Chris Roberts Back in your wallet - STAR CITIZEN

[Draegan]

Didn't they say originally that all ships were going to be available in the game somehow and buying them now just gets you a leg up only at the start of the game? Why would whales get angry down the line (outside that they are crazy to begin with anyway)?

[Ironwood]

Also, we need a Star Citizen prediction thread. I am legitimately intrigued that so many people strongly believe the game is going to vaporware.

You think it will be something else ?

[Falconeer]

Given how much they spend each month, there is a legitimate possibility that the game falls on its head before release. They have collected $85M and they are still making money, but they are also burning A LOT of cash. So, given that they can't make more money than they burn forever, the question is: can they release it in an even vaguely acceptable shape before they implode? I am pretty sure they are asking themselves the same question at CIG, even more so with every new delay.

[Draegan]

People are spending thousands of dollars on pixals and promises now. How much money do you think they'll make on DLC when they actually play the single player game? Billions man. Billions.

[Falconeer]

I am talking of the possibility of them going belly up before the single player releases.

[tazelbain]

Given how much they spend each month, there is a legitimate possibility that the game falls on its head before release. They have collected $85M and they are still making money, but they are also burning A LOT of cash. So, given that they can't make more money than they burn forever, the question is: can they release it in an even vaguely acceptable shape before they implode? I am pretty sure they are asking themselves the same question at CIG, even more so with every new delay.

Which leads to the question: how many more promises can the chump market bear?

[IainC]

Also, we need a Star Citizen prediction thread. I am legitimately intrigued that so many people strongly believe the game is going to vaporware.

I see two outcomes that are not entirely mutually exclusive.

In the first a game comes out but it's not the game that has been pitched so far. It's something sane but obviously doesn't match the hype. Many people, especially those who are in for any non-trivial amount of money are vocally unhappy about it and the game limps along under that cloud for a bit before quietly folding when all the noise has settled down.

The second option is where they stay true to their vision and actually try and build the game they say they will. This goes badly and RSI implodes. For the next few years, former employees wash up in other studios and tell stories that no-one who wasn't there with them will believe.

[Draegan]

I am talking of the possibility of them going belly up before the single player releases.

They'll get something out, I'm very positive about that.

[Jeff Kelly]

At this point I can only see a few outcomes (In ascending order of likelihood):

7.) Roberts Space Industries ships a game that is everything the backers hoped the game would be. This will happen shortly after we've achieved nuclear fusion and world peace, solved global warming and hell has frozen over.

6.) Roberts Space Industries ships a game that contains everything RSI claimed would be in it. Only marginally more likely. Hell still needs to freeze over, global warming unfortunately remains unsolved.

5.) Roberts Space Industries ships a game that - while it doesn't contain all that was promised - at least contains a decent or even great core game and they still have enough money left to continue development. They spend the following months being mired in bad PR and have to endure category 5 internet shitstorms. Most fans will delude themselves further by waiting until RSI delivers the missing features.

4.) Roberts Space Industries ships a game that - while it doesn't contain all that was promised - at least contains a decent or even great core game. Unfortunately they ran out of money during development and can't continue to support and expand it. They spend the following months being mired in bad PR and have to endure category 5 internet shitstorms. They are also the target of at least one class action lawsuit that won't go anywhere.

3.) Roberts Space Industries ships a game that is mediocre or even bad. They spend the following months being mired in bad PR and have to endure category 5 internet shitstorms. They are also the target of at least one class action lawsuit that won't go anywhere. Meanwhile disappointed Star Citizen fans will argue with deluded Star Citizen fans over whether or not the game is great, whether or not Chris Roberts has realized the 'vision' he had for Star Citizen and whether or not the dress is gold/white or black/blue. At this point it won't matter whether or not RSI has any money left or files for bankruptcy protection and if they have any intention of continuing development of the game. The kickstarter for Star Citizen 1.5 wll raise 20 million regardless.

2.) At some point in the not too distant future Roberts Space Industries ships something - anything - that could be considered a "Star Citizen" game due to fan pressure and for legal reasons and files for bankruptcy and chapter 11 protection directly after. Over the following weeks and months more and more dirty laundry is aired and what comes out confirms or even exceeds our suspicions. The legality of the whole thing will be challenged in court but by the time everything is decided nobody will care anymore.

1.) Employee turnover will rise continually as more and more key people leave the company to "pursue other ventures". Once the non-disclosure clauses of the employee contracts run out more and more internals about the state and progress of the game, the amount of money the management staff has spent on coke and hookers and the fact that that there's basically no real game to speak of will be leaked onto the internet. Contractors, business partners and (ex-)employees come forward and claim that they haven't been paid in months and that RSI is essentially bankrupt. Chris Roberts will issue statements that basically say that all claims are patently false. Hard core SC fans will delude themselves further. Soon after RSI unsurprisingly files for bankruptcy and chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Star Citizen never comes out. The legality of the whole thing will be challenged in court but by the time everything is decided nobody will care anymore.

Corrollary: RSI is not really bankrupt instead Chris Roberts and his associates have transferred most of the remaining funds into off-shore shell acounts.

Personally I think that it will likely be anything between 3 to 1 with 2 being the one I think is most likely to happen

[Malakili]

They will release something.  In that sense it won't be vaporware.  The game they are selling and promoting though, that will never exist.

[Fabricated]

They'll release something that is probably like a larger scale but far buggier Elite:Dangerous, promising all of the rest of the modules later. They'll sell this "beta" or "early access" version at full price and rake in the money again until people again realize that the game cannot be delivered as advertised.

[Rasix]

Something will be released. Chances are it will even be really good.  Will it justify going into financial ruin over fake spaceships? No. It'll take years post launch to get there and things will get permanently cut that were promised.  The feature set reads like something I'd dream up in middle school, when I thought I knew something about game design because I'd played a lot of video games.

"Launch" will likely be a disaster of Funcomian proportions. I just feel that the multiplayer integration is going to fall down pretty severely at load.  What you can glimpse about the overall architecture from how the features are designed just screams out "bad fucking idea, mate".

[Threash]

"Launch" will actually be a 2-3 year long open beta.

[Lucas]

Regarding the release, keep in mind that Roberts never actually said that every feature (especially those from the stretch goals) will suddenly bloom into existence at 00.01am 20-?

From this article on Poylygon (yep, as always he was a little too enthusiastic about dates :P) :
http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/3/2/8131661/star-citizen-chris-roberts-interview

And then at the very end of the year we will release the very early alpha of the persistent universe. It wont be nearly all of the systems and planets, but we plan to have five or six systems you can fly between. You won't be able to do all of the things we're planning on you to do, but probably trading, mining, piracy, combat and a lot of core stuff."

Then the company plans to spend 2016 filling out the rest of the star system, finishing ships, finishing characters "basically going from five to 130 star systems and adding more of the functionally and features on that we have and building out different roles."

So yeah, the planned transition is not that different from what E:D did in late beta, although the feature set, the scope and the technology (handcrafted vs procedural) is very different, of course.

Further down, he says:

His hope is that the shift from beta to no-longer-in-beta will be, as with Minecraft, not that noticeable.

"That's what we think will happen towards the end of 2016 because that's when we think we will have finished the content and get most of the polishing in," he says. "We are saying before then we think it still be rough around the edges and have issues."

The most noticeable difference once the game is retail, he says, will likely be a change in the way the game will be priced.

"We will remove the crowdfunding aspects of it, and that will probably be the point where we do some proper marketing," he says. "At some point, once it is finished, we would probably do a push to get the general gamer in. Right now we're still hitting only a certain segment of the game population"

Regarding the single player game, Squadron 42, it might turn in some actual profit beside those who already owns it because of a game package they acquired in the last couple years.

As far as I know, the plan for S42 is to release it like the Telltale games: first episode is going to be the first ten missions, but you'll always pay for the full campaign.
-----

Back to the Star Citizen Alpha, reading the excessively verbose, but quite open, "monthly reports", consider that work is being done on at least 4 out of those initial 5 star systems: Stanton, Dalamar, Nyx and Terra, with Stanton closest to the finish line 'cause one planet will feature in the Social/Planetside module.

This whole beast might speed up, especially with the creation of environments/locations, once they create all the props and main layouts, that will be re-used and/or adjusted with all the other planets/systems as they see fit (together with more unique locations, of course).

Finally, yeah, network code seems quite hard to chew at, that's why they're implementing the "GIM" and rewriting a whole bunch of stuff. Here's what Roberts wrote about the whole mess they got into (it's worth a read, if you're a bit more interested in this beside the "scam vs best game evar" debate):

[MahrinSkel]

Also, we need a Star Citizen prediction thread. I am legitimately intrigued that so many people strongly believe the game is going to vaporware.

I think something will be produced called "Star Citizen", and that it will massively under-deliver on expectations, because the expectations are undeliverable at any level of cost or talent.

--Dave

[tmp]

At this point I can only see a few outcomes (In ascending order of likelihood):

7.) Roberts Space Industries ships a game that is everything the backers hoped the game would be. This will happen shortly after we've achieved nuclear fusion and world peace, solved global warming and hell has frozen over.

6.) Roberts Space Industries ships a game that contains everything RSI claimed would be in it. Only marginally more likely. Hell still needs to freeze over, global warming unfortunately remains unsolved.

Pretty safe bet the solution to global warming is already included in the core Star Citizen feature set, and that it will involve Hell freezing over.

[Lucas]

So, a new Letter from the Chairman has been posted on the website:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14839-Letter-From-The-Chairman

Back from the UK, Roberts talks about the most common concerns that arose during his absence: staff departures, feature creep, development time and he reflects a bit more on what open development entails for Star Citizen.

A week ago Wednesday we wrapped the main performance and motion capture for Squadron 42, Episode 1, after 66 shooting days. We started shooting on March 31st at Ealing Studios in London and completed principal performance and motion capture on July 8th. This is more shooting days than any film I’ve ever been involved with! I directed my last scene on Friday July 3rd, leaving David Haddock, our lead writer, who along with William Weissbaum wrote the Squadron 42 script, to direct the last three days of secondary character “wild lines” and motion sets the following Monday through Wednesday.

That Monday I took a train up to Wilmslow to the Foundry 42 UK Office to spend some time with the Squadron 42 development team in person as well as gather key people from our various studios and our technical partners for a technical summit on our character and facial animation technology and pipeline. Like everything on Star Citizen and Squadron 42 we are aiming to push the envelope – with the tech we are working on for animation, shaders and AI we are aiming to give you a fluid immersion inside the story of Squadron 42 and later the bigger world of the Persistent Universe of Star Citizen, in a way that conveys the emotional subtlety of film. It’s one of the reasons why our performance capture shoot was so long – maybe 10% of the scenes we shot were for cinematics, the rest were all for scenes where we allow full player control that play out during game control from your POV. Most games just record voiceovers for these types of scenes over a few days, but for us it was important to capture the full performance of our amazing cast. This allows us to then blend the captured performance of the actor’s face and body with other motions to adjust the game character’s looks and movement so they react in a natural manner to the player’s actions (whatever they may be). At the fidelity we are going for we are definitely breaking new ground, but luckily we are working with some of the leading companies and people in the area of scanning real people and bringing their performances into 3D in the most life-like way. 3 Lateral and Cubic Motion are well known for their amazing work in this field and we are partnering with them to push performance capture and real time playback beyond what you have seen in a game before. Internally we have been hiring up some incredible talent, including the architect of the CryEngine animation system, who recently joined us in Frankfurt.

But that's not all: there is also a video piece, running for 1h30m, where he address the same concerns a bit more extensively (you can jump directly to each segment in the youtube video):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1Mkcq160cE
- What is the status of Star Marine?
-  Have you been in contact with the team?
- Why is there stuff in the leak we haven't seen?
- What are your thoughts on controller balance?
- What's the story behind recent staff departures?
- Why isn't the concept ship I bought playable, yet?
- Why do you still have concept sales?
- How has Star Citizen changed since the beginning?
- Is Star Citizen impossible to finish?
- What's next for Star Citizen?

[Yegolev]

Wouldn't it be more cost effective to license Cryengine that to hire one of its architects?

[Hutch]

Their next stretch goal is to do both.

[Tannhauser]

I hope this game never releases.  I want to see neckbeards watered by the tears of penniless man-children!   

[Cyrrex]

On the Jeff Kelly Scale of Star Citizen Release Likelihood, I give this roughtly a 3.5.  I just want to pew pew some stuff.

[lamaros]

I give it a 0.75.

[schild]

Also, we need a Star Citizen prediction thread. I am legitimately intrigued that so many people strongly believe the game is going to vaporware.

There's a gradient to vaporware. Are people going to get what they want? No. Are they going to get a flaming bag of shit? Yes. Will that bag of shit be worth playing? Probably, to the true believers.

Does anyone here give a fuck? If they do, they shouldn't.

[Velorath]

At this point I can only see a few outcomes (In ascending order of likelihood):

Almost all these options involve the term "ships a game" which I think fundamentally misses how developers of "early access" games string people along. There isn't going to be some solid date where a product is shipped, or even where they say something along the lines of "This is it. The is the first full version of this game."

The most likely thing is that they're going to keep doing what they're doing, which is slowly release the game in the smallest bits possible (and even those will get delayed). I mean they started off with a fucking hangar where you could look at your ship which they released 9 months after the Kickstarter finished. 10 months after that they released the Arena Commander module (6 months later than the initial plan of Dec. 2013). Over a year after Arena Commander came out and now people are waiting on the delayed release of the FPS module, which currently according to Chris Roberts is "3, 4, maybe 5 weeks" away (delayed from "we said we hoped it was going to be out sometime in April, but 'don't hold me to that' was what I actually said").

They can keep this up for a long time because apparently all Roberts has to do is put out a Letter from the Chairman and everyone will go back to patiently waiting for the Great Pumpkin to show up. Great quote from that one linked above though:

Squadron 42 is going to be something special. I could feel it on set with the performances we were getting, with me knowing how we can bring those into the game. Squadron 42 is going to be like this amazing sci-fi movie where instead of just watching, you truly feel you’re in the world, emotionally connected to the other characters in the story.

The last example of this guy trying to direct a sci-fi movie doesn't give me with any indication that he knows what a good performance looks like or how to get one.

[Jeff Kelly]

Even early access games technically ship games or game revisions. That they call it alpha or beta is just a technicality at some point they ship something. At a point even further along they stop development on it either due to lack of funds or lack of motivation. It doesn't matter if the dev team keeps their game in perpetual beta just so that they can claim that it isn't finished yet.

That perpetual "beta-ness" is the worst aspect of early-access since it's almost exclusively used to shut down legitimate customer complaints. ("You can't complain about X, the game isn't even finished yet"). It doesn't matter though. At one point a 0.90 is technically the finished product regardless of the labelling by the developer.

[Velorath]

Even early access games technically ship games or game revisions. That they call it alpha or beta is just a technicality at some point they ship something.

But then by that definition they've already "shipped" something (Arena Commander). The way they're going about their development/early access, they don't have to release an actual piece of software titled Star Citizen for years if they keep drawing out these module releases like they have been.

My prediction for Star Citizen:

FPS module releases in Sept./Oct
First part of Squadron 42 is currently "scheduled" for late 2015 I think, so I'm guessing the reality will be 2nd qtr/Summer 2016. Might be less missions than originally planned.
Persistent Module beta "minimum of four months after the first squadron 42 chapter is released" according to one link. Probably will be early 2017 for a bare bones, very limited beta that will likely shit itself whenever more than 30 people are logged in. Multi-crew ships still won't be in. Player-run servers will of course still be absent.
Adding some missions to Squadron 42 and incrementally improving the Persistent beta will go on through 2017. Fun will be patched in later, but look at those awesome animations and cutscenes.
Beyond that they'll continue to find ways to stretch things out.

[Samprimary]

Didn't they say originally that all ships were going to be available in the game somehow and buying them now just gets you a leg up only at the start of the game? Why would whales get angry down the line (outside that they are crazy to begin with anyway)?

The people who paid 30-75 bucks or so are likely to get a product worth the cash, because that's within the realm of what a game should cost.

The people who dropped major sums of money on this are never going to get a game that is worth literal thousands of dollars.

Instead of going "well maybe this is an important lesson about how I spend my money" many of them will construct massive walls of cognitive dissonance and create fantastic spittle wells of logic about how the game was supposed to be worth their investment and was going to be but someone fucked it up and Chris Roberts and company deserve a Smartian shellacking for not delivering their impossible internal hype to them on a silver platter.

[Lucas]

Here's Smart's take on the latest comm by Mr. Roberts:

("Why Star Citizen Is Destined To Fail")
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sn49nk

[schild]

If there's one thing Smart knows, it's failure.

[Sir T]

One of the problems with "early access" is that you get your money at the beginning, as you progress there is less and less reason to keep developing as you wont get your big money chucg at launch, and the people who wereexcited enough about your game to buy it are already sick of it by launch day. So you can litterally one day say "feature complte" and shut it down and there wont be an outcry as no-one gives a shit anymore after wrangluing with yor bugged piece of crap game for 6 months.

It is basically anti-consumer and is driving down the quality of games.

In this case though we have a bunch of rabid fanatics that are literally chewing off their own arms to speed this thing along because of the name of Roberts. I dont think they can wait for people to lose interest here.

[Khaldun]

Dmart's old Battlecruiser thing is basically a pretty good prediction for the future. Remember that there were people who thought it was the greatest once they could (sort of) play it, because they were so invested in the idea of it. If people have spent a lot of time telling themselves that something has to be good, and they've got money on it, there are some who will just grimly grit their teeth and tell themselves that it IS good even if the actual released product corrupts their operating system and molests their grandmother.

[Draegan]

I think I tossed 30-40 bucks at this a few years ago. I'm more than happy to get A) Get a cool game. B) Get a meh game that I have a few hours of fun with. C) Have the entertainment of watching the whole thing collapse.

It's really win/tie/win. No loss.

[KallDrexx]

Except that I didn't pay $40 several years ago and I still get the benefit of C for free, and can just pay $40 if they do actually come out with an ok game when that happens.

[Sir T]

Oh I think everyone is agreed that they will drop some cash if this thing, against all indications, turns out to be a decent game. I think I would get more out of setting 200 quid on fire otherwise though. At least you will get warm.

[Pennilenko]

Let's be honest concerning the people, like me, who dropped 40ish bucks on this during the kickstarter. Back then the scope was very reasonable and appeared eminently doable. So many of us dropped the initial on it because we wanted to see it get made. Then shortly after, and completely out of our control, it morphed into this beast of burden that no single person could have predicted in those first few months.

Quite honestly, the initial proposal for the game looked like it could be some good fun and at the time 40 bucks was literally worth seeing it get made since this genre is completely under served. Fuck RSI for turning it into this shit show.