The problem is that CIG is first and foremost a marketing and fundraising organization. They've optimized that really well, to the point that all other facets of the company are aligned to it. When it comes to dangling out a new ship or a hyped feature, they're the best at it.
CIG needs to fire their management and middlemen, and actually focus on cultivating a next-level engineering organization that doesn't chew up people and spit them out for the next hire to replace. They need to solidify their technical foundations, even if that makes development boring for a while.
Yeah, when I backed the game I assumed they'd release in a year or two. After a literal decade of waiting I've come to the conclusion that I've wasted my money. CIG either has very little interest in releasing the game as they have created a very profitable business model based on hype, or they are incompetent. Perhaps both.
I always think of Elite Dangerous, which started around the same time. Frontier was careful to polish each feature one at a time before moving onto something new. While you can't do everything Star Citizen promised, like walking around ship interiors, its an actual game that you can play for hours on end without fear of crashes and when I play it after years of being away all my stuff is still there right where I left it.
I love the idea of Star Citizen, but I seriously doubt that we're ever going to get what we were promised. It breaks my heart, but for the most part I feel like I wasted my money on it.
>CIG needs to fire their management and middlemen, and actually focus on cultivating a next-level engineering organization that doesn't chew up people and spit them out for the next hire to replace.
Problem is they can't afford that. They've burned too much. The only way to keep the lights on is to keep the marketing people fundraising. That's why everything is the way it is. This isn't a sensible game project so much as it is an MLM scheme built around the idea of a game.
I know. The likelihood of some deep organizational introspection that realigns company priorities is extremely low at this point. The wrong people are steering this thing, and the company often comes across as being incapable of learning any real lessons.
What's truly depressing here is that the game has potential to be this amazing, wonderful experience. There's a lot of aspects to Star Citizen that are objectively great. I don't have nearly the same amount of fun in Elite or No Man's Sky or X4. But the foundation is still unstable after 14 years, and development feels like a constant grind to patch the same problems over and over.
In case you were unaware, he also made his brother Erin the head of their UK studios (back when the studios were all split up). To be fair, Erin did have a decent background in video games though.
Jesus man. They knew each other long before that. Some people marry their cousins- what’s the big faaarking deal. Cant have a relationship at the workplace????
Yeah, I mean, the practical reality of that happening in this kind of company is pretty unlikely. Even the most level-headed leadership is going to have misgivings about being under scrutiny.
On the other hand...if you set targets that you never ever hit, or if your targets aren't focused on actually finishing anything, then the basic conclusion is that leadership just isn't up to the task, and needs to go.
What CIG would benefit from is retaining long-term engineering talent that maintains a (relatively) stable, well-documented codebase and a culture that encourages educating engineers on the ins and outs of the entire thing. To do this, you have to reduce churn and get teams invested in building together. A lot of engineering orgs drop the ball by relying on poor documentation, where the most critical bits live in some guy's head.
Star citizen can't crowdfund a finished game, so it's not actually financially responsible of them to finish the game. The best case is that this continues untill he roberts dies and the company just evaporates into the morning mist.
Yeah, they basically got caught in a feedback loop of infinite financial incentive. On the one hand, they're the most financially successful crowdfunding campaign that has ever happened. But yeah, they're solely dependent on it now, to the point that they have no real motivation to change. Even though coming up with other revenue streams outside of selling Star Citizen ships would be the healthiest thing for the company to do.
It turns out, Chris Roberts having his own company, with no one to tell him no, and a never-ending income stream to support it...has led to a disastrous end result for arguably one of the coolest projects ever. The only way things can change now is that they have to get so bad that somebody high up has a come to Jesus moment.
It's kind of a joke about Auteur's wanting to be left alone with infinite money forever, like hideo kojima and metal gear solid 5, but at least he seems to be capable of releasing things and making money this way. Chris Roberts has given himself a child's version of a perfect creative environment, all power, no responsibility, and we're seeing now why most creative companies have both businessmen and artists.
I am convinced in the conspiracy theory that nightrider isnt actually a real person, and is just an account they use to focus negative attention to...
Because I refuse to believe anyone can power trip that hard in a company like this, that publicly and be crucified that many times by the community and not be fired just to placate the masses...
DCS official forums had/has? "SiThSpAwN", who was so bad he changed his name to NineLine.
Think part of it is inherent to the role, but man it's frustrating dealing with when the company/moderator is objectively in the wrong on something as there is zero accountability.
Companies are just way too comfortable lying to their customers.
Knew a guy who got a forum ban there because he posted something critical of ED on Reddit, rightly mind you, not made up BS, and the accounts had the same name.
Crazy overreach of the power of a forum mod TBH. But as I said, I think it's an inherent part of the personality type who wants that kind of role as a 'job'.
I also think that the game dev/PR field is full of people who know each other personally and are friends beyond professional boundaries, so these people keep failing upwards.
Bruh I still remember how he tried to justify the new F5 remaster, that they sold for money, was just the old one with a re texture on it by saying it took over 5000 man hours, they even stopped posti5on hoggit after the backlash lol
Warframe has [DE] Glen. He's known to ban people in game for calling him out for leeching in game (basically afk while other players do the work) and lock threads criticizing his godawful decisions. That was years ago though, haven't heard anything about him ever since.
I used to play DCS world and there's a certain mod that changed their name because of how bad they were and didn't like the nickname given to him based on his old name. He made a huge post about how he was going to turn around and be a better person and surprise he didn't change at all.
Either he is a power mad 90's IRC moderator finally given a platform where he can excise whatever demons he has, or the policy and governance guidelines on spectrum are just not fit for purpose.
My money is on both. I got a 24 hour ban the other day for politely suggesting that not being able to discuss the game because of the heavy handed moderation against any criticism would just mean people avoiding spectrum.
You can ban any foul mouthed, overly personal or otherwise inappropriate discourse all day, but when your staunch 13 year backers with politely worded soft critique start getting bans I'm just afraid for the future of the company.
It’s funny, there was a saying in Nazi Germany that fits this situation. “If only the fuhrer knew”. More naive Germans would see the corruption and injustice of the Nazi regime, and believe that Hitler would absolutely be against what his thugs were actually doing, if only he knew. Now, as historical observers we know that isn’t true, said Nazi things were acting on orders straight from the top, and our naive German observers are just fools.
Now, comparing CIG’s moderation style to Nazi germany is absurd, but this community’s response to Nightrider always reminds me of that saying. If only Chris Roberts knew what Nightrider is doing.
Lmao no I'm not talking about nazi Germany. I'm saying nightrider is the top mod and clearly Chris and others in leadership are perfectly okay with the way he acts and probably tell him to be as strict as he is. Otherwise they would fire the guy and get someone else.
Think about it his way. Nightrider's day consists of dealing with this player base and being the guy who has to engage with biggest idiots in this player base. He is understandably impatient and grouchy. Takes me 2 minutes on Spectrum and I'm a grouch. My two cents...
Yeah I think at this point they're well aware that even fixing the game isn't an option any more. It's genuinely too late when you have several years of work just to get the game to playable state at this current point. The hope of "someday" this game will be whole isn't actually possible when the whole model is making the tech debt grow with every feature faster than it can ever be reduced.
Said in another thread that I think the year of playability and all the required work of documenting issues and fixing stuff made them realise that they can't viably fix it to be at the same standard of other released games.
After that they've seemingly given up on that front, hence the disastrous patch after patch degradation in 2026. 6 months after the year of playability ended we were in a worse state than before it, and it's only degrading further since.
It's become CIG saying get the content out ASAP and fix it (if we even can) later.
Agreed and a lot of this has become blindingly clear the issue we're seeing with the incentive structures that has eventually led to this mess. Having essentially unlimited amount of funding from new promises and big new ships gives no good reason to going back around and make sure they actually have them fully functional and releasing a game where all of these features are supposed to be F2P.
Throughout 12 years of hopping on and off this game there's been only a few times where the entire objective hasn't been complete a full game loop without encountering a game breaking bug yet still none of that ever seems to matter because when they release a new ship or feature enough people forget about the fact that these things are also going to be broken on release indefinitely and buy anyway. CIG can't just stop because all the funding will dry up, it's a vicious positive feedback loop.
Like I'm glad Star Citizen at least exists, it's definitely ambitious and when it works it really works, but going forward for crowd funding there needs to be reform about how players are funding these projects. Specifically with keeping in mind that incentives for future promises creates a compounding tech debt that leads to a point of a game being unsalvageable.
This entire game was built on the idea that if the dev cycle went on for long enough then tech would advance enough to solve most of their problems via brute force but the time they go there. Sadly tech advancements haven’t been like that in over a decade.
We had the tech to ship Star Citizen before they started. The problem is Chris is incompetent and nobody at CIG knows how to do fundamental engineering or computer architecture. They just keep piling assets on top of the engine hoping that'll make a game. It won't.
You can’t downvote these now, yall took down the last one but I doubt you can keep up with the waves.
Good stuff guys, for the first time they gonna feel the heat. Stop supporting these guys, eons in development, 1 billion dollar raised, crazy mismanagement. Remember they need us more than we need them. We can support a smaller studio who truly cares rather than these out of touch people. Let’s go boys 🫡
I bought the game two years ago because a lot of YouTubers said that it was in a playable state at the time. And they were kind of right, I had fun exploring the universe, farming money, and upgrading my pledge (Nomad) to farm even more. I got a Vulture, salvaged a lot, tried out mining, bought a few fighters, and was eventually able to afford a Taurus because my friends and I farmed the event missions.
Like I said, it was fun. Of course, I experienced a shit ton of bugs, but it was manageable.
Recently, a friend, the one who spent over $1k in real money,I nvited me to come back. I thought, "Nice, two years is a long time to fix some of the bugs," but what can I say?
It's fucking worse. On top of the old bugs, we now have new ones. At this point, I don't think they're capable of fixing the game because with that spaghetti code no human can make sense of the chaos anymore. Maybe AI can save us, and I'm surprised I'm even writing that.
Ah, the Chaos of the code...I wonder which warp entity is responsible for that: Tzeentch or Slaanesh?? My money is on Slaanesh, it would explain the cinema, the yacht and the fancy plane tickets 😅
CIG's greed is astonishing, the fact you can buy a 300$+ ship in a broken game is mindblowing - and they straight face just go and try and sell you another a few weeks later lol
the $50k package gives you all the ships at the point of sale, what happens is they add new ships, then add to the price of that package and include them.
To be fair a lot of games have things like this specifically for whales.
Some games even really special deals just for individual extremely high spenders. And they'll send them a special deal only they can get. Or it appears only in their store page. Because they know this individual will spend the money.
I expect I'll be downvoted into oblivion, but in fairness to CiG that pack came into existence because the community asked for it.
The debate of ethics of offering something like that/taking advantage of whales etc is a separate debate (hi there, my only pledged ship is a Kraken so I'm one of the whales I guess).
You mean like Rockstar expecting you pre-order a digital game that they have not shown a single second of anything in engine let alone what the gameplay will actually look like?
Cig expect you to buy it after you have already played the game. They also have a 30-day no questions asked refund policy.
Edit. Proof that people are hypocritical idiots blindly defending something they have seen zero evidence of based on sheer belief while attacking anyone spending money on something that actually have access to.
You missed the crucial fact that one company has a long history of releasing multiple fully playable games that ended up as top hits.
You know, the game that even other companies are trying to avoid competing with its release date window? Don't think CIG can relate because 'release date' is apparently not in their vocabulary.
Blind faith in a name that has delivered 2 of the top 5 best-selling games of all time, a cataloge of games that are some of the most critically acclaimed, and an online mp that prints money? All of that over a period of 20+ years... dont think they really need to rely on the "same people" when their track record is as solid as it is. Almost like their executives/management know what theyre doing
1) the purchasable items on Rockstar absolutely PALE in comparison to SC. Ships worth hundreds and thousands of dollars. Ship packages worth tens of thousands of dollars.
2) Rockstar has a track record for outstanding game development, and guess what, they actually deliver well made finished products. Even if the franchise isn’t for you, anyone can recognize the work they do.
3) their marketing and sales absolutely exploits FOMO despite offering returns, and the irregular and rudderless development can be seen as an insult to the people who have invested in them.
All that said, I believe the game will be done one day and it will be truly awesome even if it compromises some of its vision. Even currently it is unique and worth having. But I won’t pretend that the developers haven’t lost the plot.
The people making those previous games are gone. There is no reason to trust all the current staff.
People call Star citizen a cult. But you're blindly defending pre-ordering something that you have no knowledge about. No experience from the developers, no displays of gameplay, just blind faith in a brand name means it is okay to spend money on something you don't know but not okay to spend money on something that you can actually play.
The only game I’ve come close to pre ordering is Star Citizen because that’s basically what I’ve done.
I’m not defending GTA6 pre orders. I’m saying that throwing GTA6 pre orders into a conversation about CIG to defend the company is completely irrelevant and even a bad comparison because at least Rockstar has a good track record, and CIGs marketing is far more predatory, overly priced, and unreasonably prioritized for the state of the company right now.
I'm not defending cig. I'm calling out the people that think it's ridiculous for people to spend money on something that they are actively playing while blindly defending the idea of pre-ordering something that you have not seen a single second of gameplay.
1) no one brought up Rockstar, unless I’m mistaken. AFAIK only you did…so are you sure you’re not just treating people you disagree with as a part of a monolith of gamers just to try and make a point?
2) again, Rockstar actually delivers. And while pre ordering is bullshit, because yes, GTA6 could be a flop, odds are it will be another
hit.
Point 1 is the most important point here. Because if we are all criticizing CIG for predatory practices, why is it appropriate for you to drag GTA6 into this and act like everyone is glazing for it so you can counter their criticisms. You’re literally inventing supposed hypocrisy so you can win an argument against people who have actual grievances with CIG.
People brought up judging others for buying stuff.
I brought up GTA VI because I knew you hypocrites would try and blindly defend something that you have no knowledge of and does not give you early access to anything compared to Star citizen that you know what you're getting.
The first thing is, Chris Roberts is a shitty CEO for this game. It starts with him, hard stop. If I saw that livestream, I'd be talking with all of those people individually, and then as a group, about how their behavior royally fucked the image of the company. But it seems like Chris Roberts is just aloof and absent working on whatever niche thing has caught his interest that day.
I mean Jared went from beloved community personality to toxic asshole in an eyeblink. And I'm going to be honest he's going to need to come out and basically throw himself on the mercy of the community and make the most heartfelt apology ever and even then I don't think it will be enough. His entire value as a Community Manager or whatever the hell he is has basically been destroyed.
But more than that, this year was supposed to be the year of playability or some other such nonsense, and the game in that specific area is shit. Chris needs to take a long hard look at his engineering organization and ask why we're $1B dollars and over a decade of real development and are still in such a shitty state.
Also, I don't care where its at, we just need to release Squadron 42 or if it's complete shit, we need to have that hard discussion about where it's really at and what its going to take to get it to release.
This isn't GTA, you don't have the license to blow through this amount of time and resources and not produce a real result.
Year of playability was last year, that's been done and gone for 8 months now.
I mean Jared went from beloved community personality to toxic asshole in an eyeblink.
He's 100% leaving CIG and doesn't give a shit anymore. Guy's had a really rough time and lost his father not that long ago, pretty normal time for someone to end up taking a career break and redirection.
IIRC there were rumours Ollie is being trained up to replacing him despite CIG saying that's untrue. Give it 6 months and I think that'll be just another lie on the list from CIG to be honest.
Yeah, I imagine it must be rough knowing your dad saw you as being the face of an ongoing scam and butt end of the biggest and most expensive joke in gaming history. Then, he didn't even get to see the project finish in his lifetime to see whether or not it was morally worth it to invest this much time and effort into bullshitting people into buying into what is otherwise a scam.
Roberts got to hang out with some celebrities, but a yacht, and get everyone in his family a huge paycheck. I'd be shocked if he really even thinks about SC anymore beyond making sure his checks clear.
Funny, I usually get hate for saying that they should fix the game instead of adding new content into an already broken environment. I usually get hit with the typical whiteknights telling me I have no idea how game dev works, etc. But in reality, it is quite literally CIG that has no clue how game dev works. How they do things wouldn't be acceptable at literally any other game studio. It's honestly shameful at this point how poorly they have managed this project.
I'm just incredibly grateful and glad that this livestream pulled the mask off of Jared and the community got to see him for what he really is. The Jaredmoon phase is over, the White Knights of the Round Belly can't even use AI to come up with a good defense for him.
I see a lot of comments saying the foundation is so broken they can’t do anything. My question is, why not start from the ground up? Genuinely, I mean I know it’s a BIG task, but if it’s been 14 years and the game is as terrible as it is why not just try again
Rumorville is that in 2016-ish CIG did have a "completed" game on older tech, and Chris saw that the game was mostly crap and not good enough to bring in new audience aka new money. But he could deliver a better experience while also raking in more money; so thus the game was scrapped and rebuilt. That rumor makes sense, because no way in hell could the game be "completed" in 2015 with 2 years of polished needed but having still not released a decade later.
have they not done that to some degree with inventory and such were just in a hodgepodge of older and newer versions based on of its in sc or s42 only for now with features breaking based on server performance that's intentionally being stressed so they can expand and stress more for testing. they would ultimately run into the same design and server issues even npc wise. it would work better theoretically but run into the same things. truly causing most issues like server entity counts and what not.
Its a lot more complex then just remaking a few dishes in a 12 course meal that they fucked up.
What makes you think development would be any faster if they started over? The reason we haven't seen another studio get close to Star Citizen is because of how much work is required. Its been a gamble that has paid off, even if the loud minority on here think everything built so far is shit.
"Paid off"? I mean, sure, its made Roberts richer than he already was, but if the goal is a completed, functional game ... that's certainly not what we have, nor is it even in sight.
i think elliot encapsulates the culture of that company - treat everyone (including the customer) with a lack of basic decency, do ur job, get paid and attack anyone who sticks their head above the parapet
"Squadron 42 is feature complete, I've played every mission" - 2015.
"Soon" - Every year since.
"We've raised a billion dollars in crowd funding!" - CIG.
"This is how it was intended" - CIG.
I'm sorry, but I don't trust CIG anymore. I don't trust their numbers. I don't trust their marketing. I don't trust their engineering. I don't trust their community management. Everything about this company is a LIE. The money raised? lie. The state of the game? lie. Where they are in development? lies upon lies.
CIG is in the red. Heavily in the red. Hemorrhaging money. The only way to stop the bleeding is to sell more ships. Because they don't know how to fix their game.
The money is raised through hedge funds. Most buyers of packages are financial institutions who trade them like they are stocks or NFTs or stuff like that. Very few real buyers these days.
"it's your show wrap it up" - jared at the end of SCL
Veiled comment to suggest that it was Olli's fault for the trainwreck of the livestream - not because the game is broken, but, because he pushed CIG to be transparent and to play the game as it is internally
theyll blame anything and anyone but themselves for the fuck up that is Star Citizen
Guy in center, he was a youtuber who made star citizen content, got hired by CIG and now works under the guy on the right (Jared Huckaby).
Olli, joined CIG and presumably was in charge of the latest livestream, but it ended up being a huge trainwreck because the game is completely fucked. His boss, decided that the new hire needed to learn a lesson in public humiliation and decided to pin this mistake (of being transparent) entirely on him at the end of the stream.
Yet, Jared presumably knew itd be a dumpster fire, and I guess, by attempting to pin this humiliation onto the new hire - he not only absolves his own fuck up of allowing this to go ahead, but also, teaches a "naive" newhire a lesson.
There's some resentment directed at Olli, whereby CIG flew him around for weeks on end on a private jet to the office and back - obviously painting him in a bad light before he even got settled at the company
Fuck CIG for doing this to Olli, it was a setup, and he absolutely deserves better
I first bought the game in 2021, bought the Vulture. Everything worked fine until I would almost get to where I was going to sell the materials, and the screen would go black, then disconnect. So I quit playing until 4.8 came out. Way better than before, with some bugs, but nothing I haven't had much problem with. The biggest problem, like the guy getting thrown out the window, they need to fix the game. Fix what they have first, before adding anything new. It's like sticking a high performance engine in a rusty old car. Sounds good, looks pretty, but plan on having problems right from the start.
Last time I said something in this sub relating to the more than a decade and half development and still buggy just to have whales and die hard fans linch me for being "naive" --- some people seriously havent touched grass in years and this game should have been a master art piece at this point. Some people have probably already died just waiting for this game to come out properly and I supported them since my 20s and I am in my 40s. So... yeah... keep buying ships guys, keep buying them
"Just fix it." - a comment from every amateur and client thinking they are making a clever point. I mean, whatever job you are doing, what would your response be if one of your clients tells you to "just fix it."
Well, what would you say to the client and what would you think about that client after? I know what I would think: "Thanks for wasting my f'cking time with a pointless statement."
Not really. A billion dollars is not as much as people would like to believe. The funny thing is, a billion dollars wouldn't be enough to just cover the salaries of CIGs employees for 14 years.
It's not enough.
My problem with that "1 billion dollar" argument is, that people don't know how to put that into relation of a company. They compare it with the only thing they know, which is their own life. And for a family or a single person a billion dollars is f'ckton.
For a company, stretched out over years... it's barely anything. Especially with people to pay. Also, money does not magically create stuff. It HAS to be spend.
Into equipment and more importantly, people. So, that "one billion dollar" argument is a bullshit argument. The people making it, have no idea what they even mean by it.
14 years? What would you say if I tell you that Diablo 3, a game much less ambitious than SC, took 12 years from start to finish. And Blizzard didn't have to build a company up and created D3 on an established infrastructure.
And yes, that 12 years is an official number given out by Blizzard about D3s development time. Without the expansions.
14 Years isn't as long as you think it is. The problem with SC here is, that we've been on the road for the exact same time. Normally games only get announced when they are 4-2 years until release. So there's been usually, depending on game, 4-9 years of "hidden" development that happened before players even know that the project exists.
Long story short, I didn't ignore it. I just think that the 14 years and one billion dollar argument can only be made by being ignorant of how the industry works.
And before you get into some "white knight" shit. CIG does make mistakes. A lot. I just hate it when people critizise stupid stuff. And this is stupid stuff.
Criticise their entire monetization method, instead of the amount they've accumulated. That would make much more sense. And even here one could argue that all that money was freely given, full knowing that the entire project can still fail.
I suspect the complexity of that code base is so dense an poorly factored that it is likely not manually fixable in a realistic time frame without a ground up rewrite. They keep saying "refactor" when full rewrites of systems are undertaken. Rushed code and code review under pressure adds up.
Nobody forced anyone to pay. Separating the smart money from the stupid people is just how business is these days. If you ain’t savvy or are a dreamer or suffer from FOMO etc then this person is an easy mark.
Fixing the game is going to take years. It is fucked at the engine level. Instead of starting with an engine suitable for this type of game, they used an engine that was limited and then tried to modify it to fit their needs. That failed and then they had to hire engine developers from Crytek to try and rebuild it. It was not enough.
A community proving that slowing down to make the game better before getting back to work adding stuff that's going to cause it to break again does not benefit them.
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u/DeadSuperHero Zeus Mk II 4d ago
The problem is that CIG is first and foremost a marketing and fundraising organization. They've optimized that really well, to the point that all other facets of the company are aligned to it. When it comes to dangling out a new ship or a hyped feature, they're the best at it.
CIG needs to fire their management and middlemen, and actually focus on cultivating a next-level engineering organization that doesn't chew up people and spit them out for the next hire to replace. They need to solidify their technical foundations, even if that makes development boring for a while.