Star Citizen scaling back plans and no longer posting long term target dates

[dalekphalm]

I'm a backer from the original Kickstarter campaign - I haven't put any further money into it (no ship packs, etc).

 

So, do I think it's a scam? No. A scam would mean that Chris Roberts (or someone else high up) is intentionally making a game that will never release and just taking more and more money with no plans to deliver. Is that happening? I don't think so.

 

Roberts is very ambitious, and I think it's a simple matter of the goals were too lofty for the tech at the time. Now, with that in mind? Star Citizen is pushing tech way beyond it's limits. Even if this game fails and is never fully released, the progress of technology for a game of this scale is going to be invaluable in the future.

 

It's definitely not a pyramid scam, because if I convince my buddy to buy into the game, I don't earn any money from that. Yes there is a referral system, but you're earning mostly skins and things of that nature (though if you reach the higher referral tiers you can get some free ships I think).

 

I don't know if the game will ever be released in a "finished" state, but I do know they're working on it and making visible, trackable progress. This will very likely go down as the longest game in development of all time (by a large margin) if they do manage to pull off a full release.

 

I don't think they should just stop what they're doing and refund everyone - though if anyone wants a refund, they should be able to do so. Personally I think they should keep going and try and finish the game, for as long as they can.

[Taf the Ghost]

@dalekphalmit's not a scam, just incompletely managed and has spiraled out of control. Normally, that'd be a failed project, however somehow money just keeps coming in. There's big questions to ask about the "where" that money comes from, but it is a real game company making a product that keeps changing every year.

[Middcore]

I don't think it was initially created as a scam. But now it's feature-crept to hell and the devs realize on some level nothing they could ever release will meet people's expectations, but the money keeps coming in so they have no incentive to stop fiddling and feature-creeping. At what point does it become functionally indistinguishable from a scam?

 

People love to flog the Miyamoto quote about "A delayed game is eventually good, a rushed game is forever bad." They love to demonize publishers who force developers to release games too early. Star Citizen is the counter-example to all of that. With essentially unlimited resources and nobody breathing down your neck saying You need to eventually ship a product this is what happens. 

[ColonelSupremePizza]

It's a scam, through and through, with them barely scaling by. There is no final flight model, there are basics that don't exist, and they change things after you buy them. Latest example was the Ares Ion that was sold as a precision ship, but they nerfed it from a skillful ship that required maneuvering and prediction to a highly inaccurate laser repeater the next patch because other people couldn't handle being one tapped by a high precision, slow firing , capital ship killer.

 

CIG is the scum of the earth with not caring about backers, being highly mismanaged on every level, incapable of ever meeting deadlines, release tons of vaporware features or product add-ons like Sataball, Theaters of War, sand worm, and desert sand storms to name a few, and have ZERO direction for thr game. They constantly make and hype features no one wants only to be removed later after tons of development work like hover mode and landing splines.

 

Long and short of it all is CIG is worse than any developer on this planet for making macrotransactions of non existent digital JPEGs that cost $100-$20000 "normal" and accepted by the SC comminity.

[Vishera]

21 hours ago, mr moose said:

10 years and $400 plus million.

Their plans were too ambitious for such a small studio.

Even huge development studios with games like Starfield,Red Dead Redemption 2 (1,600 people worked on the development of RDR2!) still take more than 5 years to develop those games,

Star Citizen devs should have hired more devs,because with the money the studio got from fund raising is enough to hire enough devs to work on the game and have a chance of being ready to be released within a decade.

 

I have managed to get the number of devs for all of their studios except for their flagship one: 400 people.

They plan to hire more than 1,000 devs until 2023 so that will accelerate development significantly.

[mr moose]

7 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Their plans were too ambitious for such a small studio.

Even huge development studios with games like Starfield,Red Dead Redemption 2 (1,600 people worked on the development of RDR2!) still take more than 5 years to develop those games,

Star Citizen devs should have hired more devs,because with the money the studio got from fund raising is enough to hire enough devs to work on the game and have a chance of being ready to be released within a decade.

 

I have managed to get the number of devs for all of their studios except for their flagship one: 400 people.

They plan to hire more than 1,000 devs until 2023 so that will accelerate development significantly.

With that much fund raising they probably should have hired those devs 5 years ago. 

[Kisai]

22 hours ago, spartaman64 said:

source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/star-citizen-devs-scale-back-roadmap-to-avoid-timeline-distractions/

 

I actually agree with them throwing out estimated release dates since they don't seem to be hitting them anyways. But if they are going to be removing promised features also, which again I agree with, but they should provide a refund path for people who bought in for those features. Also promising target dates and then not hitting them is their fault not the consumer's fault.

I backed this, and also at this point I consider it money thrown in a dumpster fire.

 

I genuinely believe that a game may come of it, but this is so over-promised by this point that I don't think I will ever end up playing it.

[dalekphalm]

20 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Their plans were too ambitious for such a small studio.

Even huge development studios with games like Starfield,Red Dead Redemption 2 (1,600 people worked on the development of RDR2!) still take more than 5 years to develop those games,

Star Citizen devs should have hired more devs,because with the money the studio got from fund raising is enough to hire enough devs to work on the game and have a chance of being ready to be released within a decade.

 

I have managed to get the number of devs for all of their studios except for their flagship one: 400 people.

They plan to hire more than 1,000 devs until 2023 so that will accelerate development significantly.

One thing to keep in mind is that hiring more devs is a diminishing return - eventually you can get to the point where they start stepping on each others toes and slowing the project down.

 

I don't follow their development as closely as I used to, so I'm not really sure what they're currently up to.

[Middcore]

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

One thing to keep in mind is that hiring more devs is a diminishing return - eventually you can get to the point where they start stepping on each others toes and slowing the project down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month