Star Citizen – General Discussions
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Very hard hitting article, “Condition Red”, and points to “Minimum Viable Product” becoming “Not Economically Feasible” using the (real) excuse of the sudden emergence of actual, effective, competition from actual, effective studios.
One original Kickstarter (2012) backer who was upset that he wasn’t granted access (via Evocati) to the game he paid for, contacted them. If you’ve seen their previous customer service actions, one of which involved Sandi, then what happened next should come as no surprise. Remember back when they released the shoddy v2.0 PU and started using it as an excuse to stop giving refunds? Well it’s like that.
Shortly after….
heh, Goon effort poster is on a roll today:
“Who would have predicted they’d hype Star Marine for over a year — raising money and garnering gaming media puff pieces with constant promises of pending release — then quietly pull it? Who would’ve predicted Chris eventually lashing out at people who dared to ask, “What happened to Star Marine?”
Who would have imagined they’d so fantastically botch their year end livestream, after already botching several other high-profile live events?
Who would’ve expected they’d prioritize rushing a huge collection of layerable clothes for their universal white, male, brunette spacedoll before they prioritized getting one female model into the game?
Who dare believed after they’d drawn criticism for allegations of wasteful spending that they’d waste backer money with impugnity so they could turn their flagship HQ office into a Restoration Hardware showroom?
For that matter, who would’ve expected, after being accused of secretly pursuing an acting career while pretending to work full time that the VP of Marketing would film yet more movies? That she would even choose to appear in official (and bizarre) Squadron 42 PR clips sporting fake tattoos from yet another undisclosed TV or film role?
Who would have imagined they’d put their big, buggy cash engine game on the backburner — the one that serves as home to all those spaceships they’ve pre-sold — just so they could focus on rushing out their other pre-sold game, the one that can’t possibly hope to generate a fraction of the revenue?
Who would’ve expected they had no big road map for the Star Citizen PU after several years of pitching it? After raising nine figures in the process?
And who would’ve expected we’d see toxic backers dog-piling a guy with Stage 4 colon cancer simply for posting a light-hearted video called “Am I too stupid to play Star Citizen?” — Or that, after learning about it, CIG would stand by doing nothing to make it right?
I could go on and on citing examples — we all could. We have chronicled it all here while most ignored it and many denied the implications or gravity.
Yet there is always more and it is always worse. It is our perpetual refrain and a prophecy itself. It has proven truer and more trustworthy than I ever believed possible when first I read it. It surely will again.
In spite of some of the biggest unforced errors in gaming history, CIG has proven exceptionally good at two things: selling outrageously priced spaceships (or IOUs for them) and the fantasy of the incredible gaming universe those ships will one day fly in. That is The Dream they have sold from the very start. That they clearly can not deliver what they’ve promised yet profit enormously by selling it anyway, is an outage without precedent in the history of gaming.
That outrage does not start to become true when the Gaming Press eventually declares it so, or when some broad consensus emerges amongst the backers and they capitulate to the outrageous truth. It does not become less true because the gaming industry’s most notorious fight-picking Alpha Troll declared it true first. The truth is not diluted just because a handful of jokers and snarkers on a backwater comedy site made a daily practice of finding the black humor in it while most around us were tripping around high on spaceship fumes and theorycrafting about space brothels and 1000 player space battles.
It is true right now. It has been for some time.
Unfortunately for Chris and Sandi, while they were busy selling the impossible dream, their competitors have been working on space games. Great space games. Games that will soon create far more wealth than CIG has amassed and mostly misspent. Games that will produce ongoing returns through sequels, dlc, merchandise, critical praise and yes, the gratitude of their customers; gratitude for giving them a wonderful gaming experience for a price they could afford.
CIG can’t expect gaming outlets not to draw comparisons, can’t expect the glaring shortcomings of their “Best Damn Space Sim Ever” to keep being glossed over because “it’s pre-alpha!”, or because some other game took longer to develop or whatever.
Mass Effect: Andromeda — a game with 100 beautiful handcrafted planets with diverse ecosystems, a huge galactic map, smart and colorful companion characters, a surprisingly rich lore, fantastic facial animations, brilliant FPS, a robust integrated multiplayer solution, and more — was built from the ground up using an entirely new engine in the same time it’s taken CIG to build 1/100 systems, 2/5th of their sold ships, 1/4 of their promised features, and a broken FPS.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare took 3 years– and added spaceships and zero-G combat in that time.
Elite had a playable game with incredible ship physics and a simulated-to-scale galaxy in even less time– and it grows better, richer, and deeper with each new iteration.
And Starfield — terrifying, misunderstood Starfield — hasn’t even revealed its devastating scope and ambition.(edited)
Each one of these superior space games cost much, much less to develop and will cost nearly all players much less to own.
$114M over 4.5 years can buy you a lot of things– but the price you pay, particularly after spending so much of that time promising the world and bragging about your superiority, is that it also bought you the very highest of expectations. And CIG can not meet them. Can’t even come close to meeting them. But their competitors have a shot– a very good shot– and in some cases, the competition is poised to exceed even the lofty expectations set by self-declared best of them. And the Gaming Press, who I’ve decried often, are going to declare these things to be true as those games arrive and make the self-declared Best Damn Space Sim Ever look pretty painfully shallow, dull, and lifeless by comparison. And late, so very late.
So, in answer to your question, it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see too far into the future. Some dates are fixed — at least for competitive releases (CIG’s are ever and always subject to revision). CIG is on a collision course of their own choosing — their unstoppable farce is slated to collide with a lot of immovable objects, where they will splinter like balsa wood spaceships into a million toothpicks.
It seems to me, as in a prophecy of old, that the writing is on the wall.
“MENE. MENE. TEKEL. UPHARSIN.”
CIG will be weighed in the scales and found wanting. They will be cast down for their hubris. And their kingdom will be divided and given to their competitors.”
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