Kotaku UK on Star Citizen

[Dalisclock]

When you think of it, five years isn't a whole lot of time for a project this massive, especially when they had to rework a lot of code. Compare it to something like GTA which comes out about every five years, has top notch support and practically unlimited funding for making a fraction of a fraction of what's in SC. Outside of designing the map, most of a GTA game's budget goes into production values, cutscenes, music licensing, marketing, etc. Even if SC ends up surpassing GTAV's budget by the time it's in a generally "finished" state, it won't matter because it will likely be the greatest achievement in game development.

Except that's kind of the problem. Trying to do a lot more then a game like GTA V with a fraction of the resources. If it works, It'll be epic. However, that's a huge IF. Right now a lot of people are seeing this as "Bit off way more then they can chew".

 

[Michael Navas]

What they should've done is a modular release, since this is the age of digital distribution and patches anyways. Build the play space, design the flight component, beta test and release. Have a support team for that while you make the 1st person stuff and do the same thing whenever that's ready. It's amazing how much more efficient things get when you break things down a bit.

 

[Michael Navas]

Final part is up:

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/30/what-to-make-of-star-citizen

 

[RedDeadFred]

I definitely agree with the author in that I don't see how anyone in their right mind could legitimately consider this to be a scam. The author is a bit more hopeful about it actually coming out than I am, but I do hope that I'm wrong. If it does get released and it lives up to all of its lofty promises, I'm sure I'll buy it immediately and enjoy it for many years.

 

[Michael Navas]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg

A scam doesn't cease to be a scam just because the scammer believes in it.

"O Christ Roberts, deliver us from the drought of space games, and the evils of the AAA publisher!"

 

[Laughing Man]

If it fails to meet expectations for "Best everything ever!"

Which it will, the game is trying to include way to many feature sets that would in normal circumstances be set across multiple games. For example most FPS shooters won't hit the mark first time out, many of the truly great FPS shooters have required several iterations to find the formula that works for them, their is no chance SC is going to hit this lofty expectation of the 'best everything ever'. Even stupid little things like control set ups will affect it, the control setups that work and make the FPS work very well may not work to make free form space flight very affective or right on the nose, requiring the player to flip between control setups as they go from ship to foot.

The thing is the core part of it, the space flight even that looks shit, the likes of KSP certainly pisses all over the flight dynamics being shown in SC, not only because it represents correct orbital physics but the auto systems in SC are just to on the button, to well assisted. A video I saw long ago showed a vessel coming in to land and the second the pilot let go of the controls the ship stopped dead on the spot.

Compare it to something like GTA which comes out about every five years, has top notch support and practically unlimited funding

You've never worked in any project based team before have you? I can tell you right here and right now GTA would neither have had unlimited funds nor unlimited development time what it would have had that SC does not seem to have is a competent project management team, a group of people who would have set clear cost based and time based goals in which the games development would have had to stick too, they would not have had an overlord to whom the word 'no' is a foreign phrase and the reality is if a feature was too complex, too difficult or would have created issue with the time and cost it would have been dropped or suspended. A prime example being The Heists, which were advertised prior to the games launch but due to the difficulty of including them had to be left out of the final release, taking over a year to finally arrive AND despite the overwhelming public demand for more of them Rockstar have no plans to create more of them simply because of the time and difficulty of including more of them.

As for the game itself, it will never be as good as the claims are making out. I strongly believe the game as a complete package will never release and the final factor that determines when it releases will be when the project finally runs out of cash. The problem by that stage will be those who cared for the game will have already bought the game and those who never cared won't want to buy a game that never

a). Got completed
b). Lived up to the lofty expectations set upon it.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

A scam doesn't cease to be a scam just because the scammer believes in it.

Well...yeah. Yeah, it does.

You can't commit fraud by accident. If it's unintentional, it isn't fraud; it's incompetence. That's why so many CEOs caught out on shady business practices immediately throw their hands up in the air and insist that they are the stupidest person on the planet and they had no idea what was going on.



On topic: I finished plowing through the articles - the third one about Derek Smart was just rich in delicious, tasty drama, nyorm nyorm nyorm - and overall it doesn't seem very negative. I'm actually surprised by how even-handed it is, considering it's a Kotaku article. The three big criticisms are:

- that the game is far too ambitious to ever deliver on what it promises;
- incredibly shitty community relations management, which appears to be run by someone who's never even had to moderate a forum before, much less deal with a fanbase as rabid as Star Citizen's;
- selling concept ships that don't exist yet, and may not ever exist in a recognisable form.

The first one, I think, is just a running theme with Chris Roberts and other "visionary" game developers and idea-men. And it's not that bad, as long as you know who you're dealing with; I don't fault someone for promising the sky if what they eventually deliver is just a really good luxury airliner. The second is genuine incompetence, but incompetent community management is distinct from incompetent game development.

The third, that's less defensible. Asking for investment is one thing; every investor should know that there is a risk their investment won't pay off. But actually selling products that simply don't exist, even if you have every intention of eventually delivering, is not a good business practice. You could very easily - and unintentionally - fall into a Ponzi-style cycle where you're spending the money you made selling concept ships to build more concept ships to sell for money that you will then need to spend building more concept ships. That's a bad, bad process.

I've got no doubt that a game will eventually come out of this. It probably won't be the Holy Grail of space sims, but I'd pay good money for a solid entry on the same level as Freelancer.

 

[Michael Navas]

People's colloquial understanding of something doesn't care about abstract legalities. Only about how it affects the sympathetic individual just like them. In other words, people who use the word scam don't care if the legal burden for fraud is met.

Freelancer only came out after Roberts was kicked out by Microsoft, someone else handled the project for its final few years of salvage. The odds are low something similar will happen here. Which is the part about this story favoring the big evil publisher.

http://gameranx.com/updates/id/70033/article/the-chris-roberts-theory-of-everything/
Biased hit piece aside.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

People's colloquial understanding of something doesn't care about abstract legalities. Only about how it affects the sympathetic individual just like them. In other words, people who use the word scam don't care if the legal burden for fraud is met.

I've never bought into that excuse. If your colloquial understanding of the word "fraud" is at odds with its legal definition, then your colloquial understanding is wrong. Fraud is a legal concept, and its use in common language is defined by its use in law, not the other way around.

You can keep using the word "scam" with your own private definition if you want. I can insist that "Star Citizen" refers to a specific type of apple sauce if I want. We'd both be woefully ill-equipped to have a sensible conversation with other people about either subject.

[sub]And how would an unintentional scam work, anyway? How do you cheat someone out of their money without intending to?[/sub]

 

[Pyrian]

[sub]And how would an unintentional scam work, anyway? How do you cheat someone out of their money without intending to?[/sub]

Well, you could take their money for a product, instead work on a much larger project, and then never finish it. You took their money and spent their money and they got nothing, and they're going to be mad. Whether or not it can be proven to be intentional will be very important in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion, stupidity and malfeasance are functionally interchangeable, and for good reason.

 

[Michael Navas]

^This.

Which is another way of saying my so-called "private definition" is in reality very common. And as should be self-evident, language is defined by its users, making it plenty useful and authoritative. Specialist definitions exist to serve specialist purposes. When those aren't there, they become either meaningless or needlessly restrictive.

And mostly brought up in colloquial discussions by someone who wants to self-aggrandize, I've found.

That's the last bit of attention I will give this tangent. This thread is about Star Citizen.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

Well, you could take their money for a product, instead work on a much larger project, and then never finish it. You took their money and spent their money and they got nothing, and they're going to be mad.

Failing to provide a profit on an investment is not the same thing as cheating someone out of money. There are a half-dozen legitimate reasons why an investment might fail other than malfeasance.

Whether or not it can be proven to be intentional will be very important in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion, stupidity and malfeasance are functionally interchangeable, and for good reason.

What good reason?

^This.

Which is another way of saying my so-called "private definition" is in reality very common. And as should be self-evident, language is defined by its users, making it plenty useful and authoritative. Specialist definitions exist to serve specialist purposes. When those aren't there, they become either meaningless or needlessly restrictive.

It's not a specialist definition, it's the definition [https://www.google.com.au/search?q=scam&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b&gfe_rd=cr&ei=WdDwV7-lEq7r8Af6oqGwCA#q=scam+definition]. And it's a damn sight more useful than whatever definition you're working under. Mainly because it's actually defined.

I mean, this isn't hard to verify. We can just google it. [https://www.google.com.au/search?q=fraud+definition&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b&gfe_rd=cr&ei=IdbwV_b-FK7r8Af6oqGwCA]

That's the last bit of attention I will give this tangent. This thread is about Star Citizen.

Dude, you're the one who called it a scam. You brought this up.

 

[Pyrian]

Failing to provide a profit on an investment is not the same thing as cheating someone out of money.

Sure, but it's frequently a key step in the process, and the money is just as gone. It's called the bottom line for a reason.

There are a half-dozen legitimate reasons why an investment might fail other than malfeasance.

There's a functionally infinite number of reasons, but you can broadly categorize all of them into fraud, incompetence, and/or bad luck. A fraudster might go straight, an incompetent might learn from experience, but in neither case should anyone be eager to trust them with more money. Only straight-up unavoidable, unforeseeable bad luck is an excuse worthy of further investment - and even then, an investor might very reasonably look somewhere else.

Whether or not it can be proven to be intentional will be very important in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion, stupidity and malfeasance are functionally interchangeable, and for good reason.

What good reason?

The money is gone, and any further investment would be likely to also disappear. Not that complicated.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

snip

All I'm getting out of this is that you seem to think that any failed investment is a scam.

That's dumb. It's really obviously dumb. It's so dumb, I'm questioning why we're even having this conversation. I think you know it's dumb, and that's why you're focussing on the looming threat of wasted money and not the intentions of Chris Roberts.

You cannot commit honest fraud. Fraud is where you deceive someone with the intent of cheating them out of their money. Dishonesty is embedded in the core concept. If Chris Roberts honestly believes he can deliver Star Citizen to his backers, then Star Citizen is not a scam. It might fail, and people might be mad at their lost money, but failed investments are not the same thing as scams. Scams are not defined by lost investment. They are defined by dishonest profit.

I went through this whole goddamn rigamarole a few years ago when people accused Sarkeesian of running a Kickstarter scam. I went through it again when people accused Curt Schilling of running a scam through 38 Studios. I understand why people might be angry when a project they've backed gets delayed or simply never eventuates. They're saying, "Where did all of that money go?!" They want a scapegoat, and they're working on emotions instead of reason, and they start pointing fingers and hurling blame without stopping to actually examine the facts and see what caused their investment to fail.

Most people use the term "court of public opinion" in a negative context. It's really odd to see you bring it up as a legitimate barometer of wrongdoing. Anyway, I figure I've said whatever I wanted to say about three or four times over now, so that's it for me.

 

[Michael Navas]

The excuse of incompetence gets progressively less convincing the more money you have for expert staffers to surround yourself with. CIG has people on board even Smart will acnowledge as experts in their field. For CIG to still act like everything is fine, so please give us more money, makes the claim of legitimate conviction in the project laughably questionable. At some point the number of expert consultants in the company has to trump benefit of the doubt for the CEO.

Literally the only thing saving Roberts from fraud is the fact that we can't see into his mind, and he refuses to share financals -even in the UK where it is required by law- that would give strong circumstantial evidence for his intent. In the meantime, people who gave him money feel like he hasn't given them what he promised.

 

[ErrrorWayz]

Shame, I wanted this to be great but I got suspicious as the quality of the graphics started to fall with each iteration.

I also can't believe I read something on Kotaku and it was valuable and informative and no one was called sexist or racist.