Vapourware Scam Citizen - Only people with too much money can become StarCitizens! WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

[Blaine]

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/3cnk6d/just_take_a_break/

Although it took me perhaps too long to realize that Star Citizen had slowly but surely evolved into a confused, unwieldy, unfocused clusterfuck and a true cash grab in every sense of the word, this here is genuine insanity.

Also, unlike most of these people, I made thousands of dollars' net profit by reselling my pledge ships. I sort of feel bad for my customers at this point given the shit singularity that's accreting around Star Citizen lately, but it's not as though I led them astray. They knew what they were doing.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

^ Blaine reminding us the same thing about himself and SC for the twentieth time.

 

[Night Goat]

My prediction is that they'll keep it in development as long as the whales keep throwing money at them. Seeing as how the Sunk Cost Fallacy is a thing, this could be a very long time. There are still people who think Grimoire will ever be released after 18 years of waiting, so Star Citizen might take even longer than that. Maybe they'll eventually release a disappointing game, having spent most of the funds on hookers and blow, and there will be mass suicides (who am I kidding, the backers will insist it's a good game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, like they did with PoE). Or maybe all the backers will die of old age (or more likely, obesity) while they're waiting.

 

[Blaine]

^ Blaine reminding us the same thing about himself and SC for the twentieth time.

As opposed to the thousandth time of people reminding me that I didn't board the "FUCK STAR CITIZEN!" bandwagon quickly enough to suit them.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

More Derek Smart drama

Well, Derek Smart certainly has mellowed since the BC3000 days way back in the usenet epoch. He's still a pseudo-macho attention junkie but reading this I actually felt something like camaraderie and gratitude towards the old narcissist. Still, a little too much fake humility for a classic DS rail against the unwashed masses. I'd pay good money to see him and CMB locked in a room together and just allowed to talk to each other. :D Unfair on the Cleve - at least I'll buy his game when it comes out.

Oh, yeah, Star Citizen: Obviously they've got a good thing going but is it really worth tarring their future careers over? Apparently it is.

 

[Drakron]

Too Big To Fail at this point. If they run out of money, investors will line up to finish it.

This isnt Origin and I am seeing behavior that caused EA to fold Origin.

One of the reasons pointed out was that Origin hang themselves with EA happily supplying the rope, its the exact same case here as it seems they have little restrains, its good to shoot for the Moon but you should not bite more that you can chew.

Also this inst Origin, Origin had established IPs as Star Citizen is nothing but vaporware and I am not seeing investors "lining up" to give money to a man that simply have no self restrain, if they given him another 80 million no strings attached he would continue with feature creep, Chris might be a great designer but it looks like he is a incompetent manager.

Also it seems the departing producer was responsible for coordinate with the outside studios, to me this indicates development became such a clusterfuck people are getting off the train before it becomes a spot in their curriculum.

He should have done what was in the Kickstarter before going into this endless feature creep, funny how the Kickstarter mentioned no Subscriptions but now there is a $10/20 one ...

 

[Infinitron]

Also this inst Origin, Origin had established IPs as Star Citizen is nothing but vaporware and I am not seeing investors "lining up" to give money to a man that simply have no self restrain, if they given him another 80 million no strings attached he would continue with feature creep, Chris might be a great designer but it looks like he is a incompetent manager.

Look, the game is a goddamn Internet phenomenon. Somebody WILL step in. Fuck, they even stepped in to save Duke Nukem Forever. And if Roberts is such a nuisance he can be demoted by whoever brings the cash.

Don't be like the idiots who thought Witcher 3 was in danger of cancellation when CD Projekt started selling pre-orders early.

 

[MRY]

I like that Derek Smart tends to take the time to explain and justify his positions, but I found his post (the 80% of it I made it through) somewhat unpersuasive. The pitch seemed to be, "I'm the person in the world who knows most about how to make a game like this, and while I came reasonably close, I couldn't pull it off." (In fact, going back to the last page of this thread, I just discovered he said literally that on FB.) The problem is, even crediting his self-assessment, his point seems to cut the other way: from a technical standpoint, I'm inclined to think that any project that an experienced savant plus $1M can pull off is a project that $80M can pull off without an experienced savant. Most of the problems this game faces are not the sort of things that need a flash of genius to solve; or, put otherwise, they can be solved via brute force as well as genius.

I'm not saying the game will be made -- maybe it is all a scam, maybe there is a DoubleFine-to-the-nth-degree level of squandering going on, maybe the principals are so removed from reality that they cannot even figure out who to hire to address these problems. It's certainly not outside the realm of possibility. But I still think that if Derek Smart in fact did pull off making more or less Star Citizen, then Chris Roberts plus Scrooge McDuck's vault can do it, too, even taking into account any mismanagement to date and the costs thus entailed. Like, they could just hire all of the EVE staff or something.

(I don't think I backed Star Citizen, or if I did, it was for a buck. If it had just been a Wing Commander 2 clone, I would've backed for sure, but this persistent blah blah vanity stuff is not my cup of tea, even if, like Blaine, I apparently could've made $469/hr working from home.)

 

[Jarpie]

One way how Star Citizen can fall is that it flops so badly that they don't get even ten percent of the money back when it eventually is released but it requires that Star Citizen is so fucking horrible piece of shit that no one plays it.

 

[Andnjord]

Minecraft was released and popular. Scam Citizen is a bubble full of vapour. Big difference.

That said, it's a bubble with some really nice assets. If someone gobbled it up, kicked out the incompetent management, cut the MMO and FPS segments entirely and made a new wing commander out of the rest, it could be good. It'd leave all the people who bought imaginary ships raging, mind you.

Ironically, that's what the kickstarter was originally about before CRoberts megalomania took over.

Surely you mean cut the single player campaign and spaceship battles but keep the MMO and FPS segments, right? That's how you make a profit in today's market sonny, with the tried and tested formula of engaging MMO FPS. Turning it into World of Spaceships.

 

[Whiran]

One way how Star Citizen can fall is that it flops so badly that they don't get even ten percent of the money back when it eventually is released but it requires that Star Citizen is so fucking horrible piece of shit that no one plays it.

How do you mean 10% of the money back?

All the money that RSI has gotten is RSI's - there is no need to get it back. It is income. It's not loans. Star Citizen doesn't have to make a single penny after it is released it will have already made well over 85 million dollars.

 

[Drax]

I agree with the doubts about the future of the project, but I don't understand the claims of "scam"...
If SC is a scam, then it is the worst, more expensive, career ending scam in the history of human civilization...

 

[Hoaxmetal]

You don't need a career if you have 85 mil.

 

[King Crispy]

You don't need a carrier if you have 85 mil.

I fixed that for you.

 

[Drax]

You don't need a career if you have 85 mil.

Then how is he paying for the 3200 studios all around the galaxy? Rainbow farts?

 

[Disgruntled]

Hah, lots of hysteria abounds. Im still on the fence and dont feel the need to delve into total despair or overhyped jubilation. Havent sold my ships, havent been pleased with the blown deadlines and lack of updates. Still planning to see this year through before I decide whether or not to jump ship.
Boy would it be easier to abandon if any other PC developers stepped up to the plate with this much ambition.

 

[Makabb]

Too Big To Fail at this point. If they run out of money, investors will line up to finish it.

Nothing is too big to fail.

Yup, Roman Empire.

 

[Vival]

Derek Smart is a narcissist who loves to cause drama with him in the center. The last i remember from him was when he trolled the Freespace 2 modding community. That caused some decent butthurt from the typical modder crowd. So i'm hoping him baiting those Star Citizen cultists will deliver some quality entertainment but i am afraid he isn't as effective as he once was.

 

[Executr]

The fun continues.

Derek Smart got his 250$ KS pledge refunded, noting he didn't ask for it.

This seems a way to get out of legal problems CIG might've faced, but who knows if lots of people start to ask for refunds, now that the precedent has been set.

This follows a new huge blog post, where he goes after Chris Roberts: http://www.dereksmart.org/2015/07/interstellar-discourse/
In it, he makes the demands below:

As backers of this project, here is our list of demands:

1. disclose the full detailed (private jet travel? we want to see it) P&L accounting (money in off-shore bank accounts? we want to know about them) for every crowd-funded dime that has been raised and spent on this project. Allow an independent forensics accountant, hired by backers, to come and do an audit. This is standard practice in developer-publisher relationships. So you know how that works.
2. disclose the true state of the project in terms of what is expected to be delivered, and when. Allow an independent Executive Producer, hired by backers, to come and do a project review in order to get an accurate picture of the game state, so we know when it is likely to see the light of day – if ever
3. disclose the true timeline for the project’s completion. As per the above.
4. setup a page offering refunds to all those who REQUEST it. The TOS is going to be the first thing attacked in any lawsuit. It is not likely to survive a legal challenge. Plus, the FTC will trump all that crap anyway, so there is that.
5. admit, in no uncertain terms, and apologize that the scope of the project has changed since the original $2.1m kickstarter crowd-funding campaign
6. halt all further crowd-funding activities until a sizable part of the game – as originally pitched in 2012 – has been delivered to backers who have paid for it. In other words, STOP selling virtual items and taking money for vaporware
7. address the nepotism issues associated with the hiring of unqualified family members to head key parts of this crowd-funded project. In this regard, explain the benefits of a) promoting your brother to an Executive Producer position, as opposed to hiring someone (like the departed Alex Mayberry) who has the experience to match the job. Also what new benefits (pay raise, shares etc) he now has access to, for going into that position b) hiring someone, allegedly your wife, to a position that she is seemingly not qualified to hold. And why a more experienced executive wasn’t put in this position. Especially since that dept has people, with more experience and qualifications to do the job. Instead, they get to answer to her; and naturally, she gets paid more, as per the position.

About the game, it seems CIG will be showing multiple multicrew ships on GamesCom, and will release Arena Commander 2.0 shortly after this event.

 

[Jack Dandy]

2. disclose the true state of the project in terms of what is expected to be delivered, and when. Allow an independentExecutive Producer, hired by backers, to come and do a project review in order to get an accurate picture of the game state, so we know when it is likely to see the light of day – if ever

I have a feeling he wants people to elect him for the job
What a cheeky cunt!

 

[Executr]

In the new episode of this never-ending drama,

RSI Community Manager Ben Lesnick stated that Smart was refunded because he was using Star Citizen to promote his game Line of Defense. He also wrote that this decision was based on Kickstarter ToS (a developer can refund backers) and further refunds won't be handled, this based in turn of the Star Citizen ToS.

Derek Smart countered saying:

I have NEVER – EVER – posted on ANY RSI [Roberts Space Industries] forum or website, nor advertised ANYTHING. My blog is mine, and I can post ANYTHING I want in it.

He believes then he hasn't violated any ToS.


Don't miss the next episode, where Smart might make a new move.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

I've backed this and Blaine upgraded my ship or whatever that was about. So, what's the status, when is it ready?

 

[Hoaxmetal]

So, what's the status, when is it ready?

132891 micro-issues remain.

 

[Metro]

 

[MrContinuity]

At least we have Fallout 4 to look forward to.