Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done'
One day before CitizenCon 2024, Tom Henderson posted an expose on Cloud Imperium Games that doesn't paint a pretty picture for Star Citizen.
Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?
This is what he's done throughout his career - the only thing that's notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.
It's entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn't bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn't even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.
I mean, some people called this back in fucking 2012, but the dreamers bought into his vision. He's always been real great about vision and lofty ambitions, but shit on execution. He sells dreams, but doesn't know how to finish anything. Every project he was attached to that executed on deliverables, was due to control being outside of his purview and accountability enforced.
And then, compare it to No Man's Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.
I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man's Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.
Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.
NMS certainly evolved a lot, but I wouldn't call it incredible. Also, despite the game universe being absurdly large, you can see everything there is to see visiting less than 20 star systems
All the daily quicksilver quests are a fucking chore, too.
Also to be fair (and critical), while Sean lied to both Sony and us about the state of the game-
They also probably did have most of everything they promised at one point, then the Christmas Flood happened. That's when the lies started and but those lies were likely more for Sony rather than us, as it's entirely possible Sony would have outright cancelled the game if they'd known how much was actually lost in the flood.
Instead they released what they could in the time they had left then just kept plugging away at it post release.
That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.
The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.
Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!
Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won't be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.
Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.
Edit: clarity and conciseness: added "originally" to the end of the last sentence.
Yes, if you spend over $1k on the game you gain access to beta-testing etc.
And the most scary part? Plenty of people do spend this much money - I know many Carrack owners, for example, and this ship costed, when I remember it, $1200. Yes, very real $1200 for an in-game ship, and there's plenty of buyers.
Heck, I know a person in Ukraine - not a high-income country by any standards, GDP per capita sitting at ~$5000, vs ~$85000 in the US - who spent about $6000 on the game by hiding huge portion of his income from his family for years. And this is not an exceptional case.
Yeah, Star Citizen is the world's most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It'll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a "complete game" state.
I work as project manager, just spent the entire week fighting a client on a new project’s scope, because he wanted more things done by the team than what was agreed in the proposal.
Anytime I read about this game, I have to do breathing excercises in a corner to calm my anxiety.
I just hope when it finally releases it has just as many tits as Duke Nukem Forever
Who'd'a thunk?
Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never "release" a finished game, you're not going to be blamed for "bugs" while still collecting money on in-game purchases.
There's a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It's been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.
If massive universe sums like that were technically feasible all of the other studios would have done it. They were overly ambitious and didn't understand the limits
Why would there be? Seems to work really well this way. Just keep milking the idiots of their money.
The actual news is that the money is starting to run dry
And this CitCon didn't do anything to stem that tide if true.
I've genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There's just no actual focus on getting the game done.
We have a saying here that translates to something like this: "perfect is the enemy of done". Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.
Also called bikeshedding.
My boss LOVES to throw that out all the time as a defense for when I inform him that he and mgmt are rushing something out the door that isn’t ready.
It definitely has wisdom but it’s not something to wave around all the time either.
Not that that’s the problem here, SC ain’t ever coming out and it’s not because of perfection. It’s because it’s a scam lol
Read this fucking gofundme trash: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
Because Crysis looked good, Chris Roberts mandated that Star Citizen would use Cryengine 3.
To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.
So now due to the inaccuracy inherent in floating point calculations, instead of invisibly nudging things a few millimeters in the wrong direction, teleports people hundreds of feet out of their ships into space if they bump into a physics object, ladder, elevator, etc.
This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.
This is not even true, they rewrote the engine to support native 64-bit precision to let them fit large spaces, they didn't just make everything small. They basically employ all the people that used to make Cryengine since Crytek went out of business, so the engine they are building is actually pretty good.
I am engine developer, but even to this day you can clearly see Cryengine 3.x issue in star citizen.
They simulate zero-g areas as a Cryengine underwater map. You routinely see stuff floating as if in water even on planets with gravity.
You can also witness strange bugs that confirm the size issue (that they made everything extremely small in a Frankenstein version of a Cryengine map); one example would be your footmarks suddenly becoming massive.
The completely fucked up physics in sc (e.g. tanks bouncing like beachballs) is also a legacy of Cryengine 3.0.
Classic, the person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about is SO sure that they know the truth. So much so they’re out here correcting people and handing out false info.
so the engine they are building is actually pretty good
Keep living in a false reality pal. I’m sure you k or so much more than the engine dev who replied to you.
How much $$ have you wasted on star citizen lmao
To make astronomically large spaces fit in the game engine from 2009, they made everything infinitesimally small.
In fairness, when Star Citizen first went in to development CE3 was a modern engine.
This is what happens when an ideas guy with no technical knowledge is making technical decisions.
If you're talking about Chris, he's a coder too, and wrote some of the entiry container system for the game.
I'm not sure where you're getting your info about them scaling everything down and that being the cause for wonky physics, though.
Jesus fucking christ, that was their fundamental approach?!
... Did they ever come anywhere close to a dynamic server model, with dynamically sized in game zones being handled by dynamically changing server clusters, dependant on player count in an area?
I remember making some comments in a thread in the main SC forums about it almost a decade ago that were basically to the effect of: that's almost certainly impossible to pull off with enough fidelity / low lag to actually work in a real time, absurdly open world shooter game,, but if they could pull it off it would basically be the greatest achievement in game networking history.
Wow.... I'm pretty crap at making decisions, but like... not that crap 😅
That's like an impressively bad choice
Damn. I had really hoped my grandchildren would get to play Star Citizen in their lives.
Misguided development at CIG? Why I never!
Shocked I tell you!!! Who could have seen this coming!?!
yeah they been grifting so long thats all they care about anymore
Yeah no shit
Today was day one of Citizencon and CIG revealed a lot of stuff that shows they're still working to give players the game they want. Most of it was actually tech to answer the scalability problem for everyone wondering how they're going to get to 100 star systems when they still only have 1
Next it’ll be 1000 star systems while we’re still waiting on Squadron 42.
Fun fact: If you take the year, add two, you'll get the current planned release date for sq42
This isn't dependent on the current year
Is anyone really surprised?
I do think they will at least release Squadron 42, but the main game is never coming out.
I'm pretty sure Chris Roberts views Squadron 42 as the main game.
I honestly don't even think they'll get that far. I mean they've announced it now, yet again, for a 2026 release date...two years from now. they've been doing this for the past decade. "It'll release in 2016" then it's "Squadron 42 coming 2018" and so on and so forth. Mark my words we'll get to 2026 and at their little convention they have to further milk their userbase of money they'll announce Squadron 42 for 2028 but please, user, they need more backers and as a reward for backing you'll get a fancy ship you'll never get to keep.
I never fell for this, and I'm laughing at you if you did.
They got my $40 in 2012. I absolutely loved the Wing Commander series; Wing Commander II was an embarrassingly important part of my adolescense, I love space sims, and still had fond enough memories of the name Chris Roberts that I didn't think he'd blatantly lie and steal from me.
How people are still giving these clowns money I have no idea.
People are buying the dream. There is personal investment now- this isn't a game, this is their game. Supporters tend to talk like this is a community project, not a transaction between a customer and a studio.
Whenever the studio finally folds, I guarantee there will be whales lamenting that if they'd only spent a little more they'd have kept the game afloat.
Same here. It was a much different time. Lots of games that originated in kickstarter became succesful. This just seemed like another one.
Hindsight is 20/20
One of my ex coworkers has spent somewhere in the ballpark of 12k. He sells, flips and trades rare ships to sell back to people after the exclusivity of the ship has expired. He's made like 4k. I don't understand gaming anymore.
i want to fall for it yet i keep waiting for further development, thankfully they occasionally do free flight events so I can actually test the game without having to pay
I used to be like you, laughing and enjoying life.
The new director of technology we just hired a few months ago flexed about how he's now hit 6-digit donations to Star Citizen. It's still early and he hasn't shown any results, but if he's following the Star Citizen path of growth, my department is fucked.
and here I was thinking they always planned to finish the game in about 16 to 30 years.
sorry I meant durrrr
Star Citizen sounds right up my alley in terms of game content and play, but I will never touch it due to the business model they've chosen.
All I want is a space pirate game that doesn't require me to quit my job and dedicate my life to it in order to acquire a good enough ship to actually be competitive.
That, or a street racing MMO with realistic physics and a true-to-life level of customization and tuning, that has a map the size of small country. Like The Crew except no arcade physics and more than 5 players in a server. And also not shit.
Somebody, please make one of these two games already. I need this so badly in my lifetime before I die.
For racing, you have Fly Dangerous. It is also a successful FOSS game!
My dream is to make or at least be a part of the former
It is very hard
Dull surprise.
I don't know if you can say that. They are releasing new content. It's just very expensive to play.
Look at the list of stretch goals, 65 million dollars worth. What have they delivered from that?
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
It’s a grift, they ain’t delivering all that lmao
SCAM
You’re just jelous of my 5k kimited edition spaceship (will be ready next year)
If they finished it they’d have to find a new revenue stream.
Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.
Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
Jesus fucking Christ! What a goddamn scam.
If you donate 65 million dollars worth of stretch goals we’ll make the game! But only if we meet the stretch goals.. otherwise go fuck yourself, give us more money!
That whole page you linked is fucking gross. What kind of morons have dumped 65 million dollars into an unproven fucking kickstarter
Seriously, I encourage people to read the text for some of these stretch goals of tens of millions of dollars, it’s a goddamn scam
For reaching 3.5 million in donations, this is the stretch goal reward:
- Cockpit decorations – Turn your stock cockpit into your home with personalized decorations; amaze your friends with bobbleheads, photographs, dinosaurs, fuzzy dice, nose art, posters and many more cool options!
- Ship boarding – learn more about how Star Citizen will allow players to conduct boarding operations.
It sounds like a fucking scam, 3.5 million to be able to place decorations in your ship???
For 19 million dollars:
- Know your foe with a Jane’s Fighting Ships style manual free in PDF form to all pledgers.
- Manage Space Stations – Players will compete to own and operate a limited number of space stations across the galaxy.
- RSI Museum will air monthly, with a new game featured each time!
Like really? You needed 19 million dollars to be able to provide a pdf ship manual to users? Good thing the PDF is free though!!! (Free, after paying 19 million usd of course)
64th million has finally allowed for the technology of having pets added to the game
OK. Never played SC so honest question here; What is wrong if the game is technically not complete? I mean the way I thought is that this means that it keeps evolving and expanding so new content and features become available as the game development progresses. What am I missing? Is this a similar situation to the Eve Online BitterVets?
It was kickstarted a decade ago with release dates which they’ve never kept thanks to a constant modification of what a release looks like - namely splitting the MMO-like Star Citizen out from the single-player blockbuster Squadron 42 - as well as scope bloat. A lot of people originally kickstarted the game (mostly for what we now call Squadron 42 + some multiplayer thing) but now a decade on, the MMO-like Star Citizen is seemingly the priority project and most of the people who are currently funding the game are primarily interested in that.
After hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, it seems clear that Squadron 42 in particular is in development hell as it still can’t seem to make it to market. Star Citizen, while playable, teeters back and forth from basically unplayable to playable and all “progress” is subject to wipes.
Just some context: from 2017 until last year they had the majority of the development staff working on SQ42, which they declared feature complete last year and now we have a planned release of 2026. Most of the development staff has been moved back to Star Citizen which is finally seeing a lot of tech come online that was promised years ago. Definitely has a ton of scope creep, and it'll probably never have an official release, but it's definitely a cool tech demo that you can play.
Instead of focussing on getting the core of the game finished and THEN expanding it they do it the other way around.
For example the mining loop now is broken again, people bought mining ships and vehicles with $$ and they are completely unusable. Not to mention all the bugs and instability. I hope they succeed but right now things are not pointing to something enjoyable within the foreseeable future at all.
They consistently make promises for things that will exist in the future, which then takes them years beyond their expected timeframe to achieve, or just never do them because some other past promise or promise they will make later makes an original promise either totally unworkable or wildly different.
So, so many missed deadlines, which uh, actually were just aspirational.
And... this is a game that sells you ships, gear, for hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of real world dollars.
Some crazy promise will be made and oh, turns out that means we have to rework something like half the game's systems to support that, but also they're adding new content constantly that is always in some limbo state between following the old system's paradigms and attempting to follow the new system's paradigm.
What you end up with is a constant state of everything being a bit broken, and a lot of stuff being completely broken.
Its less like a released game getting DLCs and more like an alpha test that just never ends.
Which, again, costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Long story short, they severely fail to deliver on their promises and also mismanaged their development incentives so that they are not financially interested to ever release, or even make the game fully playable.
Game keeps wiping players inventories including the in-game money used to buy ships. You can't progress in the game, they just wipe you.
SC is a scam. They sell ships for real money that only half work. The game is riddled with bugs, quests don't complete. Users state is regularly wiped so there's no point on progressing in it and instead of finishing the game they ask players for much more money to work on tiny niche technical problems that sound super important on presentations but don't move the needle even a little bit towards a finished game. At best, it is video game history most expensive physics toy. In reality, when you scrutinize their finances executives have pocketed most of the money raised and devs have been paid poor wages and overworked to a constantly moving target. They have never finished a single roadmap item, but they have announced to fanfare at least 5 different development roadmaps that are the very definition of scope creep. Lots of announcements but never a release. Any competent studio would've delivered at least three completed games in the same timeframe for that amount of money. They're an online asset store that sometimes let's you fiddle with the digital models, not a video game.
The game is exactly the same as it was the first time I played it except now the lift always shows up.
Don't listen anyone here, positive or negative. Try the next free fly and see for yourself. Too many feelings for an honest answer.
But here's my 2 cents anyway, ha ha: I enjoy it, they are pushing out regular massive updates that make it more and more fun every quarter. They grew a studio from 8 people to over 1000, which takes years to do, so complaints that they have taken 10 years of full scale development are incorrect. Some people don't like the idea it may never be the full game they set out to make, which is fair, it's possibly the most ambitious game to date. But it's being made in good faith, reports of a scam are about as reliable as moon landing conspiracy theories for many of the same reasons. In the meantime, what they do have is already a lot of fun. You only need to spend $50 to get in, people spending more are doing so voluntarily and generally without regrets. They have more players and revenue every year than the year before, this wouldn't happen if it wasn't already a fun game for many.
Gameplay is like a second life in space. It's very spaceship centric, but there's lots to do besides pilot. It's slow paced, the design does prefer immersion over convenience a lot of the time.
If you like big, slow (with moments of high intensity), immersive, cinematic games, or if you like sci fi it's definitely worth a try. Lone wolf play is doable, but taking a role on a crew is more fun (at least for me).
It's still around?
I remember when Star Citizen first popped up, and it makes me feel old.
What's the latest build weight in at?
It's so many gigs, it's not even worth trying every so often. Every time you load it, gigs to download.
Glad I only ever spent the initial $60
The first big disappointment was the end of the funding rewards. Is any of those original rewards even noticable? Oh yay a fish! And a 42 towel to look at!
It's called Store Citizen for a reason.
Scam Citizen
In another timeline No Mans sky was called Star Citizen and StarField was cancelled.
I was hoping there to be a conspiracy story behind it but the crux is they don't understand the concept of MVP or made anything before.
Squadron 42 is feature complete and is in optimization and polish phase. 30-40 hour campaign. It looks amazing. This was released this weekend, played live not prerecorded.
They released the game to the public this weekend? That is amazing.
Ohh, they didn't? This is still not available? The FPS spin off that isn't even the main game? They said it was played live but don't show anyone playing it live? They just made more promises, the thing they are still doing after 700 million dollars and more than a decade has passed?
Okay then.
You sound like MAGAs discussing immigration under a Fox News post. Circle jerk of hate based on misinformation, but trying to talk reason to people who love to hate the thing they hate and don't want to stop is not going to work. Keep on believing gaming journalists from disreputable tabloids who invent controversy for clicks. The engagement on Star Citizen hate posts is massive compared to others. Hating Star Citizen is directly more profitable for these sites. There is no oversight on truthfulness in gaming news.
CitizenCon was this weekend. There has been an uptick in hit pieces posted this week. That isn't a coincidence. You are being being primed to react negatively to the content that will be posted from it.
No, it's not an FPS. It's 99% a space sim like Wing Commander with a few FPS parts. It is a full AAA game, maximum fidelity, 30-40 hour campaign. You don't even know what you're talking about. You could actually watch the video you have so many opinions about, but oh that's right, it's a conspiracy if it's good.
I have hundreds of hours in Star Citizen and have enjoyed them all. That's not very much compared to many, many others. They are growing in players and revenue for 10 years. That doesn't happen to bad games. They release massive updates every quarter. They just bought a new campus in Manchester so they can hire more devs, on top of the existing thousand. It's a genuinely fun game, right now, enjoyed by many. You don't have to be one of them, but your tinfoil hat nonsense is just vitriolic skepticism from reading these tabloids, not critical thinking.
We're out there, flying around, having a great time wanting y'all to join our space shenanigans. Just try it the next free-fly with an open mind. Even if you tried it before, try it now, it is improving every quarter, it's a different beast now than a few years ago.
They claimed it was feature complete in 2023. And now they claim it is two years away from release. You really think polish and optimization takes three years? Of course, they've claimed it is just two years away every year since 2016.
They are lying to you.
Lol, one of us certainly has been lied to. Your last point is blatantly false, your first is based on your guess about how AAA game design works. Maybe it does take 3 years with a game this big, I don't know. I'll trust the many, many game devs who actually play the game and roll their eyes at comments like yours.
I've actually played the game, bought it and have no regrets. Hundreds of hours, new friends, new experiences. You passively absorbed the groupthink. I don't care if it ever finishes, I've gotten more than enough fun per dollar out this game already. Cry about it if you want, just do it quietly.
Hey look, it’s one of those gullible marks.
“Feature complete” but they can’t release it for another two years? Hmmm…… 🤔
As a dev myself this shit is hilarious
