Star Citizen, the still-in-development sci-fi game
which has now earned $400m in user funding, has decided to change what goes on its product roadmap.
Developer Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) said it is doing this because many of Star Citizen's "most passionate players" were taking features added to the roadmap as "promises", and getting upset when they were delayed.
CIG said it would no longer show any upcoming features for "any patches beyond the immediate one in the next quarter... rather than continuing to display release projections that carry a high percentage chance of moving (those multiple quarters out)".
CIG announced the change in a lengthy blog post on how it wanted users to view its roadmap, and how this had changed over time.
To cut many paragraphs short, CIG said it instead wanted players to check the "
Progress Tracker", an enormous kind-of Trello board with lists of what dozens of small internal teams are building, mapped across various months.
This is separate to the roadmap's main "
Release View", which is what further-off stuff will now be kept off. This shows which features will actually be bundled up to arrive in specific future updates.
"We've come to realise that this was a mistake," CIG wrote. "It put too much attention on features that had a high probability of shifting around.
"It has become abundantly clear to us that despite our best efforts to communicate the fluidity of development, and how features marked as Tentative should sincerely not be relied upon, the general focus of many of our most passionate players has continued to lead them to interpret anything on the Release View as a promise.
"We want to acknowledge that not all of you saw it that way; many took our new focus and our words to heart and understood exactly what we tried to convey. But there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises. And their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community, as well as to prospective Star Citizen fans watching from the sidelines at our Open Development communications."
In January,
CIG laid out its most ambitious five-year plan yet, and mentioned that by 2026 it would be "developing the sequel and sequels to Squadron 42" - its upcoming story-based Star Citizen single-player adventure still without a release date.
In the meantime,
CIG will busy itself building an enormous new Manchester mega-studio, with room for 1000 people in five years.
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