Antiochus
Member
A new overview article from the digital Forbes magazine on the ongoing saga of the infamous Star Citizen:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattpe...sed-300-millionbut-may-never-be-ready-to-play
A poll has been attached to this thread to detail the predictions members can make on the prognosis of this game, as of middle of 2019.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattpe...sed-300-millionbut-may-never-be-ready-to-play
What’s really rough is the current state of Star Citizen. The company Roberts cofounded, Cloud Imperium Games, has raised $288 million to bring the PC game to life along with its companion, an offline single-player action game called Squadron 42. Of this haul, $242 million has been contributed by about 1.1 million fans, who have either bought digital toys like the Kraken or given cash online. Excluding cryptocurrencies, that makes Star Citizen far and away the biggest crowdfunded project ever.
Rough playable modes—alphas, not betas—are used to raise hopes and illustrate work being done. And Roberts has enticed gamers with a steady stream of hype, including promising a vast, playable universe with “100 star systems.” But most of the money is gone, and the game is still far from finished. At the end of 2017, for example, Roberts was down to just $14 million in the bank. He has since raised more money. Those 100 star systems? He has not completed a single one. So far he has two mostly finished planets, nine moons and an asteroid.
This is not fraud—Roberts really is working on a game—but it is incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale. The heedless waste is fueled by easy money raised through crowdfunding, a Wild West territory nearly free of regulators and rules. Creatives are in charge here, not profit-driven bean counters or deadline-enforcing suits. Federal bureaucrats and state lawyers have intervened only in a few egregious situations where there was little effort to make good and a lot of the money was pocketed by the promoters. Many high-profile crowdfunded projects, like the Pebble smartwatch ($43.4 million raised) and the Ouya video game console ($8.6 million), have failed miserably.
But what Roberts has stirred up does seem crazy. Star Citizen seems destined to be the most expensive video game ever made—and it might never be finished. To keep funding it and the 537 employees Cloud Imperium has working in five offices around the world, Roberts constantly needs to raise more money because he is constantly burning through cash.
The initial 2012 crowdfunding campaign was successful, but it turned out that $6.2 million wasn’t nearly enough to feed Roberts’ ambitions. But Roberts and Gardiner came up with an ingenious way to keep raising funds: They would sell spaceships—hundreds of thousands of them.
“[The] marketing of the game has been an objective success, as we’re the most crowdfunded anything, [and it] was overseen by Sandi,” Roberts says.
To supercharge the money that Gardiner was raising, Roberts brought in a big outside investor for the first time last fall. Cloud Imperium received $46 million from Clive Calder, the South African billionaire behind Jive Records, and his son, Keith. The funds are meant for—what else?—more marketing.
When asked what it was like to work at Cloud Imperium, one former senior game maker who left in 2018 messaged a link to the Spinal Tapmovie scene with an amplifier volume knob turned to 11. Former employees say Roberts gets involved in the smallest details and pushes huge and complex investments in areas that are not worth the effort. At one point, one of the company’s senior graphics engineers was ordered by Roberts to spend months, through several iterations, getting the visual effects of the ship shields just right. In addition, workers have had to spend weeks on end making demos so that Cloud Imperium can keep selling spaceships—and raising more money.
Before David Jennison quit as Cloud Imperium’s lead character artist in 2015, he wrote a letter to human resources—it leaked on the internet—trying to explain why he completed only five characters in 17 months. One problem, Jennison said, was that Roberts frequently reversed approvals for the characters he was working on. “All the decisions for the character pipeline and approach had been made by Roberts,” Jennison wrote. “It became clear that this was a companywide pattern—CR dictates all.”
A company spokesman retorts: “It does say ‘Chris Roberts’ on the box, so one would naturally expect him to be quite involved with decision-making.”
Cloud Imperium says its policy of granting refunds to fans who make requests within 30 days is fair, adding that the company is being transparent about its game development. Even though not a single one of the 100 promised star systems has been finished, Roberts says Cloud Imperium has built tools that will expedite the building of future planets and moons, and claims the first star system will be the largest and most complex. For now, fans pay $45 for an introductory ship and access to what has been built, and the backers have something in their hands. Calling it a game is a stretch, but that doesn’t stop Roberts.
“Star Citizen is a playable game,” Roberts insists. “It has more functionality and content than a lot of finished games.” He adds that 40,000 people played the game together online over a recent week and that criticism of Cloud Imperium’s development work is fueled by online trolls. There are many believers. “I have complete faith,” says Dan Paulsen, a backer of Star Citizen since 2016. “If there’s a delay, it’s for a good reason. It’s because they want it to be a better project.
A poll has been attached to this thread to detail the predictions members can make on the prognosis of this game, as of middle of 2019.
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