We’ve definitely entered the phase of this saga when Roberts is almost wholly focused on getting money, not making a product.
I keep thinking of the Theranos scam. I am equally certain Elizabeth Holmes really started out thinking she could have the product actually made, but at some point they started mostly being about getting VC, and eventually it was just openly about lying to people to keep the money coming in. Without looking at their emails I don’t know exactly when that realization set in for her, but at some point it did.
What makes this somewhat different though is that what Holmes was trying to do defied the laws of physics and the limits of human engineering as we currently understand them or will anytime soon. It was inevitable that she would reach a point where, in the darkness of night, she switched over and realized “I am now running a scam, and I need to juggle it until I can find a way out.” Roberts never has to reach that point. For one thing, he is not outright scamming anyone; the lunatics who paid him $1000 for an imaginary ship got precisely what they paid for. For another, unlike Theranos, which could never had made what they said they were making, there is no reason why you can’t make a working Star Citizen; as many have pointed out, games like EVE or Elite do many of the things SC claims it will do and they didn’t require $300 million before they had a working game. It is absolutely possible that with the right management, CIG could have Star Citizen ready in a year. The thing is that Chris Roberts isn’t the right management.
I suspect he might still be in the “lying to himself” stage and not quite in the “he knows it’s a scam and he’s just raising money as fast as he can before escape to Tahiti” simply because this lie can be sustained forever.
As with many scams, part of its genius is that most suckers have only been taken for a relatively small amount of money. Which means most of them, as and when they wake up to the fact they have wasted three or four figures, just write it off to experience (especially if they don’t want to admit to others that they were in fact prepared to pay that much for a gaming experience). Even if enough of them decided to sue Roberts, and even if they won, the legal fees would take most of any settlement. So it’s just not worth it.
Apologies if this is a dumb question as I haven’t been following this closely (in fact I’m only aware of it through this thread, which I have found fascinating even though I’m not even a gamer), but are there any big investors who might take him on at some stage?
I don’t know; I keep thinking of the Theranos scam too, but I think you might be underestimating the human capacity for self-deception. See this article in Vanity Fair about Holmes’s final months at Theranos. If the article is to be believed, she was in total denial right up until the bitter end. They quote a former executive as saying “Elizabeth sees herself as the victim.” It’s not clear that she ever thought that Theranos couldn’t do what she was trying to do.
The other story this makes me think of is that of Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, the girl who spent several years in NYC living a luxury lifestyle as a fake heiress on other people’s dime. To an impartial observer form a distance, her actions were those of a classic con artist, but according to people who knew her, she really believed her “arts foundation” was going to happen.
I think what happens in these situations is that people fall into the cargo cult mentality, believing that superficial symbols are the actual cause of the real thing. Like primitive tribesmen hoping that clearing out a field to look like a runway and marching around in formation with sticks mocked up to look like rifles was going to cause magical airplanes to appear out of the sky and deliver goods to them the way they did to the British colonists, Elizabeth Holmes saw Steve Jobs and thought that being in Silicon Valley, wearing a black turtleneck, and giving speeches was what caused a person to have a successful technology company.
This might seem unlikely for Chris Roberts given that he has a history of making real, successful video games, but you never know. Fame and money go to a person’s head.
The line between self-deception and running a scam isn’t just blurry; they’re overlapping concepts. I can totally believe Elizabeth Holmes was both committing outright fraud, lying and deceiving investors and spending all her time running scams, while ALSO having convinced herself on some level that the machine would somehow save her. The capacity of people to deceive themselves includes the ability to believe completely contradictory things.
Of course, we also have to go by what they say to know what they really think, which inthe case of criminals often is not a reliable source. I have read authors who stated that Charles Ponzi himself thought right up to the end that he thought he was running an honest business, and while I believe he probably told folks that, the problem is that Ponzi was already an experienced criminal and colossal liar who had run scams of various kinds before he built his… well, his Ponzi scheme, and I have a lot of trouble buying that after running one scam or another, THAT time he didn’t realize he was a criminal just because he told people that.
Yeah, ancient history. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the man hasn’t actually released a game in almost 20 years. Games today are an order of magnitude bigger and more complex than they were in the 1990s. Maybe he really believes that he’s capable of making a modern game; maybe he’s just deluding himself.
46 years ago, Liz Carmichael claimed to have invented a new, fuel efficient three-wheeled vehicle. Turned out that the whole project was little more than smoke & mirrors and she was convicted on fraud charges.
Chris Roberts is marginally better, given that he has a somewhat usable product rather than a pretty shell with nothing underneath.
The biggest difference is that no individual component about the game is unachievable or even particularly impressive. It’s always been about the scope and scale. And for the first several years of development, they kept throwing more scope and more scale on the pile. It’s a trading sim! A space fighter! An FPS! An RPG! An MMO! A full single player campaign! An explorer sim! A base builder!
Theranos never could have delivered because the technology didn’t exist. Star Citizen could have, if Chris Roberts had cared more about an achievable game and less about its platonic ideal.
Same story,. of course, albeit in miniature, but with a telling end; Roberts’s vision for Freelancer was basically Star Citizen, a huge, persistent space fightin’ universe and MMO. They ran out of money, because that was before Kickstarter. So he sold out to Microsoft, who immediately came in and said “You can’t develop this forever. Create a working game that does something. Here’s your schedule.” The result was a perfectly decent game, even if it wasn’t a gigantic thing Roberts initially envisioned.
At this point in time, I am so far behind in news about Star Citizen that maybe I’ve just lost sight of what it is supposed to be (aside from giant moneygrab, of course)… But what is supposed to be there that isn’t already present in Elite: Dangerous?
At the moment I think a fair elevator pitch for the game is:
All the best space sim/trading parts of Elite: Dangerous
All the best exploration/survival parts of No Man’s Sky
A space fighter better than anything currently on the market (though Squadrons is getting very good press)
A full-fledged competitive FPS
A full-fledged RPG, though I’m not sure what its scope is supposed to be
Base building and survival, though I’m also uncertain of the scope there
Ah, so not just all that and a bag of chips, but the kitchen sink, too.
I’ve “owned” it since… 2015? I got it as a bonus from a video card purchase. At the time, I was only really able to walk around in a starport, essentially (could be remembering wrong).
Presumably because of my browsing this thread, I get suggestions for Star Citizen related content on other sites. Reading the comments on Reddit and YouTube, I’m shocked by how many people there apparently are who still believe this game is actually going to be released.
I mean, there is a game, and I’m sure it will eventually be “completed”. It just won’t realistically e anywhere close to what was promised. People are just defending the dream against the mundane, unpleasant reality.
Well, there is always the possibility CIG will fall apart or go belly up before the game releases. I guess, though, that a real game company could then pick up the debris for pennies on the dollar and release something.
Looking at that first link Skywatcher provided, I mean, I’m now starting to wonder if this is all some kind of incredibly expensive joke.
The fact PC Games published an article this wide-eyed and optimistic about the game, after all this, is just astounding. Does CIG pay them? They must, right? Even the article’s title is a joke.
The features that the trailer itself breathlessly announces… I almost cannot believe what I’m seeing. Here they are, and I swear I am not making this up:
“Inventory control.” You can manage inventory by swapping things between different boxes that have little boxes in them. You know, like games have been doing for ten or twenty years.
“Throwing mechanics.” You can throw things. I remember when I was amazed by that 25 years ago.
“Formidable weapons.” Wow, there’s weapons in a combat game.
“Force reactions.” This is their term for the idea that when stuff hits other stuff, the other stuff moves. Again, pretty awesome in 1997.
“Planetary Improvements.” Whatever the fuck that means; it isn’t clear, but what I’d like to call your attention to, if you’ll watch the trailer, is that this is presented while a dude in a spacesuit walks around, and what’s interesting is that the guy in the spacesuit is shown walking down a staircase in an odd, herky-jerky manner. Haven’t FPS games pretty much perfected the movements of a human by now? $300 million and they didn’t get that quite right yet?
No idea why a German site is the only one currently mentioning how the game deals with deaths but here we go.
(Bolding theirs; translated to English by Google.)
The game will therefore distinguish between three possible and not always final types of death:
Mortally wounded: Strictly speaking, and also in terms of game mechanics, you die. However, your character can survive, be rescued and then continue to play with him.
Death: Your character can die and then be cloned. However, this doesn’t work forever: at some point the DNA becomes too unstable for the cloning process and you have to say goodbye to your character.
Ultimate Death: The character dies forever. You continue to play with a descendant who inherits parts of the property and reputation of your previous character.
Your death must not be too deadly: How often you can jump the shovel of death depends entirely on the nature of your death. For example, those who bleed to death will survive in most cases. Your chances of keeping your character after this head first was shot into the sun are (unsurprisingly) rather slim.
Those who die and are cloned lose their equipment . Because what you are wearing or lugging around with you is not just cloned. If you want to have your belongings back, you must first find your old body. And even then, you will only get your items back if they have not already been looted by another player.
The studio says they are currently reaching a point where they can actively begin developing the feature.
There is currently no specific release date for the permadeath feature in Star Citizen.