Backer42
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CIG has managed to raise over $100 million from roughly 1.3 million eager players.</span>
No, they haven’t. On Kickstarter 34,397 backers pledged $2,134,374. That is the only certified number. Everything else is made up. Some backers have thousands of accounts on that RSI site. Most have pledged nothing.
CIG told the press, they had about 70.000 total downloads of the “Alpha 2.0” techdemo client, they had about 70.000 verified Twitch livestream watchers in Oct 2015. And tens of thousand is roughly the number of YouTube views they get.
So we can say they have 70k “eager players” spending money on this, but not 1.3 millions. That’s ridiculous!
Crowdfunding might be dead in the water soon, this looks like foreshadowing.
When the largest crowdfunding project ever collapses it’s over for anybody collecting “crowdfunds”, because payment processors won’t transfer money anymore to stay clean of that stuff.
[quote quote=3178]@ Backer42
I am kinda surprised that you had that strong of a no-BS policy and didn’t know who that woman was (at the time), and was also an original backer. I could’ve been a golden ticket holder, but since I never ever forgot just how terrible the Wing Commander movie was… I did not jump into SC right away. I kept following the original RSI news and Kickstarter, and the cringy final push video, and waited until I saw signs that the project had a chance of going somewhere, and Chris had acknowledged his past mistakes.
Wow, Chris sure fooled me. I was seriously convinced he learned from his mistakes in the Wing Commander movie, and Freelancer with Microsoft in his interviews. I was even willing to overlook the woman who I suspected was the wife (thanks to said cringy video).[/quote]I never saw the Wing Commander movie. Back then in 2012 I didn’t even know it existed. I got mostly misinformed by video game media outlets, which promoted Roberts’ Kickstarter and praised him like a genius.
When the funding campaign launched, I was positively impressed by the successful remake of the XCOM franchise, so I thought bringing back another 90s classic couldn’t hurt. I already participated in various crowdfunded games, which also turned out good.
Of course, I expected them to bring over the good things from 90s sci-fi PC games (like diverse and customizable input controller support), not the bad things (like the excuse-tier storytelling). Turns out Descent Underground from Wingman previously working at CIG seems to be the title, which fulfills this promise, not the 120 million movie project.
Chis’ wife only appeared inside the marketing videos and I didn’t watch those. After pledging I even canceled the email subscriptions, because the weekly mails reporting the “progress” where basically just “give us more money pls!” and my stance on that was: “Come back when you have something to download”.
So it went downhill early on, but I wasn’t suspecting enough. I was fine with just waiting two years, of course, then there was no finished release, just Arena Commander.
I felt relief when I got the official statement of being released from my status as “original backer” or “citizen”. Having myself officially disassociated with the “crowdfunding movement” was much more important than the money (though it’s still nice to have it back). If one day SC members start going after each other for not spending enough money, I’m very glad that I’m not part of this anymore.
Glad to see you got your refund early on.
Well, it wasn’t so early on. I mostly ignored all the media buzz before fall 2015, because I had (and still have) a strict no-BS policy of only looking at the delivered downloads and make my assessments based on them. So I deliberately ignored all that video content (except a few Wingman hangars back in the old days), but I also ignored the Escapist articles. As a result of that policy I never sank into the cult.
This was changed by Chris Roberts himself, when he posted his “response letter” wall of text on the RSI site. This was also the first time when I heard about Derek and his example of a forced refund. That thing made me decide to watch the “CitizenCon 2015” livestream about a month later.
Then the stream was a disaster. The first minutes were the creepiest thing I ever watched on the video game streaming site Twitch: I simply didn’t know the women who just fake-cried on stage and had no clue why she was there. This was followed by hours of false promises and the PS3-tier “Morrow tour”. The latter evidence finalized my decision to request a refund (and without Derek’s example that would have been denied). The “birthday cake” at the end wasn’t needed anymore and it was just reinforcing the decision.
Just to clarify: It wasn’t Derek nor Goons nor “Star Citizen haters ” or anyone else, who convinced me to bail out, it was the man (CR) himself and his wife and their own actions. The same man who convinced to pledge three years earlier, back then I didn’t know anything about the shady history (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/6.2155-54-Wing-Leader#254911). I should have done my research.
[quote quote=3156]Not to mention baiting/harassing E:D customers on their own forums when they disagree with the crap.[/quote]
I’m at least redpilled about those space sim communities now. Could have happened under different circumstances which a real game account at stake (I bought ED at sale, so not much loss here). But I decided to look how they deal with SC critics first, before I involve myself for real.
Well, that ended fast.
I got a full refund for SC thanks to man operating this site. And I was one of the first backers (day one) who helped to start this thing.
[quote quote=3155]I will give the mods some credit for allowing a good amount of criticism to go around, unlike MMORPG.[/quote]
Well, to me it looks like they had to wait until they could construct a rule violation to make it look legit. If they could they would ban critics right away and I heard that also happened in the past. So don’t be fooled, they make it look like this, but outright delete any relevant dissent from the thread without leaving a trace.
The first occurence was a badword filter (which I’m fine with BTW). So you self-censor yourself like expected and stay civil. But then moderation hits: On Frontier forums, you are not allowed to do that. You are not allowed to use “language” even if you don’t write it. It’s already forbidden to think it! Sounds like creepy 1984 stuff, doesn’t it? Of course, it was a remark about CIG, which was deleted, they bent the rule as excuse.
But it was this snarky remark earned me the ban (and then got deleted of course):
—Quote (Originally by mrsanders)—
Well then this thread would be pretty desolate and empty since there is no game yet and not much development shown so far…
—End Quote—
Then just talk about Chris Roberts’ birds and how much you spent on concept sales. This is what this thread is for. Just don’t talk about Star Citizen oder Squadron 42, the company which makes it, the crowdfunding project or anything else related to it. This will get this thread locked.Irony is also forbidden by the forum rules and is called Public Moderation Contesting. Of course, it’s obvious the ban was for bringing up unwanted facts in the posts before, which earned over 60 reputation points for a reason, not for this remark.
And there is the usual mess of moderators intermixing personal opinion on SC with official moderation, which is really unprofessional. One moderation post is: “Star Citizen is the greatest thing evar!” and the next one is “Please don’t discuss Glassdoor or I lock the thread”, while the forum software forces you to read every single one of them (the other shills you can easily filter out).
Hi there,
Seems I got banned from the official Frontier forums for discussing Star Citizen in an unwanted way.
Amusing fact: Their “volunteer moderators” seem to have sank thousands into Chris Roberts pockets. But even more amusing: Expressing concerns about SC is answered with badmouthing Frontier products using official moderator accounts on the official Frontier forums. No joke.
Somehow Frontier put people into power, who don’t like their game and support their direct competitor. Lesson learned: If you don’t employ and pay your forum moderators, someone else is going to pay them.
