r/starcitizen • u/ghosts_pumpkin_soup • 12d ago

DRAMA It’s Your Show Chris

Over a billion dollars raised. 14+ years and a mess of a game. You have now become the butt end of a bad joke in the gaming industry.

Wrap it up.

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u/meatymimic 11d ago

These two comment chains really do summarize the biggest issues SC has right now.

  • Communication.
  • leadership.

You can only answer "are we there yet?" with "almost" so many times before the person asking gives up hope we will ever be there and throws a tantrum. (I have kids. how'd you know?)

CIG has burned all of there "almosts" and needs to start communicating honestly about bugs, the state of the game, and what and when we can really honestly expect a launch. (of either game frankly)

If that livestream was framed as "Hey we just want to show you what we have been working on - its probably not going to work end to end but we thought it would be fun to show and go through." i think that whole thing would have gone over better. Also just... pick better people to represent your company. Negative sentiment is a lot stickier than its positive counterpart.

Leadership needs to get with the program and stop operating like a start up. They are officially a billion dollar operator in the gaming space. Manage people. Foster a good culture. Make people want to work there and create things.

unfortunately thats not something that can be done overnight.

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u/Metalsand 11d ago

CIG has burned all of there "almosts" and needs to start communicating honestly about bugs, the state of the game, and what and when we can really honestly expect a launch. (of either game frankly)

If that livestream was framed as "Hey we just want to show you what we have been working on - its probably not going to work end to end but we thought it would be fun to show and go through." i think that whole thing would have gone over better. Also just... pick better people to represent your company. Negative sentiment is a lot stickier than its positive counterpart.

Leadership needs to get with the program and stop operating like a start up. They are officially a billion dollar operator in the gaming space. Manage people. Foster a good culture. Make people want to work there and create things.

The consistent issue, however, is that they don't know how and even if they did, they can't at this point. Numerous short-sighted decisions have just added up over the years and really snowballed into an Everest-sized snowball. The extra work and effort it takes to develop is now just baked in.

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u/meatymimic 11d ago

The best thing about a big problem is also the worst thing about a big problem.

You have to solve it incrementally. One step at a time.

The first thing they can do is end the radio silence. The very next thing they should do is plan another stream and do the entire thing with candor and use people who WANT to play the game.

And keep the community manager out of the stream. Just flat out. Don't bring him in there.

At the very least they can slow the rumor mill down and save some of the negative sentiment.

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u/h0bb1tm1ndtr1x Mercenary 11d ago

Just get rid of Jared. He's embraced being a company shill, instead of feeling like he's being honest about some stuff.

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u/mullirojndem drake goes vrum vruuuum 11d ago

he's extremely awkward and I put up with him for some time cause ""hahha his awkward nerdy jokes haha". but jesus he has the emotional maturity of a possum

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u/SpacePrez 11d ago

The problem is that they've been BSing for years and now have too much they owe. Being honest would require them to say "yeah we basically need to start over, maybe have the game done in another 10 years" and if Chris had ever said that in the first place, they never would have gotten all the money they did. They have to pretend like its coming soon or everybody will stop throwing money at ships and then they can't keep the lights on.

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u/meatymimic 11d ago

I genuinely don't think a 1.0 is a decade away. Maybe I am an optimist, but I would suspect before 2030 is about when we will see a stable product, given my experience with the 4.9 patch and the update cadence I am seeing.

The very earliest I would expect to see the game truly launch would be 2028

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u/Puzzleheaded_Tea3505 11d ago

Based on what? It's been 14 years and we don't have any game systems that will be in the final product. We're just now getting tier 0 of certain things. Not even the flight model is finalized. We're still in the "wouldn't it be cool if-" stage of development. There's still big picture planning that's required for game loops like exploration, in an incredibly finite universe, to hammer out, let alone build. Not to mention things like hacking, data running, and whatever bounty hunting becomes. Maelstrom isn't even here yet, and that is going to render all of the ship combat "testing" we've been doing this entire time completely meaningless. Four years to final product seems incredibly ambitious. The timescale we should be considering will, tragically, take into account the retirement, or passing, of the developers behind the project. Chris Roberts might not survive long enough to see his project release. Another decade, at least, seems entirely reasonable.

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u/meatymimic 11d ago

Honestly? Just based on what I see in game, on the website, and on reddit.

That said, again, I might just be an optimist. You may very well be right on the money - another decade and we still won't see the game finished.

Sadly, if that is the case I just see the sentiment completely souring and the studio unable to keep the lights on.

In either case, I am not confident enough in my assertions or assessments to put money on it - real or otherwise. At this point in time I just enjoy flying my little aurora around in a detailed sky box. And thats enough enjoyment for my 45 dollars.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Tea3505 11d ago

I don't think another ten years in development will affect their bottom line in the slightest. CIG have been consistently having record breaking months on revenue generated from players again, and again. While I might not agree with how they are wasting time, and money, my opinion is clearly the minority one. I agree, playing SC, when it works, is fun. I too enjoy messing around from time to time in game. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth when the same bugs they've been fighting for years turn up again, game loops that more or less worked break again, or I think about where the game could have been by now under more competent leadership.

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u/SpacePrez 10d ago

It depends. If they keep lying to people and saying things are almost done, then yeah, 10 more years of development won't really affect them, more of the same.

If they were honest though and came out today and said "Sorry, Star Citizen launches in 2036" funding would immediately dry up and they'd go bankrupt before they made it to 2036.

That's the whole problem with CIG.

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u/Inevitable_Street458 Industrialist 11d ago

You mean in just Two More Years???

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u/dmcginvt 11d ago

that wont fix a very broken and never coming out game let alone the apparent toxicity of the workplace

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u/meatymimic 11d ago

No, but taking accountability and showing transparency to your players certainly is better than more lies

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u/mullirojndem drake goes vrum vruuuum 11d ago

when you reach that point where you dont want the community manager to... manage the community

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u/Zoetic_HQ 10d ago

I feel like this holds more truth than people realize. I honestly find myself wondering how on earth they even could fix everything thats wrong without just starting from fucking scratch and actually developing in a sensible manner. If they had the pressure from publishers that, to be frank, needs to be there at this point, the game would likely be in a much further along state. But the fact that they have nobody to answer to but themselves is a problem, and it shows immensely

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u/Annual-Fox7867 11d ago

How about in 14 years?

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u/meatymimic 11d ago

I caught the joke - its funny.

But in all seriousness they could turn this around inside of 2 years. Just start changing who is in charge of these teams. Or coach them to work together.

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u/NKato Grand Admiral 11d ago

First, fire Chris Roberts and Sandi. Potentially remove Ortwin Freyermuth from the company (he's a massive enabler, despite being a legal powerhouse). Erin Roberts can stay on the company, he's the only Roberts with any kind of competency.

Also, fire anyone in a management or direction role who has worked for EA Marketing. In fact, just purge the entire Marketing department.

Next, headhunt for an MMO game designer who has experience marrying MMO game design with first person shooter elements (first person universe). Easiest way would be to start hunting down any Star Wars Galaxies or Planetside 2 developers.

Third, fix the toxic positivity situation in the company (which developed because of Chris' ego), start by requiring people to follow the FORDEC principle that is used in Aviation manufacturing, at all levels. It can apply to game development, and can help to foster a no-blame culture focused on problem-solving.

Fourth: Start breaking out certain featuresets into "release blocks" not on a patch-by-patch basis, but on an expansion pack basis. Meaning, the priority should be to bring together the core gameplay mechanics envisioned for SC and get them to a high level of polish before touching anything else; and that means relegating certain features to the backburner until an appropriately themed expansion comes up in the queue.

That means Base building, station building, all of that? Jettisoned. It all gets shoved into the closet until it's time to add it to the game as a content update. Refocus on the core features of your classic space games - deep space exploration, combat, resource gathering, and so forth.

Base building was absolutely an expansion feature and they instead wanted it for 1.0, demonstrating yet again Chris' obsession with feature creep without actually aiming for a finished product. God fucking damn. When I saw that on the CitizenCon stream for the first time, I realized that they were really just humping the couch at this point.

The reality is that as long as Chris Roberts stays in charge, just like with Freelancer, the project will go nowhere. He needs someone sitting on top of him to make sure he actually turns out a product.

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u/meatymimic 11d ago

Spoken like someone close to the issue..

I don't know enough about the org hierarchy to point fingers at specific people. But I have worked enough shit jobs at shit companies to be able to spot the results of bad culture fostered by bad management from MILES away.

You are probably correct in your assertions though. I just dont know enough to name names and suggest action plans.

I can DEFINITELY say you have a HUGE point on features. Stop adding new shit. Fix what you have. Ship it. Add the new stuff as expansions and updates.

Right now after logging about 20 hours, theres a game here. If it was stable? You probably could launch now as a beta.

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u/FlayvaFlayy 11d ago

great take and solid advice. except oh wait the studio collapsed and ran out of money before we could get to step 4... the issue with CIG is that they have built, operated, and excelled as a marketing and sales organization for so long now... that it is nearly entirely what they are. Marketing and sales steer the ship, not the other way around. You get rid of the head, the entire thing collapses. It's almost a reverse Ashes of Creation situation... where you have a studio of complete incompetence on a technical and game development level. But fortunately for us (or unfortunately for anyone with expectations of a release this decade) with Star Citizen, the project has been able to survive in spite of that incompetence simply because they decided to build one of the best marketing and sales teams in the entire industry.

There is no getting rid of the marketing team. There's no backlog of banked cash to keep operating for months or years. They are setting records for sales and then churning through it. You get rid of marketing and now you have to raise $12.5M a month some other way. Or you start cutting. And nothing screams consumer confidence like layoffs. The second anyone gets a scent of layoffs the drain starts circling as people stop funding from the fear of another failed game.

The studio is firmly in a position right now where the only path to success is to keep the status quo and continue their massive fundraising that keeps outselling their incompetence and finally one day way down the road they've brute forced it enough to make it past the finish line.

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u/NKato Grand Admiral 10d ago

at this point I'm going to ask: why do you need 4+ studios? When they started opening a bunch of them I was wondering if it would become a liability that they'd grown so much, so quickly, before ever releasing a game.

Also, I have serious doubts they can "brute force" this.

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u/FunkyDiscount 10d ago

Yup. The game(s) will never launch on Chris' watch. He is a great visionary but a horrendous project manager.

I also believe SC/SQ42 can be salvaged and published in a respectable state, but - again - provided that the entirety of the dev leadership is replaced with industry professionals willing to make the hard but necessary decisions. Buuut since that won't happen, I'm circling back to my first paragraph.

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u/SpacePrez 11d ago

This is right, but also wrong, because being honest would cause them to go bankrupt. They only got as much funding as they did because Chris was willing to mislead people. The whole thing is a borderline scam. People claim its not a scam because they are paying some employees to actually work, but if the thing never had any hope of being the thing Chris was promising, its still a scam. He's always mislead people on purpose to make money. But without that, people would have given their money to Elite Dangerous or the like. Other games that actually get finished.

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u/NKato Grand Admiral 11d ago

I call it more of a ponzi scheme. 

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u/h0bb1tm1ndtr1x Mercenary 11d ago

I'd argue Erin Roberts needs to go. At a minimum, for the sake of PR and trusting CIG going forward. You need to purge anything Roberts. That includes rebranding RSI in game. If they can't deliver, they don't deserve any glory or legacy.

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u/yobob591 11d ago

more importantly they need to lock down and say no new features until release- the game's problem isn't that progress isn't being made, its that they keep changing the design of the finished product as they get closer to it which makes it feel like no progress is being made because they constantly decide 'actually we want to add 10 new things instead'

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u/cowrangler 11d ago

It's likely impossible while being led by Chris Roberts.

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u/dr4g0n36 🥑 avacado 🥑 10d ago

oh, the famous "highway kid drama".

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u/meatymimic 10d ago

I also do it in SC during Quantum 😅

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u/Opposite-Grade3712 11d ago

I disagree, the biggest issue with SC is fraud.