CIG did not set out to perpetrate a scam but once they stumbled into one decided “fuck” it and leaned in?
CIG did not set out to perpetrate a scam but found themselves holding a tiger by the tail and have no idea how to get out of this. So they are just pulling more and more money to forestall the day of reckoning.
CIG do not currently realize they are perpetrating a scam?
G0RF
Chris - Chris has told dozens of bald-faced lies over the last five years yet apologized for none and is untroubled by all of them. He believes himself entitled without check or balance to unlimited funds with no strings attached simply by virtue of his ambition. So stunted is his conscience that he is incapable of even rudimentary ethical arithmetic, as we’ve seen on multiple occasions:
“To one source who said “I felt like I was part of a con,” Roberts responded: “This is the statement that really makes my blood boil”. “I’ll put my 261 [employees], their passion and energy against the complaints of a few disgruntled ex-employees any day.
Jump Point:
Todd Papy, Design Director, F42: “I just don’t want to be selling something that we might not have in the game.”
Chris Roberts: “Sure. We aren’t selling something that won’t be in the game. We are going to have creatures on our planets. We’re going to have xenomorphs on wrecks, dangerous alien creatures on planets and so on, probably even a space whale / leviathan. Worlds need life and danger.”
“I’m always very perplexed by this,” Roberts responds, when I ask him how this deviation had happened. “We got everyone together and had a whole art summit in Austin in 2013. I thought we were all on the same page but I guess at some point we weren’t, because I started to hear back from the environment guys that ‘this thing doesn’t fit with what we’re doing.’ The communication wasn’t good, but it was also a problem because there wasn’t one person in charge of all of that.”
Chris aversion to anything resembling moral accountability is instinctive. Roberts berated detractors raising a ruckus about Star Marine even when he knew things had fallen apart with Illfonic, and when confronted by a journalist who knew how they fell apart, Roberts pulled the ol’ defense. He sees a good guy and genius looking back at him in the mirror and must always do so and anything that would ugly that perception gets the “You are dismissed” treatment so he can continue as he prefers.
How hilarious is it that even after the chastening of several hours of probing questions from Julian Benson that Roberts said:
“Where we’re at now, I’m much happier,” said Chris Roberts, posed the same question. “I feel more in control of the beast. At the beginning it’s like you’re on the back of a bucking bronco and you’re trying to stay on while getting it wrangled in the direction you want it to. Now I feel good.”
He said this even as he was setting in motion his next great train wreck with the Alpha 3.0 presentation at Gamescom 2016!
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Ortwin - Hollywood accounting legally (yet often unethically) hides profits to enrich ‘true’ stakeholders and deny non-privileged participants. Russian doll financial vehicles are but one of many tools at the disposal of such operators. I assume Ortwin would happily stomp on the spirit of the law if the letter of it gave him license to do so and that is exactly what Chris relies on him for.
Erin - Remember that tellingly abrupt moment in “Around the Verse #100”, as Erin Roberts is wrapping up his guided tour of the facilities. We’d seen Chris tour the lavishly, tackily furnished CIG LA in the prior ATV installment. This was at a time when the five-figure expresso machine had finally been confirmed and was much mocked by Derek, Goons and a few other places as “proof” that CIG was a Scam. We saw Erin engage in a tiny act of symbolic distancing in the abruptly tacked-on closer, which conspicuously began with a directed gesture at Foundry’s own modest little coffee machine in their spartan break room. The signal sent was ”Not me. Not us.” Erin knows Chris has steered the enterprise into dangerous territory and to the extent he can create distance from that, he has.
—
Between the four individuals holding so much organizational power, we see diverse positions on their business practices. What we don’t see and have never seen is real leadership. We don’t see personal accountability. What looks like a scam emerged naturally from the interplay of the dysfunctions and pathologies and since it’s gotten them this far, who would want to stop it?
It is a scam, but Chris doesn’t scam with the intent of scamming.
Chris has simply bit off more than he, or anyone, can chew. He wants to make Star Citizen. This is his dream game, his magnum opus - and many see his vision for the end-all be-all space sim as the greatest thing that could ever happen in the gaming industry and put their faith in him.
If he were successful it would be. I would buy it and so would everyone here, Derek included. If he delivered on every promise, every ship, every space martini - if he actually built the world he envisions then it might be the best game ever made.
But he won’t, because he can’t. Nobody can. The dream is too large, too ambitious, too demanding. You can’t model a universe that actually compares to the real universe. You may as well aspire to build the Matrix - at least that is only modeling one world.
It’s too much information for any server, any processor, or any graphics card to take. Star Citizen can be done, but it won’t be possible for another 50 years or so.
–——————————————
As the years plod on, his grand designs continue to churn in mediocrity. He is stressing the engine to its limit, spending resources hand over fist to achieve the vision in his head. The way he does this is to carefully construct microcosms of the game he wants to build. He shows us these: the sandworm, the pirates on the ship, the marketing blitz which pretends the game is complete. He makes these things and tries to extrapolate from there, getting 0.5% of what he wants before CryEngine shits itself and crashes.
“Small bites, small steps” he must tell himself - but those small steps are months which soon turn to years which soon turns to 6 years. The world is moving on without him and his vision. The faithful are losing faith, the money is slowing down, Star Citizen not being released has become the joke. Now he needs to start delivering if he wants to dispel the inevitable decline, and there’s nothing to deliver.
Chris needs to sell spaceships so he can keep the dream alive. He needs SQ42 to be a blockbuster smash success (it won’t) so that he gets even MORE resources to dump into Star Citizen.
It’s a scam, not because he wants to grift people of money, but because he cannot achieve this thing and doesn’t realize it.
He still genuinely believes that Wing Commander would’ve been a great movie with a bigger budget and more production time. Freelancer would have been the ultimate life-simulator-in-space if the publisher had just kept sending checks and being patient. None of it was his fault, none of it made him reconsider his choices. He remembers the horrible feeling of realizing that the jig was up and he’d blown it, and rather than scale down his big dreams to something his limited skills could achieve, he’s convinced that all he needs is to do is keep spending someone else’s money and keep pushing that day of reckoning further and further into the future: eventually he will bump into the success he feels he is owed, and everything will be perfect.
i think CIG is facing a new kind of problem.
A problem on promises, no im not talking about fulfilling those promises.
Im talking about promising more stuff. They have gotten to the point where they have pretty much promised everything.
a real life space simulator with immersive handcrafted procedural planets, A AI that can think for itself without using cheaty mechanics like finitive state machines.
Immersive base building experience with large scale ground warfare that is more realistic/arcadey than anything out there. space combat that is fought in single shard world that has multiple regions and which can support 1000’s of players fighting in freelancer/realistic enviroment. Obviously realism is big thing so if you get wounded during space combat a medic will perform surgical operation on you and its going to be more fidelitious minigame than surgeon simulator is. It doesnt end there you can also take care of wounded pets and after release you can give em cybernetic limbs. Not into space/land combat? not a problem theres always the sea, you can go boating and enjoy finding new species in the sea. If your not into fishing you can jump right in and visit one of underwater cities we have planned. Still not satisfied? take a immersive journey on the space train. You can also race the train or be a news broadcaster producing hit news pieces in the verse. Still not satisfied? How about slave trading hot chicks trough unknown wormholes that lead into new systems that haven’t been discovered yet. How about drink mixing in luxury yacht after you have traded some slaves. Obviously everything can/cant be earned ingame.
Feeling tired of star citizen yet? Try sq42 with its groundbreaking story that spans over 60 missions. Obviously its just the start there are 3 more sq42 coming.
sq42 can be replayed forever thanks to branching storyline it has. Its going to be a masterpiece on par with wing commander the movie. There is also numerous side missions you can enjoy. Or you could just observe AI’s serving in the ship to learn details on their live.
What else could you wish?
Just a small reminder,Chris flew to one of the studios (first class of course) after demanding one of the art teams set up a room full of art for him to go over.
He turned up incredibly late after having told everyone that anyone found to be leaving would be fired.
He came in,walked over to a table of printouts and ripped them into tiny pieces without having said a word to anyone,then left.
Source : my cousin,who’s been working on games for 9 years.
“we don’t know what Gary Oldman got paid and I see a lot of people on reddit talking about ‘oh you know maybe he did it for free’ bullshit, he did not do this for free“
“for people that are like ‘I don’t think this games ever coming out’ bullshit I mean like they’ve already hired professional actors to do this it’s not a scam people”
“if I’m asked the question ‘is CIG too big?’ I would have to say hell no like a resounding hell no they aren’t in fact make them bigger”
G0RF
He’s definitely been on a journey of discovery with these recent videos. But it’s clear from his use of code words like “playability” that he’s some Derpy Schart minion…
Scruffpuff
The hiring of professional actors for millions of dollars, before Chris even had the slightest idea of what this game would be, absolutely smacks of presumed success. The incredible arrogance he showed by making the assumption that the completion and subsequent huge success of this game was a foregone conclusion, despite his history of this exact failure over and over again, is what propels this into scam territory for me. This “hold my beer” act he pulled while subsequently faceplanting into a pile of horseshit is simultaneously hilarious and deplorable.
The constant attempts to break into movies are literally fucking hilarious, though. Thirsty and hilarious.
this is another DayZ. Great potential but is backed by a company which sees a timeframe of 20 years in the making as acceptable.
For how much money they have made on this game, you would figure they would be further along. That at least the game would run well. Forget adding the game mechanics and content, that should be the first thing the company aims for. It has been what, six or seven years now since development began, and they haven’t even polished the most basic principle of a game.
I feel sorry for the early backers and those who spent lots of $$$ on this game, because this is going to be another DayZ. A game with lots of potential but which will never be released.
redditors fascination and obsession with fake internet points is so pathetic. I love how downvoting and brigading are listed among the worst things D.Smart and his Goon Crew can do.
They dox and call names and make fun AND THEY DOWNVOTE US ILLEGULLY!
Mods should crack down on this sort of thing! in fact, just let me manually approve every post and comment.
Beet Wagon
I’ll never not love watching redditors cry and wail and beg for tougher moderation on their shitty subreddit out of fear of like… 8 fucking goons that occasionally roll through and make a stupid joke here and there. I hope they achieve it, I really do. Everyone else already sees that subreddit as a toxic hellhole, and imposing super harsh moderation standards will just kill any potential new traffic they’d get.
Guys like Vertisce and Redchris are advocating dosing their subreddit with cyanide to treat what amounts to a stubbed toe lmao
I think a more fitting analog would be:
Problem: Stubbed toe:
Solution:
Drink a lot of Alcohol to subdue pain
Hit Toe with a hammer to further numb pain receptors
Chop off toe
Cauterize the wound
Blame goons for your missing toe
Setting their home on fire
Blame Goons
Star Citizen is good
Sarsapariller
There’s a lot of smart tech people in here, is there some way we can do a rough order-of-magnitude estimation on the computing power which will be needed to run Star Citizen based from all the promised features and scope?
This is kind of an impossible question.
Simulation is all about abstraction. You could simulate every particle in a person’s body in order to have some kind of accurate medical gameplay. Or you could do Dwarf Fortress and have bone, skin, tissue, and nerve layers with some codified interactions between them and various damage types, and specific gameplay penalties when a layer is damaged. Or you could set health to “100” and give them packs that make it go up by 25 whenever they’re hit. You could even write the third option so poorly that it caused your computer to die. That is the Star Citizen way.
The best I can think is that Star Citizen gives each and every player a limitless dream of what they can do in the universe. Because Chris always says “yes” to every feature question asked - we can safely assume that any feature the human brain can conjure will be included in the game (that is if we assume he makes the game as promised.)
Because of this, we need only calculate the computational power of the human brain, and multiply by the number of backers.
As it happens, scientists attempted to replicate 1 second of human neurological power on a computer in 2013:
It took 82,944 processors 40 minutes to compute 1 second of human brain activity. If we convert to get a 1:1 time output, it would take roughly 200,000,000 processors to keep up with the dreams of a single player in real time. However we are all aware that these people do not have fully functioning brains, so let’s drop the required power by 75% to accurately model the simpler systems. That’s 50,000,000 processors to keep up with an actual cultist.
We can project that Robberts expects about a million players to play Star Citizen, but I’m sure he’s hoping to beat WoW and get numbers in excess of 15,000,000. A conservative 1,000,000 players would take:
50,000,000,000,000 processors to keep up with their dreams.
Wrong
Their dreams are largely derivative and relatable
Maybe account for 100x(brain) power, copying dreams where possible
Beer4theBeerGod
Star Citizen exists in its current state because there are consequences for failing. Crowd-funding is at its core a hedged bet on the part of the backers, and the developer gets all of the benefits and none of the penalties (so long as they don’t commit outright fraud). This also means that upping the ante is a viable solution when things go wrong; the developer still has no consequence for failing and the extra money means there’s a chance they might succeed. Actually it’s the only solution.
Meanwhile the backers end up divided into three groups. The first group has checked out and doesn’t care; they’re the ideal group because they don’t ask for anything and by the time they notice the money will be gone. The second group end up disenfranchised and demand refunds; give it to them and they go away. That leaves the third group, the gambling addicts who are constantly chasing the high of when they first discovered Star Citizen and know that the only way that can happen is if they buy more. This is the group that Chris is a veteran of exploiting, the dreamers who are constantly looking for an opportunity to spend more and find something new to dream about.
So you have a company with every reason to expand scope supported by a community desperate to do anything to make their dream happen. It’s phenomenal.
defense. He sees a good guy and genius looking back at him in the mirror and must always do so and anything that would ugly that perception gets the “You are dismissed” treatment so he can continue as he prefers.
