Star Citizen – Interstellar Pirates
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This is why I would suck if I ever tried the stock market for real – it’s so driven by speculation and posturing and a single unsubstantiated rumor of a company having problems can sink the stock value that I just couldn’t stand it. Like the recent “crisis” a few months ago when problems in China (combined with Marting “the forecaster” Armstrong having predicted a collapse of China in late 2015) made the stock markets go bananas and I lost like 10% of my savings in a week. And then .. nothing, and now everything is back up to where it was before and I’m left wondering “what was facts and what was FUD”. And the same goes on here, CIG is posturing and promising 2.0 “soon(tm)” while Derek is speading the FUD.
And just to be clear – when I say “I expect it in 2020 and fine with that”, I mean the full PU with the planets, landing zones and ships flyable, not SQ42 which really should be out in _aleast_ beta stage in 2016. I fully realise that’s 2 years after their Kickstarter estimate of Nov 2014 but I don’t have a problem with that. Kind of like I didn’t have a problem when Blizzard delayed “Diablo 3” for 2 more years (and took another 2 years to make it actually good).
By the way, a tip to the webmasters of this place – the design for the forum is completely fubar on mobile devices! Replies gets indented all the time so Derek’s reply showed one character per row. And I’m not used to reading vertically, so you may want to check up on that 🙂
Right. I get that. But Chris Roberts has – again – gone on the record and saying the game, including Squadron 42, is going to be completed in 2016. So you agree that he continues to lie then? That’s what you’re saying if you are now saying that you expect to see everything promised by 2020.
I have to admin I wasn’t fully paying attention to the livestream, I was too busy playing a fully working game 🙂 , but did he really promise a full PU release in 2016? not just alpha or beta or something, but an honest to god ready for market PU release in 2016?
If he did he’s bonkers. But the sad truth of today is that alot of people, from politicians, to CEO’s to game developers are replacing “intent” with “promise”. I can fully buy his intentions are to release it in 2016, the same as any CEO’s intention is that their stocks will rise and politician that he will win this election or any new startup being “industry leading”. Call it posturing, anti-FUD or whatever you will, but noone wants to back a losing horse.
Not saying it’s ok, just that yes it’s a promise and one that will go down as another broken promise of this project but not something that’ll convince me he’s the devil or evil schemer you’re portraying him to be.
@Big Lir
Can you maybe give a little more details about your refund?
I am considering getting one myself and interested in hearing any pitfalls you may have had?
Actually after reading this you bring up some great points.
I think there has been some dirt slinging on both sides of this situation, so it will be interesting to see what happens come January 6th if they do run out of money.
They made quite a bit of money in Oct/Nov due to CitizenCon and the anniversary sales. So that should last at least two months. Regardless, 2016 is the definitive year. And since they’re already tapped out on what they can raise money on, the next target seems to be SQ42.
This first appeared as a section in my Interstellar Pirates blog. I needed a link directly to that section, hence this post.
THE GIZMONDO MONEY LAUNDERING CONNECTION
Five of the six top execs at this company, Chris Roberts, his brother Erin Roberts, their lifelong friends, Nick & Simon Elms (brothers), Derek Senior – all from Manchester – through their previous company Warthog, were associated with the Gizmondo money laundering operation that was busted worldwide a few years ago.
Simon Elms, now the CFO of Foundry 42, was also the CFO for Warthog which was bought by Gizmondo and becameGizmondo Texas. Gizmondo had previously bought Tiger Telematics which was used as the entity company to purchase Warthog.
Nick Elms is also reported to have been investigated by the UK FSA back when he dumped Warthog shares, thus crashing the share price, when his brother was CFO of that company.
As the story goes, Gizmondo was a money laundering front for the Swedish Uppsala mafia headed by Swedish Gangster named “Fat Steve”. Along with his partner Mikael Ljungman, they bought the company. Simon Elms was the CFO for Gizmondo since the begining and he was also director of several companies, including Virtual Poker (of which both Simon Elms and Erin Roberts were officers). That company was quietly dissolved in early 2008, while Gizmondo went bankrupt later that same year.
It gets better.
Swedish newspapers (such as this one see translation) reported that, among other things, the crooks who founded Gizmondo were previously involved in various illegal activities. Those included distributing counterfeit money, blackmail, extortion and assault. And the icing on the proverbial criminal enterprise cake is that they were debt collectors for the Swedish underworld aka the Uppsala mafia. I kid you not. Here is the partial rap sheet for these charmers back then.
Stefan Eriksson, Executive Director at Gizmondo Europe, was previously convicted to five years in prison in 1993 for planning to distribute counterfeit money. He got another five years for trying to defraud financial institution for approximately $3 million.
Peter Uf, also a director, was previously sentenced to almost 9 years on similar charges as Stefan.
Johan Enander, head of security at Gizmondo, had been convicted for blackmail and aggravated assault.
Later in 2009, Mikael went to jail for various financial crimes and Carl Freer was being investigated by the FBI on RICO charges.
The whole thing was so freaking outrageous, that not even the US media back in the day could believe it. Here is one such accounting. Which brings us to the crashed Ferrari that was seemingly the final act that got everyone busted.
Fast forward.
Warthog, which was in financial trouble, was bailed out by Gizmondo to become Gizmondo Texas. Eric Peterson (remember him?), was made head of global studios, while Erin Roberts was studio manager of Gizmondo Manchester, along with Simon Elms. The company was supposed to have been working on various casino games which were to be released for the Gizmondo device. These are games that were reportedly never going to be released, since the device was nothing but a pipe dream. That company was dissolved before this was all publicly known.
After it all collapsed, Simon Elms later went off to Cubic motion and Nick Elms and some other guys set up Embryonic studios. Erin showed up at some point. Embryonic was later bought by Travelers Tales. Erin and Nick were there for awhile, until Chris showed up with a bag of money and asked his brother and his band of merrymen to join him on his epic quest for loot: that being the pipe dream that was to become Star Citizen. Chris then built his brother a brand new, multi-million dollar studio, Foundry 42; and gave him Squadron 42 to develop.
After I pieced this all together a few weeks ago and tweeted that I was working on a blog about it, someone else decided to do the leg work and wrote a pretty good synopsis of the whole thing and which also links all these four people to a massive international money laundering operation. It’s as crazy as you’d expect. But let me quote that person’s closing statement.
“In the end, it is all hearsay. People in the industry work with each other all the time. Bad projects happen. After all, it isn’t everyday a charismatic con man and a sociopathic leg breaker go into the videogame industry. Chris Roberts would surely want to bring people he’s familiar with onto his project. Though as time wears on and deadlines are missed and where the budget is being spent obscured, the comparisons to Gizmondo become hard to ignore. With the way things are going, we might see Chris Roberts sitting next to a crashed sports car, blaming a mysterious German for everything that went wrong.”
In 2006, Wired magazine also wrote about this fiasco.
Gamers have given this outstanding group of people over $94m to build a game. And four years later, there is still no “game”. And thus far, nobody has a clue where most of the money went.
There are those who are saying stupid things like; well they have over 200 people working, that’s where the money went. The only response that I could muster for anyone making this stupid claim? You’re an idiot.
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