Star Citizen - media blowout, Chris Robert's new game

I share your concerns, absolutely. One of my greatest fears about the project is that they'll do the thing that is "easy" to justify, the thing that is common to the rest of the gaming industry, the thing that (sadly, I realize how I old I feel when seeing this) nearly a whole generation has grown up seeing exploitative monetization as normal. However, the ENTIRE PREMISE of Star Citizen is that it is NOT intended to be a normal game, a normal project, or like the rest of the gaming industry. From day 1 it was crowdfunded because publishers at the time would not fund even a more midding, limited "common in the 90s-esq but modernized" space sim like those Roberts' used to make. When the project grew from there the community was asked and answered both in writing and with their wallets they wanted something unprecedented, as this chance was an unusual one. As the funding kept coming in until the scope became locked down at the current (basically the scope of the game was not even really set until the first 100M came in, studios and assets to support them were built for this scope etc) people realized this was a rare chance to do something that would likely for better or worse not come along for a long time.
Oh totally agree - the exact fear I have is that this has gone so far the only way to ~survive~ now is to continue with that :( How does a group of newbies compete with an org that ~starts~ with capital ships on day 1? The ability to generate funds, capture territory, make an impact on the 'verse... that will be the whales and the orgs that have been playing for years and dumping cash in. So... either you stagger that out (potentially irritating the whales), or you have to let the newbies ~choose~ if they want to put in cash. I fully, 100%, totally and completely believe that EVERY ship will be available in game for in-game money. But they've BEEN available for $$ - so tons of folks already have them. That's a hill that may ~break~ the community if they're not careful - the sadly easy answer is "don't change anything, keep taking money".
It wasn't just the game and immersion or crowdfunding, but lots of the early business decisions that were pivotal in getting people to back were absolutely unusual - and I say that even as someone who has backed a LOT of crowdfunding projects at higher values. The typical idea for crowfunding something ambitious was to put FOMO stuff in place for the "whales" , harp on exclusivity and more. Star Citizen didn't do that - they walked a hell of a tightrope. Saying that just about every ship AND cosmetic would be unlockable in game without having to pay has been a core reason people backed. Star Citizen basically proved that the common monetization justifications of the industry were bullshit - people didn't have to be "forced" by restriction, exclusivity, tedium etc.. to pay, they'll back regardless if they want to support the project and believe in it. There's a lot of other things that SC has done differently and were core values of Roberts and the early team when it came to monetization - open-handed policies over restriction, at just about every level - it was wonderfully balanced for many different types of backers all at the same time. I've said before that in recent years there are definitely some concerns I have and I hate to see this waver. I worry that an influx of new, younger talent from elsewhere in the industry will try to do what is "normal" and new bean counters will just nod along. However, if this happens it will undermine what makes Star Citizen so unique. They'll also try the patience of backers of all sorts if they keep dragging things on only for profit - some have made that accusation since day 1, and much the same way the depth and immersion of the game world makes people more understanding oft the long arc to development, were they to give up those features people would become angry all around ; some because they gave them up, others because they could have made a "meh" game without all those features much faster etc... nobody will be happy! The same will be true for monetization vs the amount of support for the project. If they start acting like a Korean Item Mall MMO with their policies, you can bet that people like me who backed on their open handed policies will vehemently protest and they're likely to turn supporters into PR opposition. This will also haave technical effects like the in-game economy described being disrupted and no longer viable, which then becomes a cascade of policies ruined seeking short term "typical" monetization gain in a project that is by design "atypical", among other issues.

So yes, while it is understandable for people to worry about them taking that course (its right to be pessimistic about watching the rest of the industry) , hopefully enough of the upper management know they cannot let the festering pathogen of exploitative monetization slip in lest it undermine support for the project and what makes it unique. Oh and its worth mentioning there are very, very few outside investors on the core game itself thankfully. Probably the only reason they've had this kind of autonomy and haven't slipped into traditional industry behavior thus far (much like how Valve is privately owned and Gaben has a controlling interest). There' was some very limited investment prior to the start of crowdfunding and then over the years they've taken some small amount of investment for things that are not related to development (ie a loan for marketing stuff, events, fabrication of some physical items etc... because Chris stated he didn't want to put crowdfunding money towards things like marketing or advertising etc. ) but generally they're pretty well set in this regard last I checked, unless something has changed.
I don't think they'll do it intentionally. I don't think chris roberts "fails" intentionally (It just generally takes a real PM or product owner to kick his ass) either - but how do you fix the balance without, well, letting other people choose to pay to catch up? I honestly don't know the answer to that - I'm fiddling ideas, but ... I suspect that's going to be an issue, if we ever make it to "release". When 50% of the population has tanks, carriers, battleships, and nukes - and the other half has sticks, stones, and two flintlock pistols... balance is ~fucked up~.
Well, considering how some people (not the one I was replying to) think that the "secret plan" from the start would be to never come to 1.0 and that failure to do so would not have any negative ramifications from the backers or be noteworthy in the way the game was stuctured, I just wanted to clarify.
 
Well, considering how some people (not the one I was replying to) think that the "secret plan" from the start would be to never come to 1.0 and that failure to do so would not have any negative ramifications from the backers or be noteworthy in the way the game was stuctured, I just wanted to clarify.
Considering the massive fluctuation in timelines, the number of times those fluctuations have occurred, and CR's track record; it's entirely reasonable to believe this is simply a money-printing machine.
 
How I look at the funding and the game as I always have -
Is it worth the money, to me, that I have spent so far? Yes, I continue to back it - no, I stop.

Anything else doesnt matter in the long run for a backer like myself. I dont care about next year - Im happy now, any improvement from here will just be awesome and a bonus. If the game shut down today, Id be sad that I cant look at my cool ships anymore, but still fine with it.
 
How I look at the funding and the game as I always have -
Is it worth the money, to me, that I have spent so far? Yes, I continue to back it - no, I stop.

Anything else doesnt matter in the long run for a backer like myself. I dont care about next year - Im happy now, any improvement from here will just be awesome and a bonus. If the game shut down today, Id be sad that I cant look at my cool ships anymore, but still fine with it.
Oh agreed. I just bought more ships. Not precisely arguing that- I’m wondering that ~if by doing so~ I’ve helped unbalance the game more. And if so, what will the long term plan be? I’m speculating - how it’ll work out, what we’ll see, wtc
 
1 system, ten years.
Sataball?
ToW (when you can't get FPS working on a horrible old FPS engine) is still nowhere to be found, two years after being a 'quick job for a 6 man team' that 'wouldn't take resources away from game development', after a failed playtest. It has now been (drumroll) outsourced to Turbulent, who is developing an increasingly large amount of the game. Of course that wouldn't take away any resources for development, would it?
Jesus tech/patch promises
OCS
SSOCS
Server 'mashing' going nowhere for years
'1000 player shards'
Cap Ships like BMM sold and still in dev/unreleased after 8 years, as the gameplay, backend and features needed aren't even greybox
Fully crewed large cap ships will exceed server player count limits if there are more than one currently
RIP economy balance
Game funded by ship sales = dead when it stops. They have no war chest. The alpha must go on
Flight model still being changed often
30-40% of features in major patches permanently delayed
Art everywhere but few greybox or features (breaks the codebase)
Massive tech debt
Chris basically NEVER says 'no, we can't do that'. Seriously go and look. Everything is possible in dreams.txt
Unplayable FPS/ship/AI desync usually
10-20fps isn't playable for fps now and was barely acceptable 20 years ago
Fps tied to server tick rate, yes a potato can be as fast as a 3090/6900
The plethora of gameplay breaking bugs, many of which are 5+ years old
Ageing graphics engine (once you see the plastic you'll never go back)
Terrible ship layout and space inefficiency
Assets and interior spaces laid out or designed with little care or thought sometimes
Stolen gimmicks from every other franchise
Spaghetti codebase, many of the OG devs are gone. New features bring old bugs often, if you're a dev you know what that means (7 levels of nested 'If statements' in one public screenshot of the code)
Features still being added in 'alpha'. Alpha now apparently doesn't mean feature complete
Most gameplay modes have severe bugs or issues (hence the 'my org does mining only now' posts)
Ships release like clockwork, gameplay modes barely touched
Feature and scope creep. Go read the starliner/transport dreams.txt Tony Zzzz wrote back in 2014 or so. Its an entire game in itself (this was also when I knew they would never finish).
Most of staff is art and marketing, few devs comparitively
Massive office acquisitions during WFH transition (tax write off/losses.exe)
The offshoot companies owned by the family, to funnel backer funding into which ended up mostly wasted (mocap studio, capture of talent screwed up, re-caps etc
Dodgy shell companies and the rest
500mil if you count Calders investments and loans to CIG which we only see UK filings for.
Oh yeah, don't forget to answer the call 2016, ladies and gentlemen. Squadron 54 is always current year+ 1-2 like server meshing.
No SQ54 gameplay for 2 years
SQ54 wouldn't take dev away from PTU but is blamed when stuff takes time and vice versa
It's an alpha (technically its not even alpha/feature complete) when any criticism is leveled
It's also a completed, released game(s) as a service according to court and the website
A new world having massive engine issues too (shares large parts of cryengine/lumber yard/'starengine' fork)
You'll notice most of the stuff on the reddit is screenshots and theorycrafting dreams.txt. You can't see the frame rate or the AI in a perpetual suicidal lemming mode/ship jittering/exploding or falling through the floor in a screenshot.
Collisions are broken likely due to them scaling a 3x3km Crysis map to 3000x3000km and having not enough precision
Some are convinced it's money laundering
Ramps, stairs, elevators, beds, ships etc are still deadly and or IEDs
50 player limit reduced to 40 (and part of the single system deleted to save IO and ram on server) for an event (engine/servers at their limits as usual)
The SC plebbit mods are cancer and the astroturfing and shilling has lot of budget, to drag new players in. It gets so bad you'll see new players shilling things they did that aren't even in the game. They don't pay for very good astroturfing.
The refunds sub is run by blue haired, trannycommie soyim goons, who actually censor/delete/shadowban more than the main sub or spectrum. All while astroturfing how bad the other side is at moderation. They push political agenda while claiming its against the rules with the expected reddit mod slant and are nasty PoS's, anyone who knows the truth of Weimar Germany knows their old tactics. Many there also cannot admit when SC does good things and love to hate it. Many also love the game concept and just want to see something work reliably, but are jaded by mismanagement or burned by promises and expressive pledge ships.


All up, with my harsh take aside, the game has serious potential. If they stopped now, kicked Chris and his family and their lawyer as far away as possible, then turned it into a sharded horror game on unreal5, they'd have a money printer. Or just focused on normal game dev procedure on a suitable engine. The ambience when not done over the top is insane. The detail for those who like it, is unrivalled. There are truly some magical things this game does that no other does or can do.
The game could be taken in so many magnificent paths with the largest dev budget ever. But it's not.
Why?

The same reason Chris Roberts had Microsoft step in and boot him off one of his most famous games, in order to get it finished after killing the budget multiple times.
The same reason he is quoted saying 'make that blue pixel green'.
The same reason many ships or things have had countless 'passes' while still being fundamentally broken
The same reason it looks great but much doesn't reliably work
The same reason for massive scope creep and a decade or more of impossible tech and engine debt

Mismanagement and petty levels of micromanagement in some areas. Chris has clearly a team of yes men, plus a lot of family on the payroll and is an ideas guy. He should be nowhere near management. Keep his often-brilliant creativity and poor grasp of physics the fuck away from any form of management, because if there is one thing that's 100% certain with the permanent delays and ten years of BS, is that it's a mismanaged clusterfuck and has been for years.
Go look at an update release for No Mans Sky, or War Thunder. Dev teams and budgets many, many times smallef. Look at all the fixes, additions, new gameplay added. That's how it's done. Not just delaying a large amount to rhe next patch.

But people keep buying SC, it's making bank while being a bit of a laughing stock in the gaming world. Sunk cost fallacy and FOMO is a big part. Earth 2 and lots of crypto is the same in that way. And before you argue its not ten years, because they had to 'build the studios from the ground up and harvest the logs and raw palladium for the workstations', that's from the 'Chairman' himself.

I'll get a base pack one day if there is more than one or two systems and they give up and fully shard like every other mmo has to due do physics. Or unreal5 (possibly happening to ToW). Or they add a damn space bulldozer. Until then, I'll watch the best funded and most beautiful gaming tranwreck in history from the sidelines.

P.s. One could write hours of this and I'm tired so can't dredge everything up for you, but this is what happens when dev takes decades
P.p.s 'watch sunk cost galaxy'
P.p.p.s sorry for my low effort mobile formatting and punctuation. Yes I am a lazy, tired asshole who has been busy working on patents when not crafting this shitposting for y'all
P.p.p.p.s WTT late production Vega 64 ref excellent undervolts, under 2k gaming hours massively undervolted


6ox7icw38ja31.jpg
 
1 system, ten years.
Sataball?
ToW (when you can't get FPS working on a horrible old FPS engine) is still nowhere to be found, two years after being a 'quick job for a 6 man team' that 'wouldn't take resources away from game development', after a failed playtest. It has now been (drumroll) outsourced to Turbulent, who is developing an increasingly large amount of the game. Of course that wouldn't take away any resources for development, would it?
Jesus tech/patch promises
OCS
SSOCS
Server 'mashing' going nowhere for years
'1000 player shards'
Cap Ships like BMM sold and still in dev/unreleased after 8 years, as the gameplay, backend and features needed aren't even greybox
Fully crewed large cap ships will exceed server player count limits if there are more than one currently
RIP economy balance
Game funded by ship sales = dead when it stops. They have no war chest. The alpha must go on
Flight model still being changed often
30-40% of features in major patches permanently delayed
Art everywhere but few greybox or features (breaks the codebase)
Massive tech debt
Chris basically NEVER says 'no, we can't do that'. Seriously go and look. Everything is possible in dreams.txt
Unplayable FPS/ship/AI desync usually
10-20fps isn't playable for fps now and was barely acceptable 20 years ago
Fps tied to server tick rate, yes a potato can be as fast as a 3090/6900
The plethora of gameplay breaking bugs, many of which are 5+ years old
Ageing graphics engine (once you see the plastic you'll never go back)
Terrible ship layout and space inefficiency
Assets and interior spaces laid out or designed with little care or thought sometimes
Stolen gimmicks from every other franchise
Spaghetti codebase, many of the OG devs are gone. New features bring old bugs often, if you're a dev you know what that means (7 levels of nested 'If statements' in one public screenshot of the code)
Features still being added in 'alpha'. Alpha now apparently doesn't mean feature complete
Most gameplay modes have severe bugs or issues (hence the 'my org does mining only now' posts)
Ships release like clockwork, gameplay modes barely touched
Feature and scope creep. Go read the starliner/transport dreams.txt Tony Zzzz wrote back in 2014 or so. Its an entire game in itself (this was also when I knew they would never finish).
Most of staff is art and marketing, few devs comparitively
Massive office acquisitions during WFH transition (tax write off/losses.exe)
The offshoot companies owned by the family, to funnel backer funding into which ended up mostly wasted (mocap studio, capture of talent screwed up, re-caps etc
Dodgy shell companies and the rest
500mil if you count Calders investments and loans to CIG which we only see UK filings for.
Oh yeah, don't forget to answer the call 2016, ladies and gentlemen. Squadron 54 is always current year+ 1-2 like server meshing.
No SQ54 gameplay for 2 years
SQ54 wouldn't take dev away from PTU but is blamed when stuff takes time and vice versa
It's an alpha (technically its not even alpha/feature complete) when any criticism is leveled
It's also a completed, released game(s) as a service according to court and the website
A new world having massive engine issues too (shares large parts of cryengine/lumber yard/'starengine' fork)
You'll notice most of the stuff on the reddit is screenshots and theorycrafting dreams.txt. You can't see the frame rate or the AI in a perpetual suicidal lemming mode/ship jittering/exploding or falling through the floor in a screenshot.
Collisions are broken likely due to them scaling a 3x3km Crysis map to 3000x3000km and having not enough precision
Some are convinced it's money laundering
Ramps, stairs, elevators, beds, ships etc are still deadly and or IEDs
50 player limit reduced to 40 (and part of the single system deleted to save IO and ram on server) for an event (engine/servers at their limits as usual)
The SC plebbit mods are cancer and the astroturfing and shilling has lot of budget, to drag new players in. It gets so bad you'll see new players shilling things they did that aren't even in the game. They don't pay for very good astroturfing.
The refunds sub is run by blue haired, trannycommie soyim goons, who actually censor/delete/shadowban more than the main sub or spectrum. All while astroturfing how bad the other side is at moderation. They push political agenda while claiming its against the rules with the expected reddit mod slant and are nasty PoS's, anyone who knows the truth of Weimar Germany knows their old tactics. Many there also cannot admit when SC does good things and love to hate it. Many also love the game concept and just want to see something work reliably, but are jaded by mismanagement or burned by promises and expressive pledge ships.


All up, with my harsh take aside, the game has serious potential. If they stopped now, kicked Chris and his family and their lawyer as far away as possible, then turned it into a sharded horror game on unreal5, they'd have a money printer. Or just focused on normal game dev procedure on a suitable engine. The ambience when not done over the top is insane. The detail for those who like it, is unrivalled. There are truly some magical things this game does that no other does or can do.
The game could be taken in so many magnificent paths with the largest dev budget ever. But it's not.
Why?

The same reason Chris Roberts had Microsoft step in and boot him off one of his most famous games, in order to get it finished after killing the budget multiple times.
The same reason he is quoted saying 'make that blue pixel green'.
The same reason many ships or things have had countless 'passes' while still being fundamentally broken
The same reason it looks great but much doesn't reliably work
The same reason for massive scope creep and a decade or more of impossible tech and engine debt

Mismanagement and petty levels of micromanagement in some areas. Chris has clearly a team of yes men, plus a lot of family on the payroll and is an ideas guy. He should be nowhere near management. Keep his often-brilliant creativity and poor grasp of physics the fuck away from any form of management, because if there is one thing that's 100% certain with the permanent delays and ten years of BS, is that it's a mismanaged clusterfuck and has been for years.
Go look at an update release for No Mans Sky, or War Thunder. Dev teams and budgets many, many times smallef. Look at all the fixes, additions, new gameplay added. That's how it's done. Not just delaying a large amount to rhe next patch.

But people keep buying SC, it's making bank while being a bit of a laughing stock in the gaming world. Sunk cost fallacy and FOMO is a big part. Earth 2 and lots of crypto is the same in that way. And before you argue its not ten years, because they had to 'build the studios from the ground up and harvest the logs and raw palladium for the workstations', that's from the 'Chairman' himself.

I'll get a base pack one day if there is more than one or two systems and they give up and fully shard like every other mmo has to due do physics. Or unreal5 (possibly happening to ToW). Or they add a damn space bulldozer. Until then, I'll watch the best funded and most beautiful gaming tranwreck in history from the sidelines.

P.s. One could write hours of this and I'm tired so can't dredge everything up for you, but this is what happens when dev takes decades
P.p.s 'watch sunk cost galaxy'
P.p.p.s sorry for my low effort mobile formatting and punctuation. Yes I am a lazy, tired asshole who has been busy working on patents when not crafting this shitposting for y'all
P.p.p.p.s WTT late production Vega 64 ref excellent undervolts, under 2k gaming hours massively undervolted


View attachment 415823
Just have to address one thing here - Im ignoring most of the post as its the same things that have been mentioned three dozen times in this thread already, and it is not anything new.
"It's also a completed, released game(s) as a service according to court and the website" - No, its not. Its Alpha all over the RSI website, before buying any ships, before launching the game, before installing the game, and many other locations. They dont hide what the game is at this point, and to insinuate anything otherwise is deceitful at best. Even buying physical goods on the website pops up the alpha warning and backing information screen.
 
Just have to address one thing here - Im ignoring most of the post as its the same things that have been mentioned three dozen times in this thread already, and it is not anything new.
"It's also a completed, released game(s) as a service according to court and the website" - No, its not. Its Alpha all over the RSI website, before buying any ships, before launching the game, before installing the game, and many other locations. They dont hide what the game is at this point, and to insinuate anything otherwise is deceitful at best. Even buying physical goods on the website pops up the alpha warning and backing information screen.
I think they didn't warn well at one point and they finally changed it to be plastered everywhere.
 
Now seriously, do you guys not find it troubling at all that it is 11/2015 and they have nothing to show of SQ42 to one of the biggest gaming magazines besides editor shots and marketing talk? A big and complex game that is supposed to come out in 2016 and they have nothing working to show of it. Is your devotion so blind that you can just brush away and justify any and all warning signs and come out with a positive justification for anything? Or do you just not care how much money, time and broken promises it will take to get it out? Can CIG seriously do no wrong in your eyes?
More years have passed since this post than from the start of the development to the day it had been written.
 
Bernie Madoff in shambles wondering why he never got into the video game industry
 
I looked that up a while back, it's eyerollingly bad.
There are ships that cost $250k for star atlas, last I checked. Heck, anything past the first wave of beginner ships costs over $2k. Then jumps to TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS.
 
Guys it doesn't matter I had a lot of fun telling people how rich Madoff was gonna make me, for hours on end. I got my money's worth even if I was still literally scammed.
 
I actually just reinstalled this again. I do it every few years to see updates.

The performance is so mind bogglingly bad, I just don't get it. I walked around some city for awhile and didn't find much of anything to really do or interact with.

Glad I only spent like $40 on this over 5 years ago lol.
 
Just have to address one thing here - Im ignoring most of the post as its the same things that have been mentioned three dozen times in this thread already, and it is not anything new.
"It's also a completed, released game(s) as a service according to court and the website" - No, its not. Its Alpha all over the RSI website, before buying any ships, before launching the game, before installing the game, and many other locations. They dont hide what the game is at this point, and to insinuate anything otherwise is deceitful at best. Even buying physical goods on the website pops up the alpha warning and backing information screen.
I'm pretty sure this used to be different and it wasn't so 'alpha warning'. But fair point. They only recently added the disclaimer on ships being work in progress, after losing an advertising case in the last half a year or so. I remember this large change as I followed the case as it was filed.
Secondly, it isn't even alpha technically as it's not feature complete.
Either way, I hope the assets are eventually ported to a more viable engine, scamengine is creaking at the seams and doesn't want any more features.

The bigger problem is that statements made by CR and CIG directly conflict with what the website says.
Go watch the old SC videos with Chris. Someone who did said he says 'no' to a proposed feature about 3x over years. Everything else (basically entire games of content) has been okayed.
 
Last edited:
That's now how SDLC works. You get feature complete at the end of the Alpha stage. You don't enter alpha feature complete.
I've seen quite a few discussions on this and there are two camps depending on the age of the definition, which I find hilarious.

In the olden days alpha was a game feature complete, you could play through it all but it had bugs or missing textures etc.
Using this metric SC is pre-alpha as it hardly has any of the myriads of promised gameplay features added.

The modern day out is what you have mentioned. This has changed in an age of eternal pre-release and rug pull scams.
 
The modern day out is what you have mentioned. This has changed in an age of eternal pre-release and rug pull scams.
It's been the "modern" (your word) definition for like 20 years at this point. No one I know (big and small studios, as well as solo devs working on indie games) uses any other workflow or definition. Most of the folks that use(d) it incorrectly came from waterfall shops, which thankfully are dead.
 
I dunno how they keep their programmers.
10 years - star citizen on your resume, not many are gonna hire you.

Any sane one would have jumped off the ship.
 
Last edited:
I've seen quite a few discussions on this and there are two camps depending on the age of the definition, which I find hilarious.

In the olden days alpha was a game feature complete, you could play through it all but it had bugs or missing textures etc.
Using this metric SC is pre-alpha as it hardly has any of the myriads of promised gameplay features added.

The modern day out is what you have mentioned. This has changed in an age of eternal pre-release and rug pull scams.
THen what would yu define a beta in the "old days"?
 
Generally first complete release. All features there or are least mostly there, lots of bugs and some features don’t work, but everything is “there” ish

At least in traditional development.
Missing textures and assets are common as well, where as beta is usually asset complete.
 
Generally first complete release. All features there or are least mostly there, lots of bugs and some features don’t work, but everything is “there” ish

At least in traditional development.
sorry but i dont understand teh difference between alpha and beta?

What Aireoth said is basically the same LOL
 
Alpha you can still ad new levels, ships, change look of whatever completely if you have to etc (so to speak)

Beta you don't change any of that anymore everything locked in place now just find bugs and squash them
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Elios
like this
The fact that this thread will be a decade old later this year and the discussion is whether or not the game is in the alpha stage yet really says everything. And this is just for the multiplayer portion, the single player game that was allegedly almost finished years ago is still completely MIA.
 
Honestly, I just come to this thread to laugh every year or two.

Maybe I'll buy it when it comes out of beta.
 
Back
Top