They never planned to get THIS far. They even disappeared with the money for like a year and then just came back like nothing happened.
Comment on Former CIG employee speaks out about Star Citizen’s design trajectory and money burn
Cabeza2000@lemmy.world 10 months ago
With this game it always seem to be more profitable to keep it in development forever rather than releasing it.
Sendpicsofsandwiches@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
bighi@lemmy.world 10 months ago
And asked for more
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m still kinda waiting for that to happen again. I tried so hard not to point and laugh the first time.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That is true of basically every game. It is why we moved away from “Game, wait a year, expansion, wait a year, expansion. new game” on to DLC and now straight up live games. It is just a reality of development as it lessens crunch (you can put features off for later updates) and removes the old ramp up/down model.
The issue is not that star citizen is trying to be a live game. It is that it is horrendously mismanaged and helmed by a “rockstar developer” and his family. Apparently the brother actually DOES know how to ship a product, but he isn’t the one who runs around telling people to prioritize bedsheet deformation. Or to insist on needing 64-bit coordinates rather than using the industry standard approach of only loading a few cells within range of the player (and then lots of complex shenanigans to update the rest at a much lower rate). And so forth.
And I am not even going to complain (too much) about the sp campaign never coming. That is what I bought a decade or whatever ago and I am still pissed that was immediately dropped in favor of making the game Microsoft said “… fucking no. Release Freelancer god damn it” to. But the majority of current players want star citizen so… fine.
But the issue is just that there is no competent leadership. And all anyone has been able to figure out is “If we keep releasing ships, people will keep buying them”.
Kaldo@kbin.social 10 months ago
Well this article is kinda saying that they are barely keeping their head above water as it is, and CIG is vastly mismanaging money and driving development heavily on how many ships they can sell in that year.
So if anything I'd say that this strategy doesn't seem to be working out for them anymore
bighi@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Look at it another way.
If they’re keeping their head above water, even barely, it means they are keeping their head above water. Without delivering a product. For YEARS.
They’re earning money by selling empty promises year after year. Not a lot of money. They’ll never become billionaires from this game. But there are lots of people in there (mainly executives and CEO and whatever) earning a decent salary. On empty promises! It’s as close to a scam that it can be without being illegal.
Kaldo@kbin.social 10 months ago
I guess, but the fact they are now laying people off is for sure a sign that things aren't going well enough. CR might live the rest of his life in a mansion but his legacy is in a crapper and he's not gonna get another chance at this (at least I hope people wouldn't fall for it twice).
bighi@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Their laying people off mean that the honest workers are losing something. But the actual scammers, the people at the top, they’re still there.
They lay people off because they don’t want to reduce their own salaries.
helloharu@lemmy.world 10 months ago
We’d all hope so but how many times have people fallen for Peter Molyneuxs shenanigans.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 10 months ago
His “legacy” has always been in the shitter.
He basically pivoted the WC success into making movies (the Kojima model) and the Wing Commander movie was so bad that it killed both the franchise and his career in film. He still had money so got to be a producer on a few flicks, but never had any creative control again.
And Freelancer was so horribly mismanaged that it basically “blacklisted” him as far as game dev went.
Star Citizen was basically an attempt to take advantage of the crowd funding craze that somehow also keyed in on what is largely the rise of “influencer” games where people care more about the dream of doing something than actually doing it (Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online are earlier examples where the vast majority of fans will never play the game but might buy it to “try it”).
Speculation, but I assume the attempts to make a bunch of tech that does what everyone else already does but poorly is trying to build out a portfolio for a buyout.
And it is worth understanding that Wing Commander… very much benefited from being “first” and for having a few celebrities involved. Even by WC4 there were “third party” games like Star Crusader that were basically better in every possible way. And Star Wars had been doing x-wing games since '93.
And then Freespace hit in 98 and was a revelation (with Freespace 2 in '99 basically being the gold standard to this day).
In a lot of ways, Squadron 42 was so anticipated mostly because we hadn’t had anything in the genre for years by that point (Darkstar One sort of existed?). Sort of like how almost all the xcom sickos played UFO ET and found it “fine” and a lot of the JA2 sickos played 5.56 and… anyway. Or us Silent Storm fans who tried to tolerate Hummer & Sickle.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
RIP Squadron 42
goferking0@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
Only part I wanted :(
Kaldo@kbin.social 10 months ago
The only part I believed they might actually deliver on since it isn't boggled down by network issues, but I guess even that was too much to hope for. I still remember the 2018 lie of "it's weeks away from being shown" only for them to not show anything or the next 5 years. If it weren't that troublesome to get it (and it's a small sum anyway) I'd probably fight for a refund out of principle alone.