Star Citizen Catch-all

TheGameguru wrote:

I’m still on it’s a money laundering scheme. There’s just no way actual customers gave them an additional $13M in May.

Let's put it like this:

The second highest crowdfunded video game of all time is Prison Architect. It raised $19 million.

The third highest is Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. It raised $12.66 million.

Star Citizen May 2021 alone would be the third highest video game crowdfunding of all time.

Anyone that still thinks all of this money transfer is purely above-board and game related, I no longer know what to tell you.

Having secured a modern PC in June, I admit to being kind of excited to reinstall this after learning a few of my colleagues had really gotten into playing SC with each other after work.

The first time I logged in it took me waaaay too long to figure out how to even get out of bed...

I walked around the space station and was feeling nauseous due to how framey it was, despite turning down most of the graphical settings.

The next time out my coworker promised to show me the ropes. It took nearly 30 minutes for us to physically find each other on the station. When I finally climbed into my ship, I couldn't get out of the hangar because one of my wings had clipped through a wall, which sent the entire ship model into a spastic tailspin. It eventually began sinking into the hangar as if in quicksand.

I rebooted and got myself back in the cabin, laying in bed again. My coworker suggested another course of action but by that time I needed to log off. Had chores to do and dinner to eat. He was very sad about that.

It's sort of an understatement for me to say the game is unfinished. Another time, in another phase of my life, I might have been happy to push through something like this to find the fun. But I'm 44 and it feels like there's a new, sexy game to play every other week, not to mention a personal backlog that spans a couple football fields (if we could make imaginary game boxes out of all the digital goods we own now).

Plenty of room to spare on my HDD but SC still felt like the 60GB equivalent of a lump of lead sitting on my PC. Even uninstalling the game was a convoluted process!

*Legion* wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

I’m still on it’s a money laundering scheme. There’s just no way actual customers gave them an additional $13M in May.

Let's put it like this:

The second highest crowdfunded video game of all time is Prison Architect. It raised $19 million.

The third highest is Richard Garriott's Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. It raised $12.66 million.

Star Citizen May 2021 alone would be the third highest video game crowdfunding of all time.

Anyone that still thinks all of this money transfer is purely above-board and game related, I no longer know what to tell you.

So if I've got illegal dollars I want washed, what am I getting by giving my money to this group? Like, I'm getting $0.00 on my illgotten gains, right? Shouldn't I be getting something back?

Or am I buying fake ships and then reselling them on the secondary market to non criminals and thereby turning $0.65 on each $1 (or whatever)? Is that how it works?

Top_Shelf wrote:

So if I've got illegal dollars I want washed, what am I getting by giving my money to this group? Like, I'm getting $0.00 on my illgotten gains, right? Shouldn't I be getting something back?

Or am I buying fake ships and then reselling them on the secondary market to non criminals and thereby turning $0.65 on each $1 (or whatever)? Is that how it works?

65 cents on the dollar is an actual good money laundering rate according to things I have read. I am not aware of the SC secondary market, I know it exists but no idea if it has the volume to hide that ML. The other way this could be a workings is there are more employees on the books than show up, or inflated contracts for the supply of services. Both of those however require some complicity from Roberts. I don’t think there is any evidence that Roberts is doing anything of the sort and AFAIK he still has control of the company.

DoveBrown wrote:

...The other way this could be a workings is there are more employees on the books than show up, or inflated contracts for the supply of services. Both of those however require some complicity from Roberts. I don’t think there is any evidence that Roberts is doing anything of the sort and AFAIK he still has control of the company.

If money-laundering were taking place, then probably both of the above.

The fundamental problem with Cloud Imperium Games is that there is so little to show for the money. Or to put it more precisely, there is a mismatch between the company's inputs and outputs.

As others have noted upthread, in the hands of Rockstar Games, eight years and at least $350 million gets you a Red Dead Redemption 2 and Red Dead Online. Yet, in the case of CIG, eight years and at least $350 million dollars gets you a tech demo and a (not quite) development roadmap.

Following the Odyssey announcement, it would be interesting to compare the respective development costs of Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen...

Gawd, they provided a roadmap to the roadmap. What more do you people want?!?!?!!?

garion333 wrote:

Gawd, they provided a roadmap to the roadmap. What more do you people want?!?!?!!?

;)

Actually, that's a fair riposte!

Indeed, as a project manager myself, I realise that I've missing a trick. I should do exactly that on my next assignment. Create a detailed plan explaining when I'm going to create the detailed plan. And then ask for more money in order to create that second plan...

In truth, I'd forgotten the Roadmap-to-the-Roadmap nonsense... which tells you just how far the Looking Glass we have all travelled. Each new absurdity neatly but completely obscures the last one. It matters not what CIG does. It only matters what CIG says in the moment (which was Legion's point a page or so ago).

detroit20 wrote:

Following the Odyssey announcement, it would be interesting to compare the respective development costs of Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen...

I don't think the financials have ever been released specific to E:D, but I remember seeing that the original development budget of E:D was about £8m. About £3m came in from kickstarter. And then after the game was released, they planned to invest about another £4.5m into development in 2016 (this was in their annual financials for 2015).

So it's been out 6 years. Given the budgets they've released, I think it's safe to say that E:D's full development including expansions probably doesn't cross the £40m mark. But even if they doubled that, that still puts them releasing a full game, 3 full expansions, and a major update, somewhere between 10-25% of the budget, within the exact same development time as SC.

PurEvil wrote:
detroit20 wrote:

Following the Odyssey announcement, it would be interesting to compare the respective development costs of Elite: Dangerous and Star Citizen...

I don't think the financials have ever been released specific to E:D, but I remember seeing that the original development budget of E:D was about £8m. About £3m came in from kickstarter. And then after the game was released, they planned to invest about another £4.5m into development in 2016 (this was in their annual financials for 2015).

So it's been out 6 years. Given the budgets they've released, I think it's safe to say that E:D's full development including expansions probably doesn't cross the £40m mark. But even if they doubled that, that still puts them releasing a full game, 3 full expansions, and a major update, somewhere between 10-25% of the budget, within the exact same development time as SC.

Yeah, but why spend a measley 40 mil and three releases when you can work slow as you want, release nothing and still bring in more money than ED made?

I'm assuming on that last part.

Yeah, WHERE is all the money? Isn't there a government/tax role here?

You can't just keep putting money into bank accounts indefinitely with zero questions asked. Tax day comes every year.

I'm sure they pay taxes, they're a publicly Kickstarted company raking in millions. It's not some indie dev stealing $5k from someone, but millions of visible funding.

What goes on inside the books, well, could be anything since they're not even selling real products half the time but concepts.

It's like they were ahead of the game on NFTs. Sell digital art of ship concepts that don't exist and might never.

garion333 wrote:

I'm sure they pay taxes, they're a publicly Kickstarted company raking in millions. It's not some indie dev stealing $5k from someone, but millions of visible funding.

What goes on inside the books, well, could be anything since they're not even selling real products half the time but concepts.

Yeah, I'm asking where the money at...is the bank account just getting bigger, is payroll getting larger, is the owner just transferring it to his personal accounts? There's got to be a CFO somewhere who is watching the money pile up in a place. I'd like to know what that place is.

I skimmed through this out of curiosity.

There is a lot I have issue with here, not the least of which is that apparently the game is more important to the guy than his kids. But regarding the game itself...it just doesn't look fun. Pretty, yes, but fun, no.

I think I'd like to direct anyone checking in on this game to check out Starbase. I've spent an equal amount of money on both games but in Starbase I have developed four completely unique ships. I have mined asteroid fields and I have dared pirates to attack me in the most valuable reaches of the belt.

These folks developed a completely new engine in an era where that makes no sense and proven why it still makes sense. Unity and unreal and lumberyard(lol) would crumble in the face of thousands of individually modified spacecraft heading out into the black (blue) in a shared online space that includes all players.

I have played with two of my friends. Helped them develop their own ships or modify them. It's in early access but farther along than this joke. Less to do, at the moment, to be fair, but maybe six months from surpassing Star Citizens feature set.

You know, I've made reference to the "starcitizen_trades" section of Reddit, but I never actually read their sidebar. How they describe the group is... telling:

Welcome to /r/starcitizen_trades! We are a community of laissez-faire enthusiasts that enjoy expressing our economic beliefs through monetary (or barter) exchange of virtual (or physical) commodities, with the subject often (but not always) related to game packages for Chris Robert's space simulator, Star Citizen.

I used that group to sell all of the extraneous ships I bought back in the project's early days. I used the funds to buy an Elite Dangerous lifetime license.

Both have been tremendous disappointments.

CitizenCon apparently happened this past weekend, and mostly they showed off some cool clouds.

Squadron 42 remains MIA. And it was pretty heavy on tech and light on gameplay for a game in its 9th year of development.

Yes, I saw that. Eurogamer had a piece on it.

I was going to post the link here before, but then I thought, "Why bother? At this point, there is nothing more that can usefully be said about Star Citizen."

It's still incredibly useful if you have a bunch of drug and/or internet scam money you need de-identified. otherwise...

*Legion* wrote:

CitizenCon apparently happened this past weekend, and mostly they showed off some cool clouds.

Squadron 42 remains MIA. And it was pretty heavy on tech and light on gameplay for a game in its 9th year of development.

You can't convince me this is not parody.

maverickz wrote:

You can't convince me this is not parody.

Meme. Satire. Parody. The Star Citizen saga is all of these and more... all of the time.

But you didn't talk about the trailer they did for their new ship for sale!

720 people working on this game and they’ve basically got a really cool tech demo to show for it and a bazillion virtual space ships to “buy” for hundreds of dollars each.

TheGameguru wrote:

720 people working on this game and they’ve basically got a really cool tech demo to show for it and a bazillion virtual space ships to “buy” for hundreds of dollars each.

Airquotes "working"

Every time this thread pops up again I head over to r/starcitizen, and it continues to be an endless series of screenshots and high-fives and nobody ever says anything negative, presumably because it's immediately deleted so the circle jerk can continue. This "game" is a perfect intersection of scammer and desperate whale.

Can somebody let me know when this game will let me see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate?

Top_Shelf wrote:

Can somebody let me know when this game will let me see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate?

All those Kickstarter pledges gone, like tears in the rain . . .

Top_Shelf wrote:

Can somebody let me know when this game will let me see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate?

No, but you can see C-bills pile up in the Roberts' bank account.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:
Top_Shelf wrote:

Can somebody let me know when this game will let me see attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate?

All those Kickstarter pledges gone, like tears in the rain . . .

Time to... buy?!?