Star Citizen – Extinction Level Event
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My personal standpoint is on Mr.Smarts side not necesseraliy due to the informations he provide but mainly by the reactions and informations CIG provides. I cannot help to admit tho that Mr.Smart certainly helped to highlight CIGs shortcomings and failings.
The whole thing has degenerated into a mud slinging war from both camps making neutral observations increasingly difficult.
As I said….I made up my mind but I can transfer into people who dont know the first thing about this project. For them its very easy to get confused by the sheer MASS of material at hand plus…asking critical questions about almost ANYTHING is met with hostility and belittlement by the SC crowd. CIG must be aware of the toxity of its community as its ever present on the forum AND gets public light as well. While publicity usually is a good thing I d dare to say THIS kind of publicity only helps in turning away newcomers and their money which CIG is very dependant on.
Yet….they do nothing to control the flames and hate. This alone speaks volumes for me.
This latest interview by Chris Roberts only confirms what I m thinking. He is incredibly vague about what he actually means by his statements leaving the definition and clarification to the community which actually does just that (as seen in the thread link) so emptions come up again and split the whole discussion into “us versus them” groups. Something Chris Roberts could ve avoided from the start by being clear and open in his statements. I mean the guy READS from a transcript for gods sake and STILL he fumbles around with lots of pauses and “ah….”s. I wonder if its blank pages he holds in his hands.
If I would be invested into the game and have considerable resources put into it…..then yes I would also see his statements of confirmation and overlook his funbles.
I am not tho so the blatant “run-around” of hot topics and vagueness of informations are extremely obvious to me and also extremely annoying when all I want is crystal clear informations about the game itself. There is none given. The only thing thats pointed out (by the community I d like to note) is the PU…..which is ANYTHING BUT reassurance that the game is in any state to be released, makes progress or best…..a “good” game convincing me to pay them hard cash.
Back to Chris Roberts. He sees this. Hell…he even became so involved at several points that he lashed out personally so the argument of “CEOs have better things to do then to handle this minutia” is utter BS to me. He does care what people think. He monitors (or let monitor) foreign forums and sites in order to track down hotspots and follows the public awareness of his game. And STILL he decides to present himself and the game the way he does.
This is “proof” to me that the situation at hand (toxic community, constant redesigns, handling of matters be it refunds or otherwise) is made by DESIGN and them being very CONSCIOUS of what they are doing.
I ve been following SC from the very start and read I dont know how much about the whole thing. I certainly dont consider myself “clueless” even tho I didnt pledge (lol) or play the “game” yet. There certainly are enough videos out there highlighting and investigating enough of it to enable me to make up my mind. Chris Roberts and CIG “lost” me very early on due to their management and speed of progress. The very early excuses like “we do have the money now but we need to build up our own studios first so be patient” sounded exactly like that even back then…..excuses. Its been YEARS since then and “progress” if you can even call it that has been embarassing.
Nowadays I simply follow the whole thing for amusement only. Its hillarious how “blind” people can become to simple logic and how artfully words can be used (by either side) to make an argument.
Above all I see Chris Roberts….HIDING behind his “fans” (really guys…you are a cult….look it up) just surviving and waiting out the crisis. He WILL crash down…..no doubt about it. I m simply worried he ll manage to get a “jail-free” pass eventually and a lil annoyed at how long it takes for some big animal like “Star Citizen” to finally die.
As CEO it would be in his power to direct awareness of his game. After all hes obliged to it….”trasnparent development” and all that you know. Yet he continues to NOT give any definite answers and doesnt present himself like a person who knows what hes doing. I m saying he knows exactly what hes doing because he knows (probably him and only a couple more people) in what state his game really is. So he plays for time and tries to drag out the inevitable as much as he can.
That day will be EPIC 🙂
P.S. if you find any typos or grammatical mistakes you can keep them. English isnt my native language.
WHY I BELIEVE THIS TO BE THE FINAL NAIL IN THE STAR CITIZEN COFFIN.
None of the arguments people are making are relevant. And White Knights, Shitizens, and Shillizens are doing what they always do: obfuscate, attack, confuse, distort.
These are what’s relevant; all the points from my latest blog.
1) The game he originally pitched simply cannot be built once he increased the scope. Period. All the features already cut out, are evidence of this.
2) The CryEngine which he chose to build the game with, is simply not capable of building it. And yes, even though they now have a custom version of it, that’s more about re-inventing the wheel, than it is about making sure the wheel is still round. The latter being the basis of using a core engine from which a custom engine is derived.
3) Following my first July 2015 blog in which I made the statements I said as:
“Without disrespect to anyone, I’m just going to say it: it is my opinion that, this game, as has been pitched, will never get made. Ever.
There isn’t a single publisher or developer on this planet who could build this game as pitched, let alone for anything less than $150 million.
The original vision which I backed in 2012? Yes, that was totally doable. This new vision? Not a chance.
The technical scope of this game surpasses GTAV, not to mention the likes of Halo.
Do you have any idea what those games cost to make and how long they took?
Do you know how many games which cost $50 million to make took almost five years to release? And they were nowhere in scope as Star Citizen?“
He wrote an entire missive and said this:
“You all know that already; you’ve lived that. You’ve seen Star Citizen evolve and start to come together. You’ve watched our atoms form molecules, our modules form a real, playable game (that you can boot up and play today!). There are people out there who are going to tell you that this is all a BAD THING. That it’s ‘feature creep’ and we should make a smaller, less impressive game for the sake of having it out more quickly or in order to meet artificial deadlines. Now I’ll answer those claims in one word: Bullshit!
Star Citizen matters BECAUSE it is big, because it is a bold dream. It is something everyone else is scared to try. You didn’t back Star Citizen because you want what you’ve seen before. You’re here and reading this because we are willing to go big, to do the things that terrify publishers. You’ve trusted us with your money so we can build a game, not line our pockets. And we sure as hell didn’t run this campaign so we could put that money in the bank, guarantee ourselves a profit and turn out some flimsy replica of a game I’ve made before. You went all in supporting us and we’ve gone all in making the game. Is Star Citizen today a bigger goal than I imagined in 2012? Absolutely. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not: it’s the whole damn point.“
As with all his previous statements and promises, you can flush this one down the toilet too. Chris evolved to be more of a salesman, than a game developer/designer. And a patently dishonest one.
How coincidental is it that – again – shortly after my latest blog dropped, and which I said this:
“And as I have stated before, Chris being a dreamer, I don’t believe that he set out to scam gamers. However, the only right thing that he can do now is to come clean, explain to the backers what he can and cannot do, what went wrong and how, provide the financials to the backers who are entitled to it, and stop taking money for a project he knows all too well that he simply cannot deliver as originally promised.”
He does this latest 104TC in which he reveals that the short-term goal is to deliver a MVP.
“So, really what we’re doing with Star Citizen is we’re working on the game, adding features for an incredibly ambitious design – I don’t think there is any other game that is trying to do as much as we’re trying to do. So, degree of difficulty 11, not 10. And, we’ll have what we determine is a minimum viable product feature list for what you would call Star Citizen the commercial release which is basically when you say, “Okay, we’ve gotten to this point and we’ve still got plans to add a lot more cool stuff and more content and more functionality and more features…” – Which by the way includes some of the later stretch goals we have because not all of that is going to be for ‘absolutely right here’ on the commercial release. But we’ll have something that we’ll think, ‘Okay yeah, not everyone can play it but it doesn’t matter – you can load it up, it plays really well, it’s really stable, there’s lots of content, there’s lots of fun things to do, different professions, lots of places to go, we’ve got a really good ecosystem.’ So, when we get to that point that’s when we would say, “Now it’s not alpha, it’s not beta, it’s Star Citizen 1.0.”
That was probably his version of “coming clean”, except that, with his wanton arrogance, he decided to again engage in word play and misdirection; rather than just coming flat out and saying what needs to be said:
“I FUCKED UP. AGAIN. Here is how I’m going to fix it”
4) He was given $500K, then $2M, then $6M. And during all that time, the statements made were in support of the game he promised.
At $112M, five years later, there is no pre-alpha, alpha, beta, or RC build. They’re still at a POC tech demo phase. What they have is nothing more than a CryEngine mod. Don’t believe me? Right now, go to Steam and take a look at Angels Fall First. That UE4 game was built by a team of part-time indie devs; and it has more gameplay, and stability than Star Citizen. I dare not even mention Elite Dangerous.
He was given over 56 times the amount of money he asked for. And wait, there’s more. During every stretch goal, he claimed that the amount raised would make the dream come true.
At $65M, the stretch goals stopped.
This would imply that he would have to deliver everything promised – upon release – with $65M.
He currently has $112M and there is no end in sight, nor a viable product, or a ship date.
Instead, now we have engineering debt which, with insurmountable technical challenges, can never be paid.
That aside from the fact that the selling of JPEG ships, ships in hangars etc, amounts to a Ponzi scheme in which the next one pays for the first and then you get to the point where there is no money to pay for the pile up.
Then the money starts to dry up. The end result is, as I’ve stated in my latest blog, the Extinction Level Event (a word play on a catastrophic collapse) that is now playing out.
And part of this is also an engineering Ponzi scheme because this statement from that 104TC broadcast, alludes to him needing more than the $112M already given, in order to deliver on what was promised. So after raising $112M, and failing to make good and/or deliver on the promises for which the money was given, he now needs additional money in order to make good on those same promises made. Go ahead and tell me you think this is all OK.
“But of course the team is going to absolutely continue working on it, just like if you look at World of Warcraft – they continue to add content and features all the time. The same happens on EVE. We will update stuff, so we’ll update the graphics, we’ll add new functionality, new content, new systems, coming across additional alien races – all that kind of stuff will be there. So, we’re going to work on this as long as you guys let us or support us doing it, because the world’s huge. There’s so many things to do out there.”
5) A “Minimum Viable Product” essentially means that they could add shops (to sell more stuff, instead of actually adding relevant gameplay features) in the upcoming 2.4 patch, fix a few bugs, and call it a full and final commercial release. Why is this relevant? Well, once they released the shoddy mPU 2.0 back in Dec ’15, precisely as I said (in Oct ’15) they would, they started using that as an excuse to deny refunds, saying that it represents a “substantial portion” of the game promised. More here.
That’s precisely what they’re now going to do with the first commercial release.
6) Aside from the nepotism which extracts a large amount of money from the project and gives to family (Chris, Sandi, Erin) and close friends (Ortwin, Derek Senior, Nick Elms, Simon Elms) – all associated with Chris, and some (Elms bros) going all the way back to childhood, there has been lots of evidence of wasting backer money.
For everyone who backed the dream, it’s simple economics to see that with $20M, a single studio can build a fantastic game. Even with third-party contractors.
Instead money has been thoroughly wasted across the world with 4 studios and at last count, over 11 contractor (some of which are entire companies!) entities, all bringing the team count to around 300 (!!!!).
– LA head office which does nothing but make propaganda videos
– Austin which is now a shell of its former self with a skeleton crew
– Foundry42-GER which houses ex-CryTek engineers which some backers were saying was the magic bullet to solving all the engineering problems. Back in July 2015, I said that was bullshit. Here we are. The custom game engine is still shit.
– Foundry42-UK which he built for his brother (and which hosts Erin, Derek, Nick, Simon) like what happened decades ago with Digital Anvil collapse, is headed by Erin who they think (he will fail) is going to redeem his brother by delivering SQ42 – a game that i) very few backers give a shit about ii) has already been pre-sold; and which, in the economics of PC games, will never yield enough additional money to make a dent in finances. Aside from the fact that sources are telling me that it’s already shit.
7) For the money (currently $112M) given, what gamers are going to end up with as a MVP, is probably a game that could have been built for $20M and in under 4 years. Just as I predicted here.
And shipping an MVP, with funds (their worldwide estimated burn rate is pegged at around $3M per month) now drying up, invariably increases the risk of the project collapsing and him never delivering on any of the other promises. And that’s precisely how Ponzi schemes collapse.
8) When I recently stated that Star Citizen (PU) was in maintenance mode, some people just scoffed. That’s precisely what’s happening now as I said here. This plays into the MVP state whereby some bug fixes, features (e.g. shops in 2.4) designed to raise money rather than implement core features, will be implemented. The engine is FUBAR. There is no getting around this. And there is nothing they can do to fix it because right off the bat when Chris increased the scope, he put the game completely out of the engine’s scope.
Quoting from a Reddit AMA he did back in 2012 shortly after raising $2M on Kickstarter, in which he said:
“The difference between this and Fable is that it is intended as an online continually updated and developed game, rather than a fixed amount of functionality and content that will go onto a disc. So all the features may not make it for day 1 but we will bringing on as much and as many as we can over the life of the universe.
There will be some features that will not make it as I’m sure some of my ideas wont work out once we start testing them with real users, and there will be some I haven’t talked about will be in the game that everyone will wonder how we could have ever conceived not having.
Part of the reason of doing this with community involvement from the start is to make sure the people that will be affected by some early choices have a voice int he process. Perhaps its feature A or feature B at launch. Backers will get a say in which feature is more important to them. Its not a perfect process but I think it will be the bets one for the long run – and as a lot of people have noted just a sub set of some the proposed functionality will be pretty awesome and I’m not going to stop until we get it all (that makes sense from a fun / payable / balancing standpoint)”
That was before backers gave him $112M to deliver on the dreams. The very nature of stretch goals. Anyone using this statement to mean that he knew all along that everything promised won’t be in the game upon release, is an idiot. Note that this statement was also made BEFORE he significantly increased the scope of the game after the KS and fundraising continued on the RSI website.
Aside from that, in this FAQ for the game he stated thus:
“The purpose of the higher stretch goals is to ensure that the game-as-described is finished in the two year time period.“
That “two year time period“, was to be Nov 2014. A date that came and went. And at that time, they had raised over $65.5M.
9) The current ToS 1.2 in which they promised to do refunds and provide financial accounting for failure to deliver the product as promised, after being extended by six months from the original promised date of Nov 2014, expires on 05/31/16. They won’t do either of those.
This should be the biggest sign that they have no intentions of delivering anything as promised, and that all Chris has said since day one, was designed to extract money from gamers, while delivering a fraction of the dreams he promised. Paying $100 for a box you could have bought for $5.
10) Failure to deliver on what they promised – and for which they got $112M – is 100% illegal according to Federal law. There is absolutely NO argument about this fact. And it has nothing to do with crowdfunding, though that has its own Federal rules and guidelines.
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And the fun part? As per ToS 1.2, anyone looking to sue over this, has to go through arbitration on their own.
There can be no class action lawsuit arising from this as long as you bought the game, downloaded it, and agreed to that ToS.
The only legal action to ever come from this, is if either the Feds (FBI or FTC) or States (Attorney General) take action, or some enterprising attorney finds evidence of malfeasance, fraud or similar, and files a standard lawsuit. Then everything goes into discovery, and backers finally figure out what happened to their money.
Make no mistake, this farce WILL end up in some form of legal action. What form that will take, is what is currently unknown at this time.
I personally do NOT believe that they will ship any MVP version of Star Citizen (PU), let alone SQ42.
I personally – without a doubt in my mind – believe that the project, as we knew it, is DEAD. And anyone still giving them money, deserves to lose it. All of it.
Not my best work but still funny
On a side note, I am shocked at all the faggot fanbois who come to your site each day. If they are such fans of the game, why would they come to your site here? They display true cultist behavior and come here to find your sources so they can discredit them just like the Scientologists do. It is actually very scary when you think about how many weak minded people are in the world who are so lonely or without purpose that they will do anything for the person or project that gives them one.
Is there a way for the backers to at least get the created content open source in the end?
That way, from the ashes at least something might be salvaged that might go to space .
Nobody denies that the ships are beautiful- though flawed by the concept of having fps-physics in the same realm – they should have instantiated a miniserver every time a player leaves a ship.
Last but not least- its just a game, and games have been played on people since the dawn of time.
Weather someone sinks his money in a old fashioned “wallstreet” ponzi scheme, or a “spacestreet” ponzi scheme, this is not the end of the world.
He who gets the dread Pirat Roberts Ship Package posted to Github, shall recive praise 😀
Just read the CIG forum post for the 10FTC and it’s incredible the amount of people in denial.
Can we download the CIG forums in their entirety before they disappear. Then five years down the road when these same people are on other boards and voice an authoritive opinion we can post their CIG history and just laugh at them and their ignorance.
“But we’ll have something that we’ll think, ‘Okay yeah, now everyone can play it but it doesn’t matter – you can load it up, it plays really well, it’s really stable, there’s lots of content, there’s lots of fun things to do, different professions, lots of places to go, we’ve got a really good ecosystem.’ So, when we get to that point that’s when we would say, “Now it’s not alpha, it’s not beta, it’s Star Citizen 1.0.”
CR thinks he will go from the pre-alpha tech demo he has today, skip alpha and beta stages then declare this is Star Citizen 1.0 to satisfy the “delivery” of the KS project. Soon to be followed by a corporate bankruptcy with golden parachutes all around for the execs.
I know it took the Feds 48 years to arrest Bernie Madoff, but seriously this needs someone in authority to investigate this now before the rats scramble off the sinking ship.
Don’t worry the counter-strike actors are ready to play. We are now at the ChumpRun point. CIG executives won’t get away with this.
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