dsmart
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I my over three decades history, I’ve never seen such a case of sunk cost fallacy and cognitive dissonance rolled up in one neatly tied up packet. It’s uncanny.
[quote quote=3110]Is this part of the “extinction level event”, or am I missing something? The only thing going extinct so far are my brain cells while wading through this “commentary”. [/quote]
No. The E.L.E is in full swing and in fact, a part of came to light in the latest 104TC
From BDSSE! to Minimum Viable Product
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Derek Smart was right[/caption]This is what I stated back in July 2015 in my first Interstellar Citizens blog.
“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?“
Here is what he said in July 2015 following that blog:
“There are people out there who are going to tell you that this is all a BADTHING. 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!
Is ‘feature creep’ a worry? Sure… it’s always a worry, and we are well aware of it. However, building the game to the stretch goals embraced and endorsed by the community is not feature creep!”
Well, this is part where everyone starts chanting “Derek Smart was right”
Less than one week after this latest blog went live, Chris, on April 18th, did another broadcast in which, in no uncertain terms, declared that, as I had said back in July 2015, the game he pitched, simply couldn’t be built.
In that broadcast (starts at 23:08) he stated that the first commercial release of Star Citizen, for which he had already been given, at that point, $112M dollars to deliver all he promised, will not contain the full product promised. He stated that a “minimum viable product” is what will be delivered. Read this and this.
“10 for the Chairman: Episode 83
Apr 18, 2016 @ 23:20
Q: Have you had any thoughts on the direction CIG will go after Star Citizen is finished? Do you think you could put all that you as a company have learned and developed into creating additional content?
“Well yeah, absolutely. I think I’ve said this for quite a long time but Star Citizen is never going to be finished and I don’t think people would say EVE is finished or World of Warcraft is finished now. Star Citizen will go on, that universe will go on as long as anyone is out there wanting to play in it – which I’m hoping will be for a long time obviously. The games I mentioned have been 10 years plus.
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.”
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.
It’s the same on Squadron 42. Once we’ve told the Squadron 42 trilogy then we’re going to move on and we’ll have other stories we’ll tell. Maybe they’re not necessarily military stories, maybe it’s more an adventure – sort of a Han Solo style adventure.
It’s just a huge universe, you know. Look what Disney’s doing with Star Wars. They’ve got a whole roadmap of the main ones and the spinoff ones and all the rest of the stuff.
So, you know, I think Star Citizen has the possibility to have a huge interesting universe. We’ve really put a lot of effort into the lore of it. I mean, you see from the very beginning that’s one of the things that we made foundational. Dave and his team constantly are fleshing out the world in addition to writing stuff for the Squadron series as well as doing stuff for the PU.
You know, we want to make this world as livable and believable and you guys spend many years adventuring around in it. And I think in today’s world, it’s not the way it used to be… where it was like, ‘Here’s a game, then you put it on the shelf, and then you come back to another game a year or two years later and you sort of iterate it.’ You know, where you have Grand Theft III and IV and V come out. I think with us, we’re just live and we’re just continually improving and adding stuff and more people are having fun and adventuring around. So, kind of like what we’re doing right now but obviously with more features and more content. Better stability, better performance under our belts and then at a certain point we’ll say, “Yup, ready for the full general public,” there you go.”
Thanks man. I think I have substantial standing right now. I have also assembled a good list of people with standing from all over the US and other international territories where the game was purchased.
The point Derek “lost me” was when he tried to connect CR & CIG to a non existent mafia, that was pure gold (atleast for a Swede)
Wrong. It’s a fact that the four execs that I named in the Gizmondo farce were connected to it; seeing as they, well, worked for that very same company.
My one conclusion as to why Derek is still going on even when the points have been made and CIG failed to step up to the plate is he wants to be damn sure there isn’t some wealthy investor out there thinking of sending a few million their way but when doing the due diligence would definitely find his or her way here and back out. That’s the only thing that makes sense at this stage. If so… well played
The most disappointing thing in the drama isn’t that Derek is necessarily right about the things he’s predicted and written – it’s that CIG is failing to step up to the plate and just prove him wrong. But they can’t which by default gives Derek more creedWrong. Again. I have voiced my reasons over and over again. In fact, I even had my attorneys put those reasons in writing, and sent to CIG so there is a written record of it.
You spent time writing up that entire missive, pointing the finger at me for speculation, conjecture etc. And what do you end up doing?
Since the forum where this was posted is sometimes pay-walled, I am going to quote it because it’s perfect.
note: The “job tourist” mentioned, would be Jared Huckaby aka Lando
[quote]I’m not saying we were well-behaved netizens back in the day, I’m saying Ben isn’t a creep, we were children when we made those websites, and all our in-joke bullshit should be taken with a grain of salt.[/quote]
But you fail to make the distinction between the fact while it is immature ramblings, even when taken out of the context in which they were said, they are far from appropriate at any age.
In Ben’s mind this is like when some celeb posts on twitter about some embarrassing style they wore back in the 80’s. He fully expected people to laugh with him as if he didn’t know better….at age 25. If this was just the spider facts page that would be the case.
Ben as a person is quite literally a mile wide and an inch deep when it comes to have any substance to his self worth.
Sure he got the short end of the stick as a kid but then no effort was really made to get him out and about and socialising with people and so he retreated into a safe space that he hasn’t really been able to leave. I also get the feeling that he’s been so wrapped up in cotton wool that he has quite the case of arrested development going on.
Him dropping out of college only just shows he has trouble doing things without some sort of adult assistance. And this still appears to be the case regarding him having to move states to work on SC.
He found the WC community as the one thing that accepted him and attached himself to it like some desperate leech and has spent the better part of twenty years obsessively immersing himself to the point where it’s defined the only self worth he’s ever known. As a result he becomes cocky and arrogant slowly pushing out other community leaders with such vitriol, even rejoicing in their deaths, till only he is left to run the ship of fools.
To make things worse this behaviour gets validated as he’s eventually rewarded for his years of service as being the public face of his idol’s latest creation.
You’re talking about a person who at that point is verging on borderline shut-in and lives off a menial admin job at a school while writing up news posts that hallucinate potential sequels from nearly forgotten game franchises of the 90’s. Now he gets paid to sit around in cushy digs with free food to live his dream – and the tragic irony is that’s literally killing him.
On top of that he’s given the controls to a new community from the ground up and sets up ridiculous rules about what can or can’t be posted and mandatory polls dishing out the law at every moment. Plus he’s an individual who has very little solid experience outside his comfort zone to deal with sensitive subjects in a proper way.
Of course he runs into the dilemma where you have backers who are just as broken and even more so as himself (see WulfKnight).
People so ostracised from social norms that they try to buy themselves some sort of community acceptance in the thousands of dollars expecting some sort of say in the creation of a dream video game or even buying people ships to try and gain their affections.
So to save the company coffers they get a light slap on the wrist for posting CP while valid concerns get banished to the wasteland as there’s only so many hours in the day and free doughnuts to eat and sitting around watching all the Star Wars movies on company time.
Keep in mind this the public face of a company that has been publicly accused by former employees of racist and discriminatory hiring practices, done at a whim because the person hiring subjectively picks and chooses people based on broad assumptions of their personal grooming. Yup, someone wasn’t hired because she was claimed to look like someone who doesn’t shave down there.
And then you have the self described “job tourist” who claims he ran a baseball team in his teens yet until someone put the clippers to him looked like a hobo they’d let in. Said hobo leaked 34gb of game assets onto a public FTP, including a working build of the game and somehow kept his job.
TL;DR
90’s video game obsessed manchild gets wrapped in cotton wool and refuses to grow up and take responsibility for his actions that are now damaging the reputation of the company he works for. Said company too afraid of community reprisals and potential loss of money to fire him.
