Star Citizen developers allegedly wasting money

That's basically what a publisher is? The entire point is no one is going to green light Chris Roberts $200M to make a game like Star Citizen. It's a massive financial risk for a bank, publisher, whatever. There is no precedent for a game of that scope. If they do give him any kind of money it's going to come with a bunch of strings attached, like "it has to be battle royale game because those make a ton of money right now" or whatever.

The whole point of Kickstarter and similar programs is to fund projects that otherwise would be too risky for standard financing. No one is denying Star Citizen is risky but it's a risk people should have realized before they kickstarted it.

In the meantime CIG ramped development very recently now that they have most of the main technical systems in place - they have over 200+ people working on the project and releasing quarterly patches with more content than the first 4 years of development. They had to build an entire company, bring multiple studios across the world together, create a production pipeline to tie it all in then spend a number of weeks polishing it for quarterly beta releases. Most games don't have to contend with that. Most AAA game companies already have procedures in place to scale during development. They have custom tools to help the various studios communicate, share code, etc. Even just like staffing of administration and crap - finance people to ensure employees are being paid, training procedures - not everyone coming into CIG knows their tools, knows cryengine, the custom tools they built for cryengine, etc. A company like Ubisoft/EA/etc has had all that in place for decades - they have workflows all established - they've scaled their studios and they know what works and doesn't work. CIG had to build all that out - while building essentially two games, one of which is massive in scope and has a ton of technical challenges. This idea that Star Citizen, given it's scope, should be "complete" (whatever that means) in the same timeframe as other games always seemed ridiculous to me. Even moreso as the budget ballooned up and scope expanded.

My biggest problem with the game is mostly just development focus. I'd rather see them spend more time on gameplay and less on fancy planets. There is almost nothing resembing a gameplay loop in the game currently. You essentially need to create your own game by either PvPing random people for fun or just exploring aimlessly. I also think Chris Roberts has a problem constantly promising insane time frames for things that clearly aren't going to happen. Although he's been better at it recently, admitting he's over ambitious on announcing dates.

 

And 2020 will be the Year of Linux!

 

So we should only get the games publishers like EA and Ubisoft say are good games?

No thanks.

If you dont want to be part of kickstarter type funding of games people want to make a reality, then don't. But don't then go and tell others they shouldn't either because its what you want and everyone else should abide. Just because someone or some company may have the "means" to fund their own project doesn't mean its not risky and potentially a loss development, this is where crowdsourcing works, either you get the money upfront to develop, and is not, hopefully, a loss project, or you don't and it never gets made. Simple as that. And again, don't want to be a part of that? Fine. Don't. Move on.

 

Yes, it is.

If said hypothetical man, asks you for money to fund a personal project - but actually has 5 times the amount he is asking for in his bank account.

I do NOT want to argue by analogy, but it would be ridiculously easy to do, I just want you and everyone else to (at the very least) admit and concede this very minor, yet 'cignificant' point.

Can you please do that, so we can move on with the other interesting points people are making here regarding Guru3D stuff, like GPU, frame-rates, graphics engines; please?

I said please three times, olive branch extended way way way farther than Loobyluggs normally would extend...because I really do think this article and the impact to games development is important. We are seeing a repeat of Freelancer/Microsoft here, with slipped dates and an 'ideas man' dragging development down because of his 'ideas'.

The original Kickstarter was $6m and 3 years. He had in excess of $30m already, but choose to mitigate risk using other peoples money, not his own.

Can you please (four times) admit and concede? Thank you.

I am not asking anyone to concede any other points (but am happy to debate them).
I am not asking you to confess the poor quality of the project (but am happy to debate this).
I am not asking you to say the project is bad (but am happy to discuss and read/listen to whether this may or may not be the case).

You cannot 'lose' for this admission, but by digging in your heels and saying that it is perfectly acceptable for someone to use other peoples money to mitigate risk - does put you in a losing position because it is abhorrent behaviour of the highest order.

I know I can be difficult sometimes, but put that perspective to one side for moment and just look at the logic of it - you know I'm right!

With respect to you and all

<3

 

I feel that the backers here have a pretty good case to sue these developers for breach of contract and yes a kickstarter once funded is some sort of contract because money changed hands. If what Forbes has written here has any sort of truth here. I know of another game that took several years to complete. Persona 5. Development started probably some time in 2008-2009 and it took to 2016 for Japan and 2017 for western countries.

In many cases you are correct but not in this case. If these developers are spending money given to them by backers to use to develop and complete this game for personal crap then this is a serious problem and they needed to be called out on it.

 

I think that (bolded) is not the point they (Astyanax) were making. I think (stand to be corrected) they were referring to the personal wealth CR had ($30m+, allegedly) PRIOR to the kickstarter being setup, wherein they asked for $6m and 3 years to complete the project.

I think that is what they were making reference to - again, I humbly stand to be corrected.

As for your non-bolded point, I think that is probably not the case, as people with $30m+ of wealth tend to have enough legal protection. In this regard, I think they shut down the Kickstarter, opened an online store of their own making, changed the terms and definitions of what pledges were, by burying them deep inside of new EULA/Terms and Conditions, which prevented all of this before happening.

If they didn't click, it didn't matter, as they would not be allowed access.

 

How? Here's how. I said by the time game releases you'll need *insert a ridiculous gpu*. To which you replied "my current gpu runs it fine". You failed to follow the conversation from the very off. Then started talking off topic, flexing muscle with bottlenecks, which was never the topic.

 

You said "the game runs at 30fps on a 780Ti and still runs at 30fps on GPU's levels above it"

That's the definition of a bottleneck. So either you don't know what a bottleneck is (hence my lol post from last page) or you're intentionally being obtuse. I honestly can't tell. I don't get how you can identify a bottleneck in the game then tell me talking about it is offtopic and never was the topic.

And this is ignoring the fact that your initial post wasn't even correct to begin with (I get 60fps+ in I'd say 90% of areas in the game and RSI's public telemetry shows people with 1070's can get averages of 60fps). The only areas that bog down are densely populated cities because the game is BOTTLENECKED by clients waiting for the server to update the network. Which is easily proven because you get 60fps in cities with empty servers. You wouldn't know this because you haven't touched the game in 3 years and most of this was fixed/updated about a year ago - hence that post.

If you can't follow this logic then I don't know what to tell you.

 

I agree with you there. You seem more knowledgeable than me with this. I also Stand corrected. I was just stating a what if scenario. I wasn't sure if they had any money prior to the kick starter or not.

 

@Aura89
lol, so i shouldn't tell others what to do, yet you do the same, by telling me to move on. right.

again waste all your money, kickstarter or not, but someone that has money,
has a business plan, will able to get money.
if not, i question his/her capabilities to either have a proper vision of it (and a plan on paper) and/or the ability to actually deliver.
this game might b the exception, but as long as te game ismt complete and released, i tend to see trouble ahead.

 

They have no case, the backers voted to extend the scope and the minority of crybabies whining about the development time thus far are not even in the 20% who voted against it, they are people who don't even have a pledge or are fake-users created by derek smart and his legion of trolls.


Stop comparing games vs games. theres no one shoe fits all development length. P5 was built on an existing engine which required minor edits.

SC and SQ42 are being built on an engine which needed core rewrites to do the task.
Container Objects is no small thing to implement.
64bit positioning is no small thing to implement.

CryEngine 3.x didn't even have the capacity to render spheroid objects till CIG aquired a number of developers from Crytek's exodus.

 

I wasn't comparing games vs games here. I was just adding to the conversation here. Plus with Atlus they were on the verge of bankruptcy when Sega bought them during the development phase of P5. Persona 5 was not build on an existing engine with minor tweaks it was made on a whole new engine. There were other people comparing games vs games here if you check the links they posted. And you are correct in saying that there is no one shoe that fits development length. For example there is this one game that this one developer was working on for over 20 years and the graphics prove it. I forget the name of the game off the top of my head. Very interesting details that you provide though.

 

I've seen it mentioned several times that backers voted to extend game content and delay release. How did the actual voting happened? Internet poll?
When someone with enough money to afford the project on their own money chooses to go for crowdfunding, it doesn't seem that they believe in the success of the said project themselves. I bet there will be few more times when backers will vote to push back release date.

 

P5 uses a modified catherine engine.

Theres really no such thing as "new engines" these days, they are all derivative.

 

Line by line on these points.

1. That is half correct.

The 'vote' was put to them during typically very early parts of development. These were (AFAICT) a series of "Hey, look at this concept art, wouldn't this be cool?" to which most people would agree, graphically - but not at the expense of a delayed final launch. These were then constructed into votes, and the results of these votes were not counted by anyone but internal staff. At this point in my reasoning, I would be suggesting a shadowy conspiracy to whet peoples' appetites and then strongly suggest that if you are truly backing this game, you need to back the development of more stuff for the game. Not what I am getting at, but a very simple 'they told us the result of the vote' - without any oversight. So, it is half correct, in that any company that dangles carrots in front of people can then NOT be blamed for people eating the carrot, or chasing after it.

Here's an idea - don't dangle carrots.

2. Half-true, there is extensive research and development conducted before embarking on actual concept art. At the heart of this is always a full-fledged game design document, the likes of which, no one has ever seen for this project, because it never existed in the first place. This, is partially why CR is a joke amongst game studios, because he has no game design document from the outset. Make no mistake, this is a basic requirement of game development. Then, follow the MVP and so on, again, he never even got to that point initially, just ploughed forward in a directionless manner.

As for the engine of choice, by all accounts he changed engines because of a change in support and licencing. This is not unusual, but merely reflects his lack of technical know-how. Before when using the original engine, progressing with a new engine, or trying to re-write engine code. These decisions should never have even existed at a 'c' level in a company. These are decisions made pre-development, as mentioned; as only a fool would continue changing the technical requirements of staff throughout development.

Why do you think CoD had the same engine (with minor changes) for the amount of time it did? Why also do you think respawn entertainment used Source (heavilly modifed) for Titanfall 1 & 2 and Apex predator? Why do you think Rockstar and EA/DICE use their own engines?

The answers to the above are well-known, but worth mentioning. Staff, staff, licencing/support.

CoD needed the same engine because they were squirting out new games every holiday period and needed staff familiarity.
respawn came from CoD and used a 'brush' level building toolset.
Rockstar have got the RGE, which means they do NOT have to pay anyone else licencing or support - no royalty payments.
EA/DICE have got the Frostbite engine...it was a deal EA made with DICE many moons ago (2003?) for DICE to create a game engine which they can them sub-licence to it's various studios. It's like...a record label signing a pop-star and then putting them in debt to you by charging them for video production and security. Indentured servitude springs to mind, also.

3. See (2). *it is completely their fault and having to do extensive rewrites, because you are trying to produce something at the behest of your audience is weak-sauce excusing. especially when you are running a continuous series of voting to justify the rewrites.

4. Which should have been more than apparent prior to developing them, and therefore is the fault of the person for not knowing this prior to development.

5. See (4)

6. Then...why did they choose it? And, I must say, if you cannot implement Opensubdiv into your rendering system, you do not deserve to work in this industry. Pixar give it away for free! You can turn a cuboid into a spheroid! link

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitize..._two_official_cig_community_polls_related_to/

Crytek misrepresented the capabilities of their engine during the tech demo in 2011, and then reneged on developer support to adapt the engine further to CIG's needs.

It remains to be seen if this renegging was malicious or not, but crytek bleeding money and losing employee's from 2014 - 2016 didn't help matters.

Notice that major milestones have been hit since CIG Frankfurt opened?

 

Interesting stuff. Does anyone know who makes the decisions regarding the designation of what a 'major milestone' is?

I don't think it's very productive in discussion (for backers on the forums @ the company) if you need a lookup table/cheat sheet, to translate the nomenclature...just a small point.

I would love to tell members of my family that a 'major milestone' in the evenings cooking has nearly hit it's target, when referring to the potatoes being submerged in boiling water, but I will need more beer to achieve the placing of a cake in the oven...major milestone...grief...what a lot of nonsense.

Not aiming at you, just hitting the keyboard hard this last week as I am writing a lot at home and so, have got the time...

 

Maybe the Road map Caveats will address that?

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citizen/info

 

Yup. That is what I expected - lots of buffering from the true issue(s), by creating nomenclature with no furtherance to process and nowhere is there a game design document to be seen.

Why have a 'roadmap' when, a simple development plan/process would do just fine.

Every heard of MS Project? You can export 'manager friendly' versions from it. It even has timelines and other visually understandable track-lines for it.

I mean...surely they are using project management software for their development?

Thanks for the link - very revealing indeed.