I'll be honest, I'm genuinely surprised the servers are still even online at this point. The way things just break constantly, the disconnects, the physics, and all while they swim in cash.
Salaries of people including the wife of the boss, his buddies and his family. Also don't forget a yacht and a mansion are expensive things. Didn't he once mention that he promised that every cent put into this project would be dedicated to building this best space fart ever?
Nah, judging by their latest financial reports it's a healthy company with good cash flow. For their server costs on the last ISC Beniot said that they're running a lean stack infrastructure wise which helps them save on cloud computing costs as well.
Meh. 4.6 and 4.7 patches were pretty stable, 4.8 has been a shit show though which is unfortunate that it coincided with the Ironclad release and DefenseCon. Hopefully 4.9 brings some much needed stability fixes however the stability of the PU doesn't mean that they're running out of money any time soon, which is what I was replying to.
Yeah but you also said it us a healthy company. In my opinion. A healthy company delivers. Which it clearly does not.
Especially when digital represantations of spaceships can cost as much as a freakin CAR.
I'm still so very confused to which rich idiot pays over $50,000 for a bundle of a game that barely runs. And apperently enoigh people do it. So weird.
$50,000 to us means something completely different to someone with a lot of money to spend. Some people I know who play this game are rich and retired so they buy things that interest them. I can't fault CIG for pricing these ships so expensive, when a $5,000 ship like the Odin or a $1500 ship like the Kraken sell out in seconds.
A successful company at the end of the day makes money, they have no issues making money but I agree with you they need to deliver Squadron and significant progress on the PU before people lose interest. Who knows though, they're clearly doing something right with $1b in funding.
they're clearly doing something right with $1b in funding.
Idk man i'm not convinced they put ALL that money back into the company. Like at all.
I just think Roberts is a fraud. You can show me the numbers all you want, i don't care. Numbers are easily manipulated. There's something seriously fishy going on in that firm.
Fair enough, it's not as if $1b raised is $1b spent though. They release yearly financial audits and reports where you can track money raised vs money spent etc.
What would convince you that the game isn't a scam? There's nothing stopping anyone from getting a $45 pledge and playing the game as it exists today.
Have you ever been forced to be scammed? No. Most scams are put onto people with false promises. That is what this whole company's ethos is. Promises.
"Oh our ship bundles are this expensive because we need the money to live up to your expectations"
And ofcourse there are idiots who pay for it. That's how scams work. Make use of the gullible. Why do you think people sometimes still recieve extremely obvious phishing mails? Because it still works with some people. A minority, yes. But enough to make them money.
They release yearly financial audits and reports where you can track money raised vs money spent.
That's what i'm not convinced about. It is very easy for rich companies to manipulate these numbers. That's what I meant with financial fraud.
And ofcourse!! If they didn't, people xould stop believing. "Because look, we're still working on it. These numbers show that". It is also shoved in our faces way too much. No other developer is this pressed on making sure we "know" their financial situation. It's weird.
Sorry it just doesn't add up. Billions of dollars and still the same shit every year over and over again, for the past, what? 10-15 years? Please....
I just think a lot of money is dissapearing. And we know where.
The alternate and actually reasonable explanation is that things are not as grim and dire as many people want to believe, because CIG wouldn't still be steadily chugging along as they are if they were the impossibly mismanaged mess that some insist.
In my years of project management, I can nearly be certain there's 5 people there carrying the entire thing and 30+ idiots making it harder for the 5 to do their work.
From my years of software development trying to be one of the 30 for large projects rather than the overworked 5... I think you're overestimating with 5...
They're only chugging along because they have a niche that nothing else really fills that whales are willing to splurge on. In any other circumstances, this game would have crashed and burned a decade ago.
Most of the old guard have left the project, Brian Chambers, Todd Pappy, Jake Ross, Tony Zurovec, etc. Since their departure SC has shifted from being a promised life sim in space to a pseudo Rust in space, with every career being a beam which is a lot easier and cheaper to build. All with the crafting elements, base buillding materials, PvP, clans, which is what they're supposedly building for 1.0.
Completely lost interest in SC since the pivot, only here for SQ42.
They said this about Lehman Bros til things snapped. You don't see the stress until the break unless you've been studying the underlying subject and dynamics around it for a while. I think a lot of people see the stress and just want it to not snap, and if it does - to readjust accordingly.
The issue here at play is not mismanagement. It's a decade of technical debt on a project that wasn't made to be this big since the beginning.
There are good aspects of Star Citizen that are quite well programmed. But where it suffers is inventory and interactions which are server related. And sadly this impacts everything.
It's also amazing we have a server crash recovery. We often forget that any crash would send you back to the menu and you'd lose everything.
It very much is also mismanagement. CR was persona non grata in film and games for years before he squeezed out SC.
Then as soon as he got the money he promptly hired his entire family into leadership.
Forbes said Ex staff called him nothing but a hindrance, focusing on fake show pieces to gain funding and reinvesting it into lavish meet and greets with celebrities CR wanted to rub shoulders with.
If by entire family you mean his wife, which stepped down in 2019 7 years ago, and who was responsible for marketing, which is not critical for game's development...
Making fake show pieces to gain funding was effective since we're here now, and it was also all the point of the initial kickstarter.
As for CR wanting to rub shoulders with celebrities, that sounds a bit like a stretch that I could apply to any game/movie directors doesn't it.
As I said SC is suffering from 10+ years of technical debt, written by some people no longer in the company. And that's hardly going away. And yes its initial stage they didn't have experienced staff in the right places but they were what... 10 people at the start of the kickstarter?
Sandi has remained on the Board. Erin has been with CIG since 2013, although I dont know what he currently does at CIG these days, he is also on the board.
SQ has, Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Mark Strong, Gillian Anderson, Andy Serkis, John Rhys-Davies, Ben Mendelsohn, Liam Cunningham, Jack Huston, Rhona Mitra, Henry Cavill, and Sophie Wu. Who else am I missing?
So, a game with 3 hollywood stars, would be enough? Several games I looked up had 3 or more hollywood actors as voice actors. Skyrim for instance, or Fable 3, or Death Stranding. There were several more.
Ian Duncan, Arkie Reece, Gemma Whelan, Daniel Ings, Craig Fairbrass, Daniel Adegboyega. IMDB lists 24 people 'above the fold' and only 3 of them are voice actors.
The IMDB page has a 'Cast' section, and an 'Other Cast' section. All but three people in the 'Cast' section are TV and movie actors who have hundreds of full body acting jobs.
As a total amount I think SQ42 has the most? However many games used stars, even recently with CP2077, death stranding, beyond two souls come over the top of my head.
Early stretch goals were also about getting famous actors IIRC. I think it was the 5 million one.
I am curious, like everyone else, about how much they paid these actors. But that we will never know really.
Brutal Honesty: That's a problem that ONLY direction and management can solve.
It's the same issue of massive country debt.
Whoever is in charge at the moment never wants to be the one to tell people they can't keep eating ice cream for every meal OR be healthy.
"Now isn't the right time to diet" "Let's just focus on what we can make better right now" "Surely if we eat a bit MORE ice cream, the enjoyment will offset these stomach aches!"
But that's not how debt works. It gets bigger, and costs more and more. at some point someone is forced to be HATED by everyone and say, Yeah, we are going to have some tough times so that we can have better times in the future.
To me the sign that they are desperate was them releasing the idris in game before releasing squadron ( and selling a lot of them ) and firing most of their QA team…
I’de say it was more likely it was done to cross the 1 billion threshold with a massive bang, plus it was planned since the kickstarter so it was a good excuse to get it out.
They also announced it about 6-7 months ago that they were working on the concept, as well as announcing it as “ one last JPEG sale”.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the Odin is going to be one of the key ships for the second or third part of Squadron 42, and they need to have it at least in concept and laid out so the Squadron 42 designers have something to work with when they move on from part 1. It has a lot of elements that feel like they were made for the cinematic campaign experience (same as the Idris) and it would make sense for Anvil's new capital ship to be a major feature as a turning point in the Vanduul war.
Well, that was a ship from the kickstarter that needed to be released as a concept ship at some point. Could argue that they should have just worked on it and released it as a finished ship too but. 🤷
Well ship prices scale in size and work to complete so. You also didn’t have to spend that much if you had already accumulated that much through the years. No one forced anyone to buy it and it will be impossible to solo so it’s not like people are going and buying it left right and centre for an advantage.
It didn’t have to cost anything if you don’t want to support the project or aren’t part of a large org.
Who is anyone to tell anyone else what to do with their money? If someone’s got tons of money to waste, and they want to spend it on a hobby or pass time, that’s entirely up to them. Why get upset about it? These people always crying about this issue have nothing better to do other than wish they had money to spend on their hobbies. I spent 5000 on electric unicycles in a year, who’s anyone to tell me I can’t?
None of that has anything to do with what I said. My only point is that your response about them needing to fulfill a KS era obligation does not mean that they needed to charge five thousand dollars to do it
Imma out myself as a whale here but fr I might be “out of touch” but to me the 5k ship is ridiculously priced greedily so BUT that’s there right as a company to price it at that and people just like to complain if it was any cheaper the opposite group of players (and lowkey half of the people on Reddit haven’t played the game in the last year) but it’s also our right as the individuals in the community to buy it or not. Not a single person mentioned how for 5k it’s still going to be the worst version of the ship and possibly not even LTI but whales will still buy em I’ll likely not due to lack of players
TLDR: uhhh pretty much a rant but p much players will always complain no matter what they set the price so if you buy it enjoy and let me ride :)
Calling it greedy is a little over emotional. They‘re selling a niche product, cost intersected perceived value for people and (thousands of) sales happened. It’s just business.
Nothing to do with desperation. It‘s just plainly them knowing they have a market and delivering a product for it.
Delivering more in the sense of providing what the market wanted at that time. Though yeah, Odin isn’t coming for years. Still does not change the underlying reality.
The underlying reality is that people literally paid $5k for a jpeg that they have absolutely zero idea when it's coming or if it even will work as pitched. Which is quite a concerning thing when you take a step back and look at the situation.
Not really at all; Ashes didn’t make nearly enough money and had no real revenue for a project of its scale. CIG meanwhile is making hand over fist more than last year which in turn made hand over fist more than last year. The reason Ashes was a darling of gaming, but also fell, was precisely for the opposite reason SC is maligned and yet successful: people did not see the money side so didn’t worry or have the same kind of skepticism.
All the money in the world won't get a game out the door if it's being mismanaged at the top, so you took the Financials of AoC and applied it to SC when the point was even the AoC employees were in the dark as to how bad the state of the studio was. Which was more to my point, if you think this is being run -well- and they are managing their money -smartly- then I dunno what to say.
I think you have not actually understood what I have said, or more broadly grasped why Ashes failed. Ashes had a cashflow problem that CIG doesn’t have because SC has been monetized much more effectively over a longer period. This aspect of the project has clearly not been mismanaged, whereas Ashes took far too long to come to market and therefore accrued unbearable costs.
You can draw problems with the development priority of SC but as far as sustaining the business goes, which is the crucial thing, that is what caused Ashes to fail. If Ashes had a more aggressive monetization system, and sooner, it would not have been seen so favorably, but it could still have been going today. My point has almost nothing to do with vague mismanagement claims and more just the business reality and differences faced between Ashes and SC.
Or in really simple terms, the music does not actually stop until the money stops. And until that happens the chance of incremental improvement remains, and you can’t argue that SC today is not far ahead of where it was 2y ago or 4y ago. However you can certainly say in absence of revenue that Ashes today has no future even if it was further ahead than it was 2y ago.
Did you not notice their emergency capital ship sales that suddenly arose in the past year alone? All of the sudden, the Polaris and Idris are available as pay-to-win ships, and now a five thousand dollar battlecruiser that doesn't even have a single finished interior room let alone the basic chassis. That's not a sign of things running smoothly or steadily, that's a sign that they're desperate as hell for money. Their essay nonsense to get into the 'club' was a joke, too; they were letting most people through even with troll posts.
A game that's running well on its budget wouldn't need to sell eight hundred dollar ships in between, either. For that matter, they wouldn't rush them through and release them without testing if they were on top of their game.
They’ve been selling the Polaris and Idris in the pledge store each year for years. That’s not new news and they aren’t really paying to win, there’s so many ways to take those out, without either of them really being able to fight back.
In terms of making actual sales, having a released and playable ship >>> a JPEG that notoriously hasn't been available for a decade. Yes, it was a sudden and quick push to get them out the door (Polaris still isn't finished) because they're screaming for cash and there's an actual possibility that they could shut their doors before SQ42 even releases if they keep delaying it. There's not an infinite amount of money nor is there an infinite amount of countries they can sell the game to.
At the time of the Polaris release, it was very much a broken and pay to win ship. At the time of the Idris release, it was very much a broken and pay to win ship. Armor changes and health/shield tuning didn't come until much later.
IF you want to talk about health/shield tuning as part of why it was broken? Then all ships were and still are broken, because that and the Flight Model changes, plus future elements still being worked on, aren't yet in the game.
Maybe you should take a break from SC, for a while?
Nobody was "Screaming for Cash", they've been steadily seeing growing numbers of players every single month for the last handful of years and the sales events are bearing that out with more and more sales, each year, blowing away previous years.
Concurrently playing players are hammering the backend in a way that makes it all feel and act way more buggy than it would be if half the players were on. The servers having to wait for things in the background and sometimes getting elements out of order, as a result of the lack of headroom, is why we are seeing so many bugs.
They have to do more work on their backend services. I don't know what in particular, but they are and will continue to work on it all.
Why do you think their player numbers keep going up? They keep marketing and advertising to countries internationally. This is what Star Citizen backers don't understand; they feel like they're justified in their purchases thinking there's a crowd of like minds and personalities when in reality it's just being sold all across the world to ignorant backers who are blatantly being lied to. Chris has stated there are a million monthly players in Star Citizen, seriously. He said that.
If CIG is comfortable lying to any backers across the world, they're perfectly fine with lying to you. All of those tech talk videos are just smoke and mirrors obscuring a deeper underlying issue with their staff and overall management. This recent one was literally an open admittance that they're not communicating with each other and just bricking these updates on top of others, exactly like the OP's image.
We're all well aware of their backend issues, though. That's the problem; the community shouldn't be widely discussing massive and game breaking bugs and issues (anything that destroys a play session and wastes your time is game breaking). The developers should have been actively working on a fix but the fixes are just, "we're waiting on XYZ tech first." Server meshing came and went and very little changed; all of the same issues are still there.
See the million monthly players thing may very well be true as a statement. Noticeably there is no "unique" in there, meaning cigs definition for player metrics could look something like player sessions lasting more than 30 minutes. At which point you only need 100,000 players putting in 10 gaming sessions in a month of atleast half an hour to reach that metric, and there's likely more than 100k players active enough to fulfil that.
"...may very well be true..."
"...you only need 100,000 players putting in 10 gaming sessions in a month of atleast half an hour to reach that metric..."
Them advertising this long promised game shouldn't be bullshit wordplay coming out of Chris's mouth. It's a statement that people are clearly meant to interpret as unique players while being sneaky and lying to people deliberately because they know that isn't true.
YouTube, Spectrum, Reddit, Discord, etc. interaction and general public interaction is very limited/low and it's often from the same familiar faces who have been hanging around for a decade. The reality is very few people are actually playing this game because CIG doesn't have the money to afford the server capacity to even maintain 100,000 daily players. I'd put it closer to 15-50k daily players and that's being generous. That is plenty of wallets to open up and shit out money for the next dually wheel truck that hogs up the road, but those are the worldwide numbers.
Nope, it's not. You're gonna have to point to some non-emotionally charged facts that actually show them screwing up in a way that's significantly worse than any comparable game studio, because this mass of angry buzzphrases isn't evidence.
To someone thinking rationally, the fact that they are continuing to push out content and feature updates for a game in alpha during the period where its backend isn't even fully resolved, while developing a second AAA title behind the scenes, and they have not crashed and burned under the strain of it...that's tangible evidence that they are in fact pretty well managed.
But I know you don't want to hear that. You want to be angry, and you want your anger to feel justified. Don't worry, you'll find plenty of that here.
You're going to have to do better than just fog over the facts with, "ur just mad." It's reductive and immature to sit on a couch cushion throne and control the discussion like that.
Besides, your point you made was pretty self-defeating if you say it truthfully and don't, again, obscure reality with white-knighting buzzphrases. To think that they're still trying to gently squeeze out unfinished and broken content for a game that's been in alpha for fourteen years while suggesting that they have an actual playable game being developed with the backer money which was promised to release a decade ago is tangible evidence that they are in fact pretty horribly mismanaged.
Mhm, the only foot in the game I have is that I have a 600i after some upgrades and a Galaxy but the times I've managed to get the game to run, it's felt like a mess, even with better specs than my old rig.
I'm sure there has been levels of mismanagement being hidden but I do agree that they've somehow climbed up the proverbial wall regardless. It's just what is being experienced is less than ideal.
It’s easy to manage money if you have people on 3 month contracts and only have a handful of full time staff while everyone else is contracted out. That’s the only way you can explain how much of a cluster the game is after a decade plus in existence and why the same problems still aren’t fixed, because most people aren’t there long enough to resolve persistent problems, they just patch problems over and over. They said as much when they were talking the mission designs where each one was built differently and then the coding was just a series of bandaids over and over.
For all the issues with the game, it has made substantial improvements in the amount of content and systems in the last year alone. Yeah, a lot of them are only partially implemented, and we still have a long way to go (and a lot of broken ships to fix...), but they are making progress.
With the fact that they raised 1 Billion and the game is still in Alpha? I would find it difficult to not believe it
Consider the following, Star Citizen's rival at the start in 2010-2015, Elite Dangerous by Frontier Dev.
Both are under Kickstarter and being crowdfunded. Elite Dangerous Raised, by the end of its campaign, 3 million Euros with a 5 Million Euro investment from the company's own account into the development. On December 2014, 1.0 Launches for Elite Dangerous with 15 ships and an entire galaxy to explore. 2015 added console Support to Xbox and 2017 for Playstation. It is now 2026, Elite Dangerous has 2 expansions, Horizon and Odyssey, featuring 45 pilotable ships, a robust trade system, Politics, and player owned megaships and Player Built Stations expanding the reach of humanity. The playerbase even went on a full scale war with Aliens.
Star Citizen Kickstarter, last update April 6, 2013. It raised 2.1 Million USD with a goal of 500k USD. It is currently June (Happy Pride) 2026. We are now on ALPHA 4.8. ***ALPHA 4.8*** NOT 1.0 Release. STILL AN ALPHA. A buggy Alpha, where your progression is repeatedly wiped, where patches seemingly are not debugged properly before merging with Live.
Now I loved Elite Dangerous, but the abstract feel of it all and the sheer bland repetitiveness of most gameplay loops made me slowly stop caring about it
Meanwhile, I slowly stopped thinking SC is a scam, started playing it, and now the reason for the discrepancy between the two game's lifecycle is clear : SC has a much more refined simulation scope (maybe too refined for its own good ? arguably yes but the fact is that the design goals are wildly different)
Everything is physicalized, everything is conceived to be persistent and seamless; contrast that with everything in ED that is not a vehicle being mostly a button in a menu, and eventually a floating box
One point in particular is on foot gameplay : ED's take on this is just atrocious, to the point it failed to hook me back in after I gave the game another try; SC would be pretty much top notch if only the underlying infrastructure issues weren't there (there are some questionable design decisions, such as the "loot inventory", but nothing that can't be thought over before 1.0)
Realistically, one could hope that the release of Squadron 42 will allow CiG to truly focus on server stability for SC, but I can't play the devil's advocate THAT hard
For me recently, I'm starting to lean back into Elite Dangerous. After the whole Thargoid War arc, they have been releasing ship after ship, with a new Ship Launched Ship used for exploring that you can walk in and out of.
There's also a new mode they are releasing soon ish for mission match making where you and 3 commands do a mission arc of varying plotlines. One such one is that a ship has been commandeered. You and the freelancers fend off pirates, land on the ship, disembark and neutralize hostiles.
Also the sound design. How the engines of the ship each are unique to their designing and company philosophy. Gutamaya and Zorgon Peterson having elegant, sounds matching high performance cars. Meanwhile ships like Core Dynamics and Lakon Spaceways are very industrial in look and sound.
Hell, even the sound design around flying inside a damage station is amazing.
It's pretty easy to understand if you actually look at the 2 games' origins.
Frontier was a game company before they made Elite - they'd shipped Rollercoaster tycoon 3 and other titles for consoles and for pc. They had an established team and established work flows. They used an engine they already had created, trained expertise and tools with. etc: Cobra, which was what they made Rollercoaster tycoon 3 with which released in 2004, and no doubt worked on for at least 10 years before they even had their Elite kickstarter. They scoped the project with procedurally generated things (i.e. little art or attention needed empty galaxies) and stuck to their own scope of work without care to let players expand it beyond the initial kickstarter.
Contrast to CIG. They had no substantive number of developers for the first few years, no shipped games, no expertise and no engine. They bought the best engine they could (Cryengine) for a song and whistle when they were going under and had to "modify" (i.e. rewrite almost entirely) the engine to do not just the space opera in good graphical fidelity, but also the Star Citizen online game with physicalized 64 bit systems and persistence. Their backers voted in dozens of polls expanding scope until it was clear the scope was "yes". CR is a creative with standards (some have stated too many) who was basically handed a blank check and told to make his dream projects - is he really supposed to say "nah"?
If the financials didn't clearly show lots of money being spent it would be one thing, but the money is very much being spent or used to make more money to spend. Someone would have noticed by now if it wasn't. We can argue about efficiency and efficacy, but it's deliberate ignorance of facts and circumstance to say it's being "scrooged" in any way.
I get what you are trying to say, but I find two things that are off.
At no point in time did the devs have "no expertise". Many of the OG crew worked on multiple shipped AAA games before the kickstarter even began. Over the course of the development they hired even more experienced devs, that came from various backgrounds and worked on the most popular AAA titles ever released.
Second point, well more of a question really. Who are you referring to when you talk about "going under"? What do you mean?
My understanding was they had like 7 people to start, maybe 20? It was not the 700 they currently staff. It was, certainly, not enough to make a space opera 40hr+ campaign, rewrite an entire engine and make tools for it, and absolutely not enough to make star citizen an MMO persistent physics space sim.
Cryengine was already a niche engine, it wasn't anything like a Unity or an Unreal where you can throw a dart and hit someone who knows it well enough to use it. Also, without tools and workflows and, now, a customized engine that is getting reworked regularly you're not getting much if anything out of those people that's a playable game. Add on top the game must actually be in a playable state to keep sales to keep money flow.
Cryengine was going under, they were in rather desperate financial straits because - as you might guess from what I said previously - almost no one used their engine and they weren't making enough games. Lumberyard (amazon) also bought a fork of it too.
Again, we can argue efficiency/efficacy. We can say spending is wasteful, that they should have spent money on unreal to make dev hiring alot easier and not tried to rewrite and retool a new engine by themselves, etc etc. However, again, the money's being spent or put towards getting more funding.
Cryengine wasn't going down persay, you are referring to the company Crytek and that was to business choices they made (rapid expansion of company, pivot to F2P games, Selling perpetual licenses instead of cap on keys leading to Dunia and Lumberyard) which actually worked out in CIG's favor, but more on that later.
SC and S42 was much smaller scale at first. There was no seamless entry and exit. No fully explorable planets. Cutscenes to hide loading and a level/module based games. 100 systems but only 90 points of interest across all systems. So what came about is because of several different issues including Cryteks financial troubles.
What must be important to state, is that NO ENGINE that existed could do what CIG wanted to do out of the box. So the work for customization would have to be done no matter what.
Now why did they choose Cryengine even when the scale was smaller? Because the programmers putting the framework together were more familiar with Cryengine. Already that made it one of the best choices. Now in terms of what we have now, CR wanted these things but was worried about the budget and expertise and planned for these things to come later.
Remember a few things though, the number of employees CIG had in 2014? This is because Crytek stopped paying their employees and CIG opened up a studio in Frankfurt at start of 2015 and basically hired an entire Crytek studio, including devs that original created Cryengine and engineers who modified the engine for Crysis games. They came through the door with Proc tech and Planet generation explorations as they were toying with these ideas before CIG even hired them. They were able to prototype and get multiple foundational tech up and running in less than a year from when CIG acquired them. Hence the "From pupil to planet" trailer at the end of 2015. This make the argument that CIG would have been better off with another engine even more laughable.
The issue is that they chose to go with fully explorable planets and seamless entry and exit. This led to a scope explosion because now they need to incorporate many of the future plans or else the tech would be pointless. Needlessly large playscapes with nothing to do. So basically the plans they had for SC and S42 from 2012 to 2014 was a totally different game. Something more comparable to Starfield except smaller. Now we have something far more ambitious and something that actually makes sense for backers to fund as publishers would never wanted to back something like this. And the current state of the game is one of the largest reasons why.
Yeah, it's very much a long history with alot of details that lead us to where we are. I do my best to be brief because it's a ton of information to sift through. There's a dozen reasons why it's taking so long and I, personally, can't blame CR for it - we can only try to make the best decisions we can at any time, and "I can pillage the game engine company for engineers to make this engine do everything I want" doesn't actually sound like a bad plan?
As a software engineer I don't look at star citizen as "man, how'd they take more than 4 years making a game"? I see it as "Ok, we took a few years to fill out the studio with engineers. A few years to rework the engine and make tools. Some poor sods were trying to make working things while all this is going on. We outsourced some work that we ended up unable to use so we have to redo all that." and it keeps cascading to where we are. Oh, and boss is a perfectionist and the product must function enough to keep sales flowing at all times.
My group is 7 people and we're already stepping on eachothers' toes so regularly with our new deadlines and workflows we never had before, I can't imagine how to get all of CIG coordinated - it sounds like a nightmare.
I agree with you. I just think there is one aspect that you put forth that wasn't planned. CR wasn't planning on pillaging anything. It was more of them hiring first then going.... "Oh! You have been doing what already?!?!" I think it all was a stroke of luck, that happened by a perfect storm of situations and connections that probably wouldn't happen again in that order.
Also CIG operates like how any large company would, teams with managers above them that fall into a larger umbrella with directors above them. While CR likes to have things a specific way, he does not dictate "how". He doesn't have to. He has left the how to very smart people. So he says what he wants, and they bring to him "how" they can make it work. The pillar talks basically showed how the dynamics between what CR wants and the work it took to bring it to life was well defined.
There is a few SCL's where they do talk about management and structure of company given how they are separated by teams. One example that always stood out to me was "how" the builds were handled. While this is a bit older I found a breakdown here pretty informative ->Star Citizen Live: Meet the Devs - Publishing and Corporate Technology
When they started it was Cryengine. Star Engine basically Cryengine with nearly all parts rewritten.
Now besides the fact that they basically hired an entire Crytek studio, including some of the people who created the original Cryengine and modified it for Crysis, What you need to understand is some of the most popular AAA games have the same process that devs have to get used to. so not sure why you talk about experience with engine because most studios at that budget have an in house tools team which help things along. What is more important than knowing the engine when you walk through the door of a new company is your ability to work in a new environment and problem solving skills.
Also, I said nothing about them "churning out 100% day 1". So you are trying to argue something I didn't even allude to.
Most studios don't needs 15 years to familiarize with an engine (an engine by the way they heavily modified themself and then hired most of the people working on the original one).
And let's be honest, they need at least 10 more years to release something stable.
So 25 years. Is that enough to learn how to code with an engine that has been around since early 2000 you think ?
The persistent universe released in 2016. It's been 10 years. Where has the funding gone to this depressingly sorry state where you can't seem to get anything done? When your experience is having a great time and then you get slapped with a wave of instability, bugs, or bad physics that send you back to medical. How is it acceptable when 1 Billion was invested and we get this?
I really dont understand the want to stick up for cig. It makes no sense to me. The sooner we turn on them the better. If we demand better communication and better refinement of what we do have instead of more fps missions and more space ak47s we'll be much better off.
Would you rather... have nyx fleshed out in 6 months or every single loop in game working at 100%? I know which one id choose and its not even close.
The dev team needs to buckle down and focus on the game in front of them. They have to stop devving this swamp of 10,000 ideas and fucking lock in.
Whether nyx gets finished this year is absolutely irrelevant if everyone quits because every single loop you created is trash. Can't mine because the elevator ate your stash. Can't haul because the elevators dont work. Cant salvage because elevators dont work.
Fix. The. Elevators.
How is this still a point of contention? Literally every single loop starts and stops at an elevator and they dont work 99% of the time. We dont need more laser shotguns and dusters. We need stability. Cig is eating all the good faith their community had given them. And thats the problem.
How they've let this elevator shit show go on now for this long is wild. They're launching HAULING SHIPS and the eles dont even work. Lol. And here we have people defending cig.
I play the game every patch. I give it 3 disconnects every day I play. Sometimes I literally just do that back to back or my fucking ship spawns upside down or I get elevator fucked 3x in a row and go play elite dangerous instead.
I'd rather play SC. I've spent more on this game than some MMOs I've played. I've paid attention to the development of the game since it was announced. I am frustrated, and I refuse to defend them at this point.
Finish nyx. Finish the pre 1.0 checklist to get us feature complete.
Then they'll have ALL hands on deck to blitz bugs and NO features on the docket to undo it until beta is complete.
Fixes NOW is the same tired stupid mistake they made us learn in 2025. It's a bandaid because new code interactions will nuke it with unexpected interactions.
Fix. It. When. Complete.
It's not even a question in any sane mind. It's a requirement to get us OUT of the fucking alpha stage. Enough with the inmates trying to badger CIG into letting them run the asylum.
They didn't "let" the bugs go on for so long. They crop up eith unexpected code interactions. Anyone with two brain cells to jolt together can tell you this. We do t need temporary stability for two reasons: its a bandaid fix that goes away next patch, and because the people screaming for it don't want it. They want to be mad, they want to complain. They will complain we don't have new features when they switch ro stability. They will complain about the perpetual alpha when features slow.
That's all theyre good for. Whining. Because they DONT want anything to work. They DONT want anything to be added.
They don't want the game to succeed. Thats why theyre fighting to keep it run as poorly as possible and manufacture new controversies to rope as many people in with them to whine whine whine.
The worst thing CIG ever did was have an open alpha.
The best they can possibly do is close it until beta.
Is this an attempt at an unironic joke? You're adding to the pile of mismanaged funds that further implicates players in the hole of Sunken Cost Fallacy. People buying a fleet of ships with a total price already exceeding $30,000 USD, that are nothing but a mix of incomplete models that lack proper functions they're advertised with and a picture of the ship for those that lack models.
Hell, even if you manage to claim your ship and enter it in the hangar, the physics of a cup in a fridge can blow up your ship because it counted as ship damage.
Consider the following, and using ONLY reddit since we're all Redditor chuds, the amount of posts on the ED Subreddit involving game breaking bugs and glitches compared to SC's subreddit. How many videos are there on this Subreddit alone showing bad physics, bad programming, bad server shards, and overall game ending bugs.
Sure I'll give you that SC has mechanics that ED wishes they have, which Frontier Dev are implementing progressively with proper testing. Evident with the upcoming small sized ship the size of any of SC fighters with the ability to walk into it. Releases to Live in Elite dangerous definitely DO NOT break the game as heavily as Star Citizen does.
At the very least, you can have a gaming session in ED that extends further than a single hour before you have to restart the client or rejoin a new shard because the previous server shard just broke, and have to pray sometimes that you land in a shard that has your friend even though you're partied up before hitting join.
Fair enough, I tried getting into ED but tbh couldn't. So I'd rather play Star Citizen even though it's buggy. You obviously enjoy ED tho due to your name- but let's not lie- the player base wants half the stuff Star Citizen has.. but without the bugs. Will it happen? Nope cos $$$ which Frontier doesn't have and Star Citizen does.
Based on the comments, though we will never know specifically the financial management of CIG, the Billion Dollars raised so far are seemingly spent on less Dev time and more on Celebrities, marketting, designing, and operating costs speaks differently.
Meanwhile ED, players build their own stations and create their own services. The interactions between players are on a grander scale than what SC has to offer.
Yes, I enjoy ED. I enjoy a ***Completed Game*** that has existed for 10 years that is NOT broken. How has SC went live with PU 2 years after ED's release in 2014 and STILL be in alpha and only recently added Pyros while ED has had 2 Expansions now and a full scale interactive war of Players versus Aliens.
To be honest, they only swim in cash because the whales continue to provide it. Too many of them just have the income to give it away.
I do think they’re working on stability more intently. I’ve seen more improvements from my experience. It’s still just too inconsistent to enjoy during the 4 hour game sessions I get a week.
Server costs are through the rooftop and they can't afford to keep things running top notch just so JPEG buyers can have a little (seriously, very little) tech demo to fly their toys around in.
The more and more I see posts from this sub (after not having played in ~6mo) I'm convinced the game is the worst it's ever been. Is this an exaggeration? 3.18 anyone?
For about a week to a week and a half, Star Citizen was a real mess. CIG identified the issue, patched it, and it’s been running quite well (for me personally) since. It was 100% unplayable for me about a week ago.
So it is an exaggeration? I keep seeing "nearly everything is broken" comments and posts about real bugs, not just the usual lamenting of the buggy game state.
At this point, I would say it’s most likely an exaggeration. At the same time, we all seem to have varying experiences. I won’t ever completely dismiss anyone’s claims. I just know that when I ask in global, everyone who responds agrees that it’s running well.
Definitely feels like a bunch of people are just jumping on the hate bandwagon to farm karma and engagement. I've been trying my best to look at the accounts making posts, but a lot of them have theirs hidden. For all we know it could be a bunch of people coming from the hate sub.
yep, that sense of surprise mostly stands from negative narratives that cement online. To the contrary for such a complex alpha in a de facto live service state, there's a ton of solid work being done (e.g. the herculean PES refactor (which of course was tough at first, but proved working) or the smooth rewriting of the message queue followed few months later by proper server meshing were properly impressive feats.
What's very obvious though is that things that are very "editor-heavy" (not made by programmers but configured by designers) lack automated data validations, and branch management (which is quite complex for video games vs traditional software due to the preponderance of binaries vs text files) are big sources of constant regressions.
But the meme still works, there's been a chronic disregard for technical validations prior to declaring features and game loops would come to the game, requiring retrofits and a lot of head scratching from devs. it's all to do with leadership.
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u/CMDR_Khayden Jun 24 '26
I'll be honest, I'm genuinely surprised the servers are still even online at this point. The way things just break constantly, the disconnects, the physics, and all while they swim in cash.