Continuing the discussion from The Lounge:
What are your thoughts on this guys?
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I think this man has some very legitimate concerns especially with the release date being pushed. Yes it is understandable that if they are going to add so much more it's going to take longer but looking at it from his point of view they could easily push it out as far as they want to milk it.
âWhile the Star Citizen case is a first to take crowd funding to this new level, it does show the potential of this fundraising method when pursued properly. However, as many commentators have pointed out, if crowd funding is to mature as an alternative funding source for games of all budget sizes, it will ultimately need to include safeguards against insufficient planning or plain abuse. Several projects, even some with raises in the seven digits, have failed already to deliver on their promise. A âlook over the fenceâ to the area of independent film financing again provides an insight as to the mechanisms developed in that field, some of which may be a template for future crowd funding of games projects.â
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Recently Ben Lesnick addressed a lot of things in a huge post on July 8 after the first Derek Smart Blog post:
Hey guys! I know you have quite a few concerns this week, and I'd like to take a little time to settle some issues as best I can, informally. This is all in the spirit of improving communication, and I'll do my best to keep on this thread to answer things. Let's try and keep the discussion polite... we have enough toxicity already for a group of people who all want the same thing. :) If there's anything I've missed in this long post, let me know and I'll say what I can. (I'd originally been going to reply to one of the big threads with this, but it got so long that I figured I would just put it out here for everyone to see.)
âStar Marine is delayed indefinitely.â
First of all: the phrase âdelayed indefinitelyâ being bandied around is incorrect. We do not have a release date to announce yet, which is not the same thing. Iâm aware that there is an ongoing sub-debate in which one poster will insist it is delayed indefinitely accompanied by the dictionary definition of indefinitely, and then the counter argument is that the phrase has a different meaning beyond the individual words. This counter argument is correct. âDelayed indefinitelyâ is a games industry PR term for âcancelled.â Anyone (and apparently this is a great many people) reading clickbait headlines will believe weâve cancelled Star Marine. This is not the case, to the point that it implies the absolute opposite of whatâs actually happening.
What is happening? The weekly updates from the team will give you a better idea, but the short story is that Star Marine was not ready for launch when we had hoped (and planned.) We spent several weeks expecting that resolving a then-current crop of blockers would allow a PTU publish. When this didnât happen, we conducted a full review of the module lead by our top technical folks from around the company. What they determined was what you read in Chrisâ letter two weeks ago: we need to rebuild several âboringâ backend pieces and we need to fix serious animation issues before there would be any benefit to a release.
It would not be my place to give you a timetable, but with the number of people Iâm seeing who genuinely believe that we somehow now arenât doing the FPS module I will say that we are talking about a delay of weeks and not months/years/decades. Certainly, I hope not to be pushing folks for weekly updates very soon. :) (And to answer the inevitable question: why donât we give an internal target date right now? Because the worry is that we might find ourselves in exactly the same position when the current set of issues are resolved. Weâre at a point in the process where we believe we know exactly what to do. Weâve already let you know what that is, weâre going to continue sharing the progress⌠and when that work pays off (or if it doesnât) youâll hear about it.)
âStar Marine is Call of Duty in space!â
First of all, let me speak out against reducing any concept to such broad strokes. Yes, Call of Duty and Star Marine are both first person shooters. That is just about where the resemblance ends. (I guess thatâs more of a pet peeve of mine, though. Itâs something publishers require for internal pitches⌠you donât come up with an original idea, you come up with an idea and explain to your boss how much like a popular game it is. To wit, I once gritted my teeth working with EA on a Privateer reboot that was to be pitched as âBattlefield meets Grand Theft Auto.â Shudder.)
But I digress! The important thing that I want to point out here is that Star Marine isnât an aside in any way⌠itâs an essential part of Star Citizen, something the rest of the game must have. We arenât making a giant first person shooter, but weâre making a game that needs that technology in order to work. Star Marine is the blood and sinew of the game, the connective tissue that plugs planetside into boarding into space combat and so on. One of the least sexy but most important aspects of game development is building the behind-the-screens modules that make up the finished form. For everything you see, thereâs dozens of pieces working together: audio systems, streaming managers, graphics renderers, physics layers and so on. Star Marine is that on a macro level⌠it gets plugged into Star Citizen to build the whole weâve dreamed of.
(How long have we dreamed about this? Let me tell you: when I was eighteen years old I was lucky enough to visit Digital Anvil, Chrisâ previous game studio. The Wingman himself gave me a tour of the office and demoâd the then-upcoming StarLancer in their little theater. StarLancer was great, he explained, but StarLancer 2 was going to be even better: they were already working on a design that would let you get out of your ship to fight boarding actions. I thought it was the coolest idea Iâd ever heard. Iâm thirty-four now, and I still think itâs up there. :)
I will end this one noting that we HAVE built a little in-world fiction to make the module a game-within-a-game⌠but thatâs purely gloss, something we can do without taking developer time in order to make the experience more immersive. Itâs intended to show you our dedication to the world of Star Citizen, not our belief that Star Citizen needs to be a CoD-style gunfight.
âYou are spending too much time polishing the game.â
This is absolutely inaccurate. We are grappling with blockers, not a polish (for those unfamiliar, polish is typically what a game does at the very end of the development process⌠you make the art nice, the particle effects fancy, make sure there are no âreplace mes,â etc.) I do not know how folks are remembering Arena Commander as some sort of polished experience. When we shipped it, it had a single ship, physics that didnât work and multiplayer that didnât multiplay. The community helped us make all of these things better, and thereâs still massive amounts of work being done (and to be done.) No one on the team believes that Arena Commander represents the finished form of Star Citizen, and if anyone outside tells you this is the case then they are just wrong. (Now: Arena Commander looks great because we have amazing artists, but even then none of it was polished. Every single piece of art you saw last year has been revamped since then, every single ship has either been reworked or is scheduled to be. Youâre seeing very impressive work, which is what Chris gets out of the team⌠but you arenât seeing a polished game.) (And I am aware that the common reply to this is: but Chris used the /word/ polish in his letter! That is not the same thing as doing a polish pass, and Iâm hard pressed to believe that thatâs genuinely confusing folks.)
âFeature creep!â
I donât have much to say to this, beyond that itâs not accurate. At this point, we are not adding additional features to the plan, weâre building out the ones weâve already scheduled. Iâve seen some recent posts about how Chrisâ âfirst person universeâ is at odds with the original Kickstarter-era plan⌠and thatâs again not the case. Itâs a more recent way of describing what he wants to accomplish, but everything weâre working on is still what was pitched back then: Privateer-style persistent universe, Squadron 42 single player game, first person boarding and so on. (A desire to avoid feature creep is exactly why we stopped doing stretch goals, despite being aware that they drive revenue.)
âYouâre spending all your time on concept sales!â
We arenât! Concept sales are something of a slow burn that uses mostly outsource talent who would not otherwise be working on the game. Early in the process, they require a fair amount of design work. Luckily, thatâs work we need for the broader game: how will bounty hunters work, how passengers will work, how will repair work and so on. Once thatâs done, theyâre given to a concept artist (almost always an outside contractor) who works with high level folks on the form and function. When the shipâs design is finished, it gets assigned to a technical designer who figures out how the specific ship will integrate into the game (How big is it, how do the internals lay out, etc.) The fact that we can have regular concept sales is because we have the pipeline working properly â it should be a good sign for outsiders reviewing our production process, not a bad one! (Although the reason it work so smoothly is that itâs infinitely easier to predict a timeline than when youâre taking into account creating new technology and solving game issues. When a producer is trying to do that, he has to base the timeline on something much more vague⌠whereas you can pretty much know exactly how many hours itâll take Ryan Church to make a spaceship!)
âMy ship isnât flyable yet!â
Despite rumors (and jokes, I promise!) to the contrary, we have not forgotten about the Caterpillar, Banu Merchantman, XiâAn Scout, Constellation, Retaliator, Orion, Herald, Vanguard or any of the others. :) Every ship weâve sold (and quite a few we havenât) are on the block schedule and every dog will get his day. Why are some ships prioritized before others? Thereâs a couple reasons for that.
The thing to remember is that we work with limited development resources. Thatâs not to say we donât have enough people or we need more money or we need to do so-and-so. I know that everyone imagines Star Citizen as kind of a straight line: youâll do this ship then this feature and then this ship. But try imagining it like a producer does, as a giant puzzle they need to solve, a huge schedule grid and a list of personnel they can assign. So while itâs tempting to say: letâs get the Vanguard out today and sell it! the actual way itâs done is: letâs make sure the Vanguard is ready by the time we plan to finish the game. Imagine (and these numbers are made up) you have twenty ships and five artists. Even if you kick off five ships at once (Instead of one, or equivalent parts of ten of them which often makes more sense) thereâs still going to naturally have to be a priority system to get to the final goal rather than an immediate benchmark. And with that, I can share a little bit of the logic behind the process, how we assign out our resources to make the ships weâve promised on the schedule:
- Ships that will be used in Squadron 42 are a priority. (I know this is taken many different ways, and I even have a point to address for it below⌠but for me, it shows our dedication to the game above increasing revenue. The artists who are building UEE battleships and Vanduul dreadnaughts could instead churn out ships and variants that we could sell⌠and we donât do that.)
- Ships for Arena Commander 1.0 are the second priority. These are the single seat ships that make sense to include in the current dogfighting alpha. We are very, very close to the end for these, with the Merlin and the Herald actively being worked on now. There are a few more that were added to the schedule later that weâll see down the line, such as the Archimedes⌠but theyâre coming!
- The bigger ships arenât going to be flyable until Arena Commander 2.0. If you recall the Arena Commander 1.0 launch way back when, we ended up publishing with just the Hornet and then we methodically finished and introduced all of the other ships. We will do the same thing for the multicrew release: perfect one or two example ships and then use the processes weâve created to make the others flyable.
- Some ships just wouldnât make sense to focus on yet. We have a dogfighting arena right now, for building out that very important part of the game⌠but quite a few ships ARENâT oriented for fighting whatsoever. Things like cargo ships, tugs, science ships, mining ships and the like will be prioritized in line to go with the tech required to make them interesting for you. So the Orion can come when we debut mining, the Hull when we start the cargolympics and so on.
âTheyâre only making assets for Squadron 42!â
This is also not the case. Many of our artists are working on Squadron 42 and many are not. Here in Santa Monica, the only artist we have on a Squadron asset is the one assigned to the Herald, which is a ship that will appear in Arena Commander 1.0 well before itâs needed for SQ42. The good news is that as Squadron 42 ships are finished, we free up extremely talented artists who can then focus on the ships in the queue.
âSales are down, weâre doomed!â
We are not concerned, and you shouldnât be either. We saw the same trend last year, and are keenly aware that interest in Star Citizen is based on our ability to deliver fresh content. Star Marine has delayed that, and the influx of new players suffers as a result. But every single person on the team is confident in what weâre doing and that weâre going to deliver things that deserve real attention.
(I know how frustrating it is when we say that something looks cool but we canât share it, so please forgive me this one. I shared it with the mod team, and they encouraged me to tell you all. About two weeks back, when Erin was in town, he called everyone together to show some of the first selects from the Squadron 42 motion capture shoot. It was incredibly early temp footage⌠lips sometimes didnât move, objects were missing texture, crowd scenes were empty⌠but I teared up like a baby seeing it. It was the reminder we all needed that incredible things are coming, and it was a personal assurance to me that the project Iâd given so much to was going to be a reality⌠that Iâd helped bring back the spirit of Wing Commander. It was a big emotional moment for me.)âWhere are the previous web features youâve talked about?â
This is a good question, and reviewing our past six months of communication I believe itâs probably the most serious concern here. The short answer is, of course, that theyâre still coming. Organizations 2.0 and the star map are still in progress, although like every other aspect of the game there are blockers and there are resource allocation requirements. As with Star Marine, itâs the decidedly unsexy back-end stuff that takes the most time. Turbulent has had a lot added to their plate that they didnât originally intend to handle, from actually working on Arena Commander (leaderboards, matchmaking, etc.) to the massive tax changes earlier this year mandated by the EU.
In the case of the star map, itâs coming along very well. The most significant blocker is getting the data right at this point, which means locking down areas of the PU that we were (until recently) free to change and move around at will. Organizations 2.0 is taking longer, although theyâre looking now at how to bring some of the features out earlier. The biggest blocker there is that weâd rather have it tie into the persistent universe than be a sort of fake web-only experience. Expect to hear more about it later this year (thatâs all I could get out of âem! :)).
âChris Roberts is wasting his time directing the performance capture shoot.â
Positively untrue. I am not sure where the belief that Chris fell into a black hole came from (save simply the fact that he canât do 10ftC while on set) but it is not true. Our production process already works with teams around the world and weâve done the same here â Chris is still intimately involved with everything from the intricacies of ship design to what kind of boots particular characters will wear. And frankly, heâs the best man for the job. Chris is an accomplished interactive director, arguably the worldâs finest for this genre given his experience with Wing Commander III and IV (two projects he both ran and directed.) The plan was to have him direct the shoot from day one, and that wasnât ever going to change. We made sure our company structure and our internal communications would support it well in advance, and⌠well, they did.
âX employee is leaving, weâre doomed!â
As I said in a recent post, turnover sucks⌠but itâs a constant in this or pretty much any other industry. The sky is not falling. From the inside, itâs always interesting to see how the world reacts. Because it comes off as so specific â the guys who decide to let you know theyâre leaving like Travis or Eric are the heart and the soul of the game⌠because you know them above anything else. In the past two years, weâve had some amazing talent that has moved on for plenty of reasons (other opportunities, personal issues, etc.) and itâs always sort of a shame to see theyâre never appreciated. Iâll also say that the averages work out pretty well: we are hiring extremely talented people many times faster than we lose them.
I also believe thereâs some confusion as to just what a producer does. Itâs nowhere near as glamorous as it sounds: they arenât designing the game or telling anyone how itâs going to work⌠theyâre responsible for very methodical processes. A producer is essentially a scheduler, someone who works with giant spreadsheets and charts to make sure the components needed to realize Chrisâ vision can happen and that personnel are tasked with individual processes. And then theyâre responsible for holding the whip: you said the Freelancer rework would take seven days and youâre on day eight, whatâs going on and how do we fix it? and so on.
To speak personally: Iâm very sorry to see Travis go, he was a friend and I will miss his company (we actually first met when we were teenagers, when his dad was a producer for Chris!) I didnât know Alex very well, but I certainly have a high degree of respect for him. And for my honest money, the biggest loss was Chelsea. She really helped set the kind and dedicated tone for the CS department early on, and weâre going to be extra careful to make sure the care she put into helping backers carries over as we get bigger.
And let me end this one by adding: if thereâs anything that genuinely makes me unhappy, itâs the speculation about actual people and their lives. Itâs almost always bizarrely wrong and itâs just so stupid. Did anyone see the Reddit thread about how Chelseaâs âbody languageâ during her goodbye on RtV proved there was something sinister going on? I mean⌠seriously? The drama folks are imagining doesnât exist. Like most people, weâre more like a family than a TV soap opera; thereâs certainly tense moments on occasion while weâre arguing about big things (I will confess being ready to murder Travis once or twice⌠twice), but at the end of the day we truly all get along. The reaction on RtV was real because weâre all genuinely sorry to lose the friends weâd see every day, nothing more.
âItâs not open development!â
I think this is an easy one to attack because itâs a vague concept; thereâs no dictionary definition for âopen developmentâ and if there were weâd still argue about it. We see open development as sharing our progress with you every step of the way, and I believe we do a fairly good job of that. Weâll continue to get better, weâll continue to work from feedback⌠but we make the entire team available to interact with you, we tell you what weâre doing on a weekly and monthly basis⌠we think itâs pretty open.
But make no mistake: open development does not mean you get every single build, or that you get to play with everything we do the moment we start on it. Backers help test the game when it makes sense for them to do so â when weâre at a point where the feedback is valuable instead of obvious. Working it any other way would be a very expensive mess (pushing a patch costs money; patching three times a day for the sake of showing you weâre not lying when we say the game doesnât work yet would use up that $80 million pretty darn quick!)
(A concern Iâve seen relating to this: thereâs so much stuff in the leak that we havenât released yet. Thatâs absolutely true, but it is NOT a case of holding material for some fancy reveal. Much of it is Squadron 42 content, a fair amount is part of the upcoming social module⌠but none of it is Arena Commander content that should have gone out for review yet. I think the telling thing that speaks to our development, though, is that pretty much anything folks have dug out is something you already knew exists and not some crazy surprise. We donât share everything right away because itâs counter-productive to the development process; weâre proud of how cool Star Citizen looks⌠but we also know that our job is to make Star Citizen work, not make sure every alpha build is polished and finished at any given moment. That means coming up with a balance that preserves some sense of discovery for things like Squadron 42. Itâs not a perfect science, but itâs something we put a lot of thought into.)
âCIG is not communicating with us!â
I firmly believe that this is absolutely incorrect, but I also believe that itâs a criticism that will never, ever go away. I will continue to push my folks to their limits to communicate with you and we will always try to improve⌠but if youâre someone who honestly believes development is behind an impassable wall, youâre incorrect. Between AtV, RtV, the monthly report, weekly Star Marine reports, Jump Point articles, Meet the Devs, Bug Smashers, 10 for⌠weâre putting an insane amount of content out there. And weâll keep doing more, to the best of our abilities!
The ensuing argument for this one is of course that weâre telling but not showing. To that, I have to say⌠thatâs correct. In so much as weâre anything, we are reporters and not coders, designers or marketeers (probably not a word.) The bottom line is that itâs hard enough to take ten minutes from leads to do the weekly Spectrum Dispatch videos where they tell you what theyâre doing⌠but the shortest marketing video to go with such a video is at least four hours taken away from an artist or a technical designer⌠and often quite a bit more time. Showing today is a battle between taking time away from gamedev to reassure folks that the game exists, and thatâs a losing proposition. Weâre working to hire an internal marketing artist to do some of this, but itâs never going to be the way youâre likely imagining. Showing you the game is a lot more complicated than running StarCitizen.exe and capturing some footage for ourselves. Weâre here to tell you whatâs happening, and show you when it doesnât interrupt development (like with the recent video of Randy working on the Starliner; we want to do a lot more of that! But itâs a matter of being in the right place when the work is happening, which can be hard to do with studios around the world.
Look MMO's take time to make. Here is a handy chart showing how long it took to make some of the biggest MMO's:
Star Citizen is a very ambitious title. There isn't a need to worry right now. I've backed the game and I'm going to ride this out. We may not get the finally game till 2016 or 2017 but the things is CIG has provided consistent content. They've let us now what the hold up for Star Marine is. We have Gamescom coming up and CIG will be there. Then we have Citizencon. I'm going to watch and see how this all plays out. I'm still going to do some digging into Derek Smart. My journalistic instinct tells me to dig so I'm going to see what I can learn.
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I especially like that graph it puts things into perspective.
I am not invested in Star Citizen, just to get that out of the way.
The reason for this are that initially I missed the kickstarter and by the time I was aware of it it had reached $42 million and when I read through the list of what the game would be I said to me self "Nice idea it will be great in about 20 years." Now that has continued and it is at the point where it seems like a game of this scale is beyond the development cycle of the people making its life cycle. Literally they will all be dead before what they have promised will come out in full form. Which then leads to a new team an new views.
I joked once that Star Citizen will be the greatest kickstarter cash grab and dump ever. That look worryingly true for those who have paid in now.
The thing is this would all be fine if they had taken the original goals and the money at that time, $2.someodd million, and made that game we would not be here right now.
What they could have done is then continue, as the have, to accept money and tack on promises for those that donated past the original goals. Basically instead of making one game make several, fund a studio and series rather than funding one monolithic game. Or even expansions that at a later date could be added to the base game and some years down the line some of this money would go to rebuilding the engine and assets to incrementally upgrade the original game. That would be sensible. This right now is not.
I do however thing that a Star Citizen will come out, but I don't think it will be the Star Citizen that people paid for. There is simply too much in it at this stage to be that game. Even the FPS portion has all ready been postponed indefinitely now. That was something people paid for and is now not happening for a very long to possibly never happening time scale.
I am invested in star citizen as far as hope goes. I think it honestly stands a chance at doing the unthinkable. Replacing EVE and WoW as the biggest MMO of all time. But only if they do it right, and do it well.
That is all.
It hasn't been delayed or postponed indefinitely, I'm going to quote from what I posted from Ben Lesnick:
âStar Marine is delayed indefinitely.â
First of all: the phrase âdelayed indefinitelyâ being bandied around is incorrect. We do not have a release date to announce yet, which is not the same thing. Iâm aware that there is an ongoing sub-debate in which one poster will insist it is delayed indefinitely accompanied by the dictionary definition of indefinitely, and then the counter argument is that the phrase has a different meaning beyond the individual words. This counter argument is correct. âDelayed indefinitelyâ is a games industry PR term for âcancelled.â Anyone (and apparently this is a great many people) reading clickbait headlines will believe weâve cancelled Star Marine. This is not the case, to the point that it implies the absolute opposite of whatâs actually happening.
What is happening? The weekly updates from the team will give you a better idea, but the short story is that Star Marine was not ready for launch when we had hoped (and planned.) We spent several weeks expecting that resolving a then-current crop of blockers would allow a PTU publish. When this didnât happen, we conducted a full review of the module lead by our top technical folks from around the company. What they determined was what you read in Chrisâ letter two weeks ago: we need to rebuild several âboringâ backend pieces and we need to fix serious animation issues before there would be any benefit to a release.
It would not be my place to give you a timetable, but with the number of people Iâm seeing who genuinely believe that we somehow now arenât doing the FPS module I will say that we are talking about a delay of weeks and not months/years/decades. Certainly, I hope not to be pushing folks for weekly updates very soon. :) (And to answer the inevitable question: why donât we give an internal target date right now? Because the worry is that we might find ourselves in exactly the same position when the current set of issues are resolved. Weâre at a point in the process where we believe we know exactly what to do. Weâve already let you know what that is, weâre going to continue sharing the progress⌠and when that work pays off (or if it doesnât) youâll hear about it.)
Now on Firday's we are getting FPS module reports latest one here: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14829-Star-Marine-Status-Update
I think it's safe to say they are still working on the FPS module. It's just delayed.
So it is going to be 8 weeks or less before it is in some sort of shape to show? Not to sound inflamatory but...
If it is not months than that defines it a less than 8 weeks. How long ago was that posted? I remember reading it at least a few weeks ago. I don't mean t sound like a dick but those are his own words.
@Zibob It was posted last week on July 8. I'm fine with how you are asking questions. It is important to ask them. Weeks is a little broad for me. There are a couple of ways I can read that. One they think they can take care of the issues in a couple of weeks and then maybe launch it at Gamescon (Which is pure speculation on my part). Another could be like you said less than 8 weeks. I'm in the wait and see mode right now.
That is fair, it seem a lot longer than a week ago that they said it would be delayed. Like I said I am not invested at all but I do look forward to seeing how this progresses.
The thing with that FPS module is that it was not part of the original, it was nothing to do with what the kickstarter backers paid for. I think on that alone that people who paid for the extras should get the extras when they are done, after the main game. This is not a priority and should be left aside until the main game is completed. It does not look like that is happening.
There will be people who invested in it to get the game that the kickstarter promised and are now without a game, without recourse and long past the deadline for delivery.
That I think is the main issue here. All the other goals should be secondary and excluded from development until such a time when it makes sense to go about doing them.
After forcing myself to read through him talking himself up in the first article, I found Smart had some rather good points. I'm hardly invested in Star Citizen, but from what I've seen, this looks like a rather standard situation of unbridled optimism.
Games, AAA games in particular, cost many millions, even when coming from test-tried-and-true devs. Here's a Kotaku article with the costs of many games. Here are just a few of the more recent:
Beyond: Two Souls - $27 million
World of Warcraft - $200 million - In a September 2008 analyst conference call, Blizzard disclosed that the cost of four years of post-launch upkeep... was $200 million.
Defiance - $70 million
Disney Infinity - $100 million
Destiny - $140 million
Watch Dogs - $68 million
Wikipedia has some similar info.
Many games no where near as expansive as SC have cost substantially more than SC has funding for. If that doesn't send up red flags, I don't know what does. One of the biggest parts of game design/dev is CUTTING the things you cannot achieve with your resources. We all want the game SC promises, but there's a reason no one has made it yet - it is an uncut game.
Feature creep is as small as adding a new model. Looking at the SC stretch goals, some of them are the definition of it (eg the most recent "modular ships" feature). Ben Lesnick can say that these were rather things already in the game design docs, but I think this is a sad case of denial...
And besides, if they were already promised features, why make them stretch goals? Really, I think the push behind their stretch goals was/is a symptom of reality becoming apparent to a project that had its head the the clouds.
Furthermore, I would very much agree with Derek Smart's assessment of their team - 4 studios across the world, and a crew of 200-300+? Unless they have leads/coordinators with an unimaginable level of talent, my one word: yikes.
Lastly, delays: I don't mind them, generally speaking. But what's the simplest, best, most professional business practice? To deliver on promises and in a timely fashion. Derek Smart in his team simply don't have the chops/exp for me to give them the benefit of the doubt as I did with Tim Schafer and Broken age.
Maybe I'm a pessimist. When Chris talks about the game it sounds fantastic. However, it also sounds like a child's dream.
Some important info concerning Derek Smart. CIG refunded his pledge because:
Hey guys!
I believe I can clarify this. We refunded Mr. Smartâs package because he was using Star Citizen as a platform to gain attention as part of a campaign to promote his âLine of Defenseâ space game. Our ToS (or in this case, the Kickstarter ToS) allows us to refund troubled users who we would rather not have interacting with the community. The process lets us entirely disable their accounts, preventing them from playing the finished game. Think of it as the video game equivalent of a âwe reserve the right to refuse service to anyoneâ sign in a restaurant. Weâve used this ability a limited number of times in the past, always with the aim of improving the community (until today, the most famous example being our old friend jcrg99/Manzes/PonyMillar/he of many other alts.)
I do now want to stress that that is not to say you can get your money back by simply being as obnoxious as possible; weâre also able to ban accounts from the forums without requiring a refund. But sometimes we take a look at a user and decide that theyâre so toxic or their intentions are so sinister that we simply donât want them associated with Star Citizen.
As for refund requests working the other way: per the ToS, weâre not required to offer them. We do try and work with backers who are facing hardships, but the hard truth is that the money is by necessity being spent to develop a game rather than sitting unused somewhere (that being the significant difference with Steam; those refunds are taken out of their gamesâ profits rather than their development budgets.)
Eric Wingman Peterson also made some interesting statements:
Look, I am no longer at CIG, but I recall when Chris and I were working at Origin, Derek Smart sent several negative emails accusing us of stealing his ideas etc, the guy is just not worth the time to read.
He is just trying to get attention - something none of us should ever give him.
IMHO, I think CIG did the right thing here, that guy is just not worth the trouble.
WM
Now before we even give any head to Derek Smart, we should first exam a couple things:
Who is he?
Derek Smart is the President of 3000 AD. He has a website with a webpage about himself.
Why is he doing this?
To raise an awareness of his game. in each of his blog post on his website he talked about his game Line of Defense which wow look a space sim game.
What is his reputation?
It really isn't that good of a one. Polygon wrote a great article about him in 2012 and creates a clearer image as to who he is.
Based on what I have found on Derek Smart is someone to ignore.
Another Question we should ask: Is Star Citizen worth having patience on?
On Massively OP Jef Reahard wrote an Opinion piece on why he thinks Star Citizen is worth the wait.
My opinion: We are gamers. Does anyone here have any experience making a game on the level of Star Citizen? I'm going to trust CIG and give them the benefit of doubt because they have not done one thing to make me question my backing their game. That is all I have to say on this matter at this time.
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Wow what a bag of dicks. Welp you can't buy better publicity than pissing of a fellow game dev who is all ready got an audience talking about you game.
EDIT: To expand this will nto stop him comparing his games to theirs, all this serves to do is fuel his platform to talk out against Star Citizen. Which is not good, they should have thought that through. Further I think he has some very valid concerns it is a big scope, All doable but as above, so below.
After FULLY reading both of the blog and spending this much
This how I feel
what have i done
EDIT: goddamn I spent double what that guy paid and never felt an ounce of regret because I want... NEEDED a game like this to exist. I knew I should have just stopped at my 350r, but then I wanted more guns. Then I wanted to be a trader which explains my Freelancer MAX and then I was like what if i need to move something bigger so then once again, credit card in hand, bought a Taurus Connie.
I feel really low right now.
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Fair enough. I personally look at the modules as a way to test aspects of the whole game to see how they will work. Arena Commander gives us a very rough idea of how space combat will work. The racing gives us an idea of how racing will look. Star Marine will give as idea of how ground and space based FPS combat will work. Etc.
Now the part I'm most excited about is Squadron 42 which Chris Roberts just finished film so now it'll be in post production.
We will all see how this plays out.
That was a splendid short read and was something I had suspected all along. The man does have so.e points but hes just being an ass for the sake of being an ass. The comments are also very informative on that post.