The main differences with Star Citizen are that itâs
- Funded in advance
- Funded by people who have no say in how the product/company should work
- Massively overfunded
This means, CIG has no pressure to ship soon or even at all (if the project fails, they have no liability). They also have nobody telling them what to with the money. They have already made their profit.
I am not knocking CIG for this situation, but if you put it like this, itâs easy to see why for each CIG out there, there are tens of thousands of games on crowdfunding sites that either
- Failed to raise funds
- Failed to get a decent company/legal structure running with the money they raised
- Failed to actually ever deliver anything in an usable state
- Are just pure scams
So as a general business model rather than just an insane stroke of luck, I donât think this is a good option.
A business model that only earns money after release (like the classic publisher-funded development model) is bad for the obvious cash-grabby and buggy reasons, but at least it consistently delivers games. Contrary to the âearn money before you start developmentâ model that is enabled by crowdfunding, which in general does not deliver games.
In my (not very educated) opinion, early access is probably the best middle ground. You start off with little initial funding required, but by the time you turn to the crowd, you already have a working prototype and company structure. That makes it much more likely for the game to eventually be released in a full version. This option obviously comes with its own downsides as well, but many of my favourite games have been small studios or even individuals who use early acces to fund development.
NotYourSocialWorker@feddit.nu â¨10⊠â¨months⊠ago
I canât understand why crunch time has become so normalised. Thereâs no other software development project where constantly failing to plan for the needed time requirement would be accepted. Crunch is a sign of bad project management, it isnât normal.
Sylver@lemmy.world â¨10⊠â¨months⊠ago
But when it works, when that day comes, weâll make a hell of a lot of money for the shareholders! Isnât that nice?
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world â¨10⊠â¨months⊠ago
At some point, people figured out that during a couple of weeks of mad rush right before a deadline, if youâve got committed, well-rested employees who know theyâre going to get a rest afterwards, they tend to be much more productive than they normally are. Some bad managers only paid attention to part of that, and determined that eighty hour weeks are more than twice as productive as forty hour ones, and intentionally started inducing crunch. They somehow didnât notice that the third week of crunch is only about as productive as a regular week, and after that, itâs way less productive as everyoneâs exhausted. Combine this with the fact that people with management knowledge tend to flee from the games industry rather than to it, and you end up with the software engineering industryâs least effective managers running things with easily debunked dogma.