Star Citizen is a scam.
I’d be more-generous and just call it a wildly mismanaged development process that ran out of control.
This is not to imply that one should throw more money into the hole, mind.
Star Citizen is a scam.
I’d be more-generous and just call it a wildly mismanaged development process that ran out of control.
This is not to imply that one should throw more money into the hole, mind.
swordgeek@lemmy.ca 11 hours ago
It’s possible that it wasn’t a scam to begin with.
But now? Now it’s impossible for even the most dewey-eyed dreamer to see it as anything less than a deliberate hustle, perpetrated by amoral grifters.
tal@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
I really don’t think that it’s all that abnormal, aside from the funding structure.
Lots of video games — including even some pretty successful ones — have dev studios that screw up the scope when they estimate what they can accomplish with their financial and hardware budget.
The problem is that if you’re a video game developer and you look at the state of your game and you know that it doesn’t meet up with what you’re hoping to make, you can maybe go to the publisher and say “we screwed up and need more money”. And the publisher — who is familiar with the industry and has the ability to actually come in and take a look at what’s going on with your development process and has bean-counters whose job is to make a cold, clear-eyed call on this — is one entity who is hopefully is going to make an objective call.
But with Star Citizen, that structure doesn’t exist. The developer can just keep go begging for more money.
Take Daikatana: “The aim was for the company to create games that catered to their creative tastes without excessive publisher interference, which had constrained both Romero and Hall too much in the past.”
Or Duke Nukem Forever: “Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.” That was self-funded, so there wasn’t some outside party saying “no more”.
The problem is that the developer knows perfectly well that the game doesn’t meet the kind of standard that they’d hoped for and which they’d gotten player expecting, but they aren’t willing to cut their losses and just wrap things up (which in Duke Nukem Forever’s case, happened when they exhausted their capital, because employees aren’t gonna work without pay).
But in Star Citizen’s case, even that brake doesn’t exist. They aren’t using their capital. They’re using player capital that they got in exchange for promises, and I don’t think that players are nearly as good as an outside publisher at performing cold, hard, objective analysis of the development process. CIG dug themselves into a deep hole. Once they’re in that hole, there’s not really a good way out. If they just stop development at any given point, they aren’t going to have something that players are happy with. The only route they have out, to not fail, is to make more promises, try to get more money, and somehow try to develop their way to a successful game. So they’re gonna keep doing that until all of the players cut them off, which can take a long time. A publisher would say “you blew through numerous deadlines in the existing development process, and I don’t think that you’re a good investment”, or said “no more money unless you give me a hard, short timeline for wrapping this up”. I think that they knew pretty well that there was no point where they could wrap things up in a handful of months and meet player expectations, so their choice was always “fail” or “keep kicking the can down the road in hopes that they could fix things”.