This has got to be some kind of money laundering scheme.
I’m still guessing Ponzi scheme. Kind of. Ponzi and his copiers paid actual money to the first investors from the money of the next investors; Roberts is running more of a standard confidence scam where he uses the money to give people… hope, I guess.
I dunno. The small investors, sure, but the big ones? I think someone should check to see whether all of the subcontractors and employees supposedly on Roberts’ payroll actually exist. I see a company where huge amounts of money go in and huge amounts of money go out. Who’s to say that the money isn’t going right back to the hands of the people who “invested” it?
From my recollection, one of the great hallmarks or a confidence scam is that it relies on our inherent weakness to the sunk-cost fallacy. That’s what Roberts is doing here - he’s got people who have invested years of their life and hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars in the idea of THE GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME BY THE GREATEST GENIUS OF ALL TIME. If they pull out now, they lose all that invested time and money and they might never get to play THE GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME.
Of course they exist. They are his friends and family.
Does the game have those features? Boarding parties? You’re writing in the present tense, as if people can do those things now.
I mean, I don’t actually believe thing things will happen, do you?
I’m a month shy of the one-year anniversary of this post, but an update caught my eye:
No Man’s Sky is getting cross-play tomorrow.
And Elite: Dangerous is supposed to get “space legs” next year.
Meanwhile, pretty much the only thing coming out of Cloud Imperium is hype, hype, and more hype. Where all that money is actually going is anyone’s guess.
$300 million; still no end in sight.
It’s never happening. It’s a scam.
It’s not just a scam. It’s the greatest scam in the history of video gaming.
An article popped up in my feed today, but it was one of those awful “stories” that’s just a bunch of links to a Reddit thread.
The thread is interesting, though. Pretty much nobody is defending CIG in it.
There was also some talk about Chris Roberts being MIA since late last year, but I don’t follow the game closely enough to know anything about that.
The best comment that I saw in the thread - somebody said that they bought the game in 2012. “The year one of my kids was born. He’s coding his own basic games now…”
There’s also a post that is (presumably) by the guy with MS who sued to get a refund.
I don’t think that I would call it a scam in the sense that I don’t believe there was willful malice. However, Roberts also clearly acted incorrectly in the sense that his plans were grandiose and implausible, and involved a bunch of un-necessary elements.
The irony is that, for a far smaller budget, Elite now basically has all the features of Star Citizen and wqill release the second major expansion before SC hits Beta, except it’s also far bigger and more varied and actually functions as advertised. Star Citizen is obsolete before it was even released. This wasn’t inevitable; it’s just that Roberts couldn’t properly manage and lead.
What are the chances he uses Covid-19 to shut the whole thing down and walk away?
I think it’s unlikely as long as he’s getting paid huge sums to indulge his whims.
Precisely. The whole thing will continue if the money continues.
While I 100% agree it was not a scam when it started. I am not entirely convinced it is not taking on scamlike traits now. I don’t know that it is. I just think it’s possible. I previously mentioned the example of Theranos, a company that when it started absolutely was not a scam - Elizabeth whatshername was just stupid and megalomaniacal, but she really did set out to invent a cool thing. It just became a scam later as lies piled atop other lies.
It’s possible Star Citizen is becoming like that, that Roberts, people working for him, or both are starting to lie, paper over the truth, produce cinematics being foisted off as gameplay, and other things in a desperate attempt to keep the money rolling in. That is Possibility A.
Possibility B is just that Roberts is really this self-deluded. He clearly did not know how to manage a project this grand, and he might STILL be fooling himself into thinking he’s a genius and everyone else is just wrong. Well, not everyone else - SC still has a cadre of people who’ve invested thousands of dollars in ships they cannot fly, but who are fully rooked in, Spanish Prisoner style, and still praise Roberts and put videos on Youtube breathlessly raving about the latest feature he planned.
The thing is… the official videos look soooooo boring. Nothing about the game looks innovative or impressive.
Abandoning development would open them up to lawsuits.
So would completing the game.
The only sensible (not to mention profitable) move is to continue developing it.
So, I was going to hold off on making any more Star Citizen posts, but well, here we are. I didn’t want to have more mockery or slamming CIG, because at this point, what is there to say? Its been said many times over. However, while taking a break I noticed one of the most bizarre stories about it, although it may not seem so at first.
To clarify, CIG just released a new plan for Squadron 42, a game (or part of one) that’s four years late at this point. They realistically should have been able to make a game from scratch and design a major expansion in that time, but that’s another conversation entirely. The bizarre part is that, as per the release, there still isn’t a plan. Instead they’re planning to eventually create a new plan.
They don’t have a plan now. They’re just working on devising the goals for developing a new plan. Four years after the release date.
That… is mildly terrifying. I’m sure everyone knew this was not a well-managed project, but this release implies that they’ve accomplished virtually nothing. Project revisions happen, but they don’t need communication of planning a “revised roadmap” because you just adjust the existing plan. Instead, that strongly implies that no one actually managed anything at all from the very beginning. There is no world in which you should need a “rough mockup” roadmap at this stage.
*I also have a big pet peeve about companies that use “roadmaps” because, in my experience, they are largely bull from beginning to end and not a serious project. But that’s a rant for another day.
Sounds remarkably like Trump’s COVID strategy, announced at last week’s briefing: the strategy is to develop a strategy.
What kills me is that I watched the Squadron 42 trailer, and… I have zero interest in playing that game even if it ever exists. There is nothing new or interesting there. It’s been done.
So they haven’t just failed to come up with a plan. They don’t really even have much of an IDEA.