Wonder with appealing humility; Romero preferred playing the Gaming God. (Both, to their credit, earnestly love(d) face-to-face fan interactions.)
His girlfriend Killcreek was an object of fascination, admiration, contempt and a lot of skeevy talk, too. That Romero made her an employee was much derided– yet Stevie Case at least had serious gaming cred, both as a team player with the legendary clan Impulse 9 and as the girl who beat John Romero at his own game.
At the time, I wasn’t that interested in Daikatana. I loved Doom and Quake (who didn’t, right?) but considered Carmack the playmaker at iD and preferred his low-key, human computer demeanor. (Their split was described back then by Romero as his “vision of gaming perfection” vs. Carmack’s “vision of coding perfection”, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit seeing echoes of that in Roberts vs. Braben today…) Truth be told, though, by November of 1998, Romero and Carmack both seemed like yesterday’s legends– Half-Life was out.
But the stories from guys monitoring the ongoing Ion Storm scuttlebutt made for riveting reading — and members of the Gaming Media read it, too, as did major players in the game development community. Some of it was too outlandish to believe, though at the time, we believed it all anyway. It was only after it all fell apart that reflective sorts could go back and run evaporation techniques to boil off the bullcrap and salvage the facts. (Old Man River aside: Chris Roberts cocaine tales — often repeated here with few corroborations beyond an angry ex-employee’s Facebook comment — remind me of that. Barring further evidence, I feel the same about the worst claims about Sandi. Fair-play and all that.)
The Indeterminable Waiting Period Between Can’t and Must
Then as now, there was this indeterminable wait, a surreal Nether period. It lasted most of 1998 as I remember.
You’d read things on some Quake underground gossip swap, or occasionally hear them from your hardcore gamer friend over rotgut shots– then you’d read the exact opposite in the gaming press. The press accounts were lazy and glib, lean on hard facts and replete with PR soundbites and hype!, hype!, hype! just inflating the expectations bubble all the more. Yet the chinwag from the gawkdog grapevine was dismal, specific, and very sharp.
You knew, you just knew the latter would pop the former any day now. That the bubble that inflated for years would deflate in a flash, with only the dismal truth remaining before the game even got close to release.
But that’s not really the way it played out, was it?
Sure, a few big ominous prophecies of doom made it to print or online before launch. The big developer walkout was high-drama that broke out on places like blues news, then on IGN, and eventually even got some mainstream attention.
Ironically though, the biggest pre-launch expose on Ion Storm didn’t come from the Gaming Media. It came from the alt paper down in Dallas, in the form of an especially colorful local dumpster fire story in early 99. Their Stormy Weather article surely got more traffic than anything they wrote that year– gamers all over the world, particularly skeptics, were electrified.
These days, a Star Citizen backer would call it ‘click bait’, but it was honest to God shoe leather reporting and remains a great early prophecy of the eventual outcome, 17 years after the fact. After it broke, PC Mag and Gaming Media outlets dutifully got react quotes from Romero– none apparently embarrassed that they’d been scooped by guys who, like alt rags in conservative cities all over the world, mostly covered right-wing foibles at the municipal level and the like. And of course, Ion Storm went on mole hunts and targeted the reporter for, well, reporting.
Yet the center held.
Beyond that, though, the full on Gaming Media hellstorm we all kept assuming was right around the corner because “OMG I can’t believe this crazy crap is happening guys it’s gonna ‘splode any minute!!!” did not precede the release of the game. There was cautious optimism or polite silence from the Big Guys for far longer than informed skeptics could believe.
The Ion Storm skeptics saw their “it’s all gonna burn!” narrative boosted on off-the-reservation channels with the early release of the Daikatana demo. ‘Lowtax’ took a shot at it a small eternity ago, and was but of many…But the big guys stayed polite, and in the months prior to commercial release, started reframing their stories in accommodating “Can our hero save the day for his troubled game?”
I couldn’t find the full scans of the magazine, but did find the text of Next Generation magazine’s May 1999 story, printed only weeks before release.
Next Generation, May 1999 Dogged by software delays, and scarred by staff losses and accusations of mismanagement, highflying developer Ion Storm has come down to earth with a bump. Is the company that spends millions when thousands will suffice all flash and no dash? Can “John Romero’s Daikatana” save the day? In Dallas, it’s make or break time…“
A sidebar in the story notes those gleeful doomsayers, yesteryear’s version of us…
Next Generation, May 1999 Recent troubles have had Ion Storm’s most cynical detractors rubbernecking with the kind of glee usually reserved for the owner of a broken-down Ferrari stranded at the side of the road…“
The Dallas Observer stories apparently at least made it safe for the gaming media to hint about the possibility of abject failure. How strange that seems, even still. But it remained no forgone conclusion. Romero got a pass from the reputable outlets right up until the official release, and then, at belated last, the feeding frenzy truly began. The merciless, gleeful scorn. Mockery, savagery, damnation. Articles about Carmack as the genius, Romero the pretender. “Feet of clay”, “suck what down, Romero?”, “Can ya believe it? Who saw THIS coming?”, blah blah blah…
And Slashdot- remember them? In researching this story, a found a choice gem that simply had to be included here. In their metacritic-like rundown of excoriating reviews, “Daikatana Sucks: It’s Official“, even the supervillian of gaming himself, our beloved OP, got a shoutout:
Jonathan (5011)
“I know what John Romero can do next… (Score: 3)Start a company with Derek Smart of “Battlecruiser 3000” fame!“
At long last that which couldn’t be told for over a year finally had to be told– and the after action reports about the waste, dysfunction, nepotism, insanity all finally became safely codified for posterity by the very parties who feared giving voice to it when it might’ve actually helped change things for the better. Over a decade later, big outfits like Eurogamer were still writing about it.
Back in the Nether Zone
So– here we are again, waiting in the Nether Zone. CIG’s narrative is triumphalist, and our narrative apocalyptic, the gaming media narrative conspicuously deferential with occasional gentle sniping. At least two of those narratives are wrong– and at some point in the future, one will emerge and become settled history. But for my part, I don’t expect THESIS and ANTITHESIS to beget SYNTHESIS.
It certainly didn’t happen in Ion Storm’s case. In the end, ANTITHESIS prevailed, and ex-employees negotiated for gentler epitaphs for Ion Storm for posterity’s sake. Defenders of Romero / Daikatana could still be found, but they were given no quarter by yesterday’s equivalent of triumphant goons.
Andy posted
“A sad story? Are you insane? They caused all the crap they went through! That feature just made me want to strangle him and his band of idiots even more. How could he live with himself, wasting tens of millions of dollars working in an office on the top floor of a Dallas skyscraper on a game without a plan. What little design they did have is like something out of the imagination of a ten year old. Even if Daikatana had been completed exactly as he envisioned, on schedule, it wouldn’t have been a great game.Did he think Eidos’ money was a gift? A reward for his brilliant work on Doom? How could he have put so little effort into making a good game? He said he couldn’t concentrate on level design because he had to manage a team, but he didn’t want to manage a team. He/they did absolutely everything wrong. It’s incredible. But they get to learn from their mistakes, and LGS is out of business because of their stupidity (yes, indirectly, but $10 million is $10 million).”
Nedan posted
“First off, I like to see a show of hands right now… which one of you has experience in running a Game Development Company?!?! Well… anybody?!?! Just like I thought . Alot of you guys are sure ones to talk & dis a company when you know jack about running one yourselves.You can read all the friggin’ info you want on running a company. But when it comes to actually doing it… it’s a whole different friggin’ story entirely.
Yes… John Romero made some mistakes. Why? He was new to running a business. He never ran one himself before. He also didn’t like the idea of stealing talent. He tried his best not to steal talent. So he had problem of finding new talent instead… which is not easy to begin with.
His only mistake wasn’t being an egomaniac, it wasn’t over spending & it certainly wasn’t advertising the game too early. It was just inexperience. He had none when it came to running a company. I can certainly have sympathy & show forgiveness for that.“
Sound familiar?
Behold, the last holdout of the chump who believed too long in a Dream! Their final sanctuary and only refuge is always the same: “At Least They Tried.”
In closing
I honestly think if a hard-hitting, narrative smashing expose comes, it will probably come from outside the gaming press.
In the short term, smaller sites will write blistering pieces, Derek Smart will keep firing mortars from his camp in gaming exile, and the big guys will continue to opt for safe ways to nibble at this without tearing it wide open. We’ve seen a bit of that already, and we’ll see more of it in the months ahead.
Examples have oblique titles like:
— “Ranking The Space Sims You Can Play Right Now”
— “Is Mass Effect: Andromeda (or Call of Duty: Infinite War) a threat to Squadron 42?”
— “No Man’s Sky: A VR-friendly Star Citizen You Can Play Today”So easy, so safe, so guaranteed to get clicks and therefore dollars. And the comments sections will explode anew with Believers vs. Skeptics each calling each other idiots and worse. “It’s Pre-Alpha!” and “You know nothing about game development” will be repeated millions of times. And The Status Quo will be maintained, the untenable center will somehow hold because the story must be told, but it can’t be told for longer than you’d think.
Star Citizen is sold a bit like Donald Trumps candidacy.
They say anything they think will get them more $$ from backers and change their tune when it suits.
Fans hear what they want to hear and make up policy as they go along.
CR et al just have to keep feeding them once in a while and momentum grows.
Well, Star Citizen fans are going to be so pissed, come June 13. Word is, the 2016 PC Gaming Show is going to have a Squadron 42 trailer created by Foundry 42 for the show. More news soon!
I think you are over-estimating the fans intelligence. They will be happy to see some progress made, even if it is not for the game they are waiting for. Anyone with a brain has figured out that CIG needs money to continue and that is why most of the progress towards the game has stopped and been directed toward the single player game that is easier to make and might bring in some new money.
The fanatics will have excuses. They will say things like “The single player game uses assets that will be carried over to SC so its OK” or “You haters complain when there is no game and now complain when a game is almost ready to be released”. There is no hope for them. When Chris finally releases a shell of a game with only 20% of the features promoted, and then keep soaking them for more money they will gladly keep paying. Chris has created a money generating machine and at this point there is no stopping it. It doesn’t matter if he never releases the actual SC game, these idiots will keep sending him his tribute each month.
Indeed. However, the point I was making about the trailer is that after being given almost $114 million by backers, who have yet to see any in-game footage; they decide to go and do a reveal exclusive to a gaming event. Don’t you find something wrong with that?
lol, only this shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qexLUpQJPw8
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