Please hold back your surprise, people.
Star Citizen was among the big, early crowdfunding successes. And how could it not be? If, back in 2012, you saw the name Chris Roberts (of Wing Commander fame) on a new space sim, you probably told him to shut up and take your money. And if you did, well, you’ll be sad to note that not only is the game not finished after 7 years, it’s blown through nearly all of the money earned from its $242 million Kickstarter.
As for why, well, most of the blame seems to be falling on Cloud Imperium co-founder and Star Citizen designer Chris Roberts. Mostly due to the fact that he’s fallen afoul of what I’d call “creator’s disease”. To put it bluntly, Roberts promised the moon (if you’ll excuse the turn of phrase), which he can never deliver. He put himself into a situation where no one could tell him “no”, and he suffers from a complete inability to resist scope creep on the project. It’s more common than you’d think; big name creators have spent so long working under certain constraints, that once those things holding them back are gone, they can’t stop themselves from overdoing things. Which usually leads to their worst work.
To give you an example, Roberts promised that the game would feature 100 star systems. As things currently stand, a grand total of zero star systems are in the game. They functionally have two planets done, which is a far cry from that promise.
The FTC has gotten 129 consumer complaints about Cloud Imperium, all asking for refunds. Some of those refunds going up to the tune of $24,000.
The game they promised us can’t even barely run. The performance is terrible and it’s still in an ‘Alpha’ state. I want out. They lied to us.
complaint from an anonymous player that spent $1000 on the game
Former Wing Commander IV producer Mark Day’s company was contracted to work on the game back in 2013-2014. He had this to say about working on it.
As the money rolled in, what I consider to be some of [Roberts’] old bad habits popped up—not being super-focused. It had got out of hand, in my opinion. The promises being made—call it feature creep, call it whatever it is—now we can do this, now we can do that. I was shocked.
As a matter of fact, Day’s account is far from the last made by someone who worked on Star Citizen. A number have popped up, with one former senior graphics designer mentioning the development of the ships shields. They spent months doing so; they went through numerous designs in an attempt to make Roberts happy before they finally hit the mark. Another comes from a former lead character artist, David Jennison. It took him 17 months to complete 5 character designs, for roughly the same reason.
All the decisions for the character pipeline and approach had been made by Roberts. It became clear that this was a companywide pattern—CR dictates all.
David Jennison, from a leaked letter to Cloud Imperium’s HR Department
This isn’t the first time this has happened with Roberts, as Mark Day noted above. While it’s almost a given to have happened with the Wing Commander games, his previous ambitious project was apparently of the same sort of scope creep. Freelancer, which was a decent enough game (I should know, I got it from a Target bargain section for $5), went through a somewhat similarly pained development. It was a good game, but it was also clearly not finished.
This all doesn’t even take into account the fact that of its initial $288 million total raised, Star Citizen and its single-player campaign mode, Squadron 42 were down to their last $14 million late 2017. So how has development continued? Well, Roberts found alternative funding; bilking the existing fanbase out of money for ship models. And some of those models run to the tune of $3000. Each.
Regardless, Squadron 42 is still, somehow, slated for a 2020 release. Which I’ll believe when I see it. As for Star Citizen proper, though, that’s anyone’s guess.
Source: VG 24/7
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