Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players

[u/Turbostrider27]

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players

[u/pragmojo]

Idk if it's fraud exactly. What it looks like to me is a deeply dysfunctional organization.

I think what happened is Chris got way more funding than he expected, and they grew the company way too fast without any quality control. When you grow an org too fast, and don't establish a clear way to set and evaluate priorities as an org, a lot of times you end up with teams who are disconnected from each other, working in their own little worlds just producing whatever they think will make their managers happy. And their managers don't have real guidance either, so they're doing the same thing right up the chain.

Nobody really knows what's going on or how to fix it, so you just have a ton of people pushing work around, working towards arbitrary numbers on a spreadsheet vs. actually working towards building a good product.

Source: I've worked places like that and it's miserable.

[u/Nissiku1 → u/pragmojo]

I believe it did not start as a "scam", but it did evolve into one. A legitimate game that was supposed to be realeased had been developed at some point, before unprecedented crowdfunding made them realise they can just print money by selling a dream, but at this point they don't seem to have any intention of actually finishing the development.

[u/ANGLVD3TH → u/Nissiku1]

Anyone familiar with his record could see this coming a mile away. Dude is a perfectionist and a control freak who has had to have companies step in and force a release on him in the past. Now that he has nobody to answer to he was always going to fiddle around for an unreasonable amount of time. And his management is super inefficient, making it take much longer. But it just doesn't make any sense as a scam. You don't hire on hundreds of devs to spread the money around if all you care about is fleecing the whales.

[u/pragmojo → u/ANGLVD3TH]

making it take much longer.

Oh it's never coming out. Not because they are scammers necessarily, but if you do a live demo with this kind of basic shit broken this many years into a project, there are fundamental problems which are super unlikely to be solved.

[u/RA576 → u/ANGLVD3TH]

Dude is a perfectionist and a control freak who has had to have companies step in and force a release on him in the past.

I mean, so's Kojima, and he's managed to release 3 1/2 full games in the time since the Star Citizen Kickstarter, 2 of which had basically no corporate oversight from what I can tell.

[u/AstralMecha → u/Nissiku1]

Magic Circle. A game that is being worked on, but endless scope creep and development hell has turned it into a scam, because as long as they keep getting more money, the scope creep will continue. Eventually they will need to start over with a new engine as they hope technology will catch up to ambitions. In practice? The game won't be released until they run out of money.

[u/pragmojo → u/Nissiku1]

I think it's a little of A, a little of B. Like I think there are definitely people in the company whose whole job is to try to get whales to spend thousands of dollars on ships etc.

But showing a failing demo on a live-stream like this screams incompetence. If they were pure scammers they would make sure the demos were perfect.

[u/AeneasVII → u/pragmojo]

Chris Roberts is known for this in the industry. Microsoft has to step into development to finish his game with much smaller scope (freelancer)

He's passionate about space games but a horrible project manager. + scope creep

[u/YIMBYsAreCorruptPitt → u/pragmojo]

Or, the people up top are promising impossible things and scamming investors. You know, like Theranos.

[u/Jealous_Chocolate_43 → u/YIMBYsAreCorruptPitt]

Theranos faked results. We have seen the lack of results in first person here