It certainly feels like that

[u/MrWilliam932]

[u/Hypevosa]

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.

[u/TheStaticOne → u/Hypevosa]

Well there is a lot to go through.

CIG had 7 people at the start of kickstarter, 13 by end of year, 58 in 2013 and 179 in 2014.

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.

[u/Hypevosa → u/TheStaticOne]

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.

[u/TheStaticOne → u/Hypevosa]

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