the thread on sa is full of gem posts such as this wonderful post about the current state of star citizen. here was a recent one.
CLOUD IMPERIUM CAN'T COMPETE
CIG can't compete with the AAA Space Games they know about -- and the certainly can't compete with the ones they don't know about. They are a floundering, disorganized studio -- the Ad Hoc-iest game studio in recent memory -- and they've betrayed this very fact repeatedly without intending to in the very shows meant to boost backer confidence in the project.
Over the last month or so, I have been astonished to see how many new faces have appeared on "Around the Verse". This most recent episode features an employee in LA who was on his very first day of work.
His very first day.
I don't mean by mentioning him to impugn his talent or question his worth. He might be a great hire-- as might be all the new hires. But CIG is a Gaming Studio whose revolving door spins like a top -- so many leaving, so many coming in. It might take 3-6 months before a new hire reaches something approximating productivity. Yet CIG is not a well-tuned engine made faster or more efficient once new employees learn the ropes, it is a bucket brigade. Some fight fires, others try to keep the thing afloat.
Rockstar, Bethesda, Infinity Ward, Bioware-- these are machines. Work doesn't grind to a halt because some guy broke his arm, or because they lose a key employee, or because they can't fill a position. They may occasionally push a release date back three months, they may occasionally even lose a badass. But deadlines matter to them because they make their money AFTER release, not before.
And the most successful of them hardly lose employees at all. Bethesda Softworks has 100 employees. Some have worked together 5,10 even 20 years. Todd Howard touched on the mysterious shorthand that emerges between people who've worked together closely for that long in a recent speech at DICE. There are synergies CIG can't even dream of once a studio achieves that level of cohesion. It took 100 people 4 years to put out Fallout 4-- and they made nearly $1B in 24 hours upon release. CIG can't compete against such studios because they can't compete
like them.
"YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT GAME DEVELOPMENT!"
"Why, it's just the way the Games Industry works!", the backers always retort, as some did when Mark Skelton's surprise departure was announced only days ago.
"You know nothing about Game Development if you don't know that!"
Alas, would that that were true. Would that it all were true! Than the steady flow of CIG arrivals and departures was a sign of the relative health of the company; a sign of good things to come for
Star Citizen and
Squadron 42.
Yet the perpetual turnover and ad hoc development habits of Cloud Imperium Games are
not typical of every studio.
Nor are logjams where two years of motion capture animations pile up undeployed because there's no Technical Animator on-hand to port them into the game.
Nor is starting a new year without a development roadmap for the year ahead, necessitating ad hoc spitballing sessions between management power players spread across the globe.
Nor is prioritizing the addition of in-game Spacedoll clothes shopping when your tutorial is broken, your flight model ludicrous, and your FPS so bad you can put a clip full of bullets in an opponents head, only to watch him strike a T Pose and hover away.
THIS IS WHAT FLOUNDERING LOOKS LIKE
It explains quite neatly why Star Citizen remains in an unstable Alpha state, 4.5 years in, with less than 10% of its promised content and features available for players. A company like CIG does not have time to anticipate and then respond to their competitive threats because...
...Their Developers are too busy lining up all of Chris Roberts promised game features and deciding which ones to shoot in the head...
...Their QA teams are documenting bugs squashed months ago somehow resurrected with new patches...
...Their Customer Support folks are busy sending canned "too bad, so sad" replies to people asking for refunds...
... Their Community Team is too busy putting out weekly tv shows about Wing Commander arcana while denying viewers answers about delivery dates for content...
... Their Visionary Leader is too busy shooting even more footage for a long overdue single player game unlikely to ever recoup its development budget...
...and their Marketing Team, such as it is, continues to pursue her Hollywood dream while not even bothering to stay abreast of basic game developments like Evocati testing...
How can they respond to threats from without when fighting threats from within is a fulltime job?
I know this was true for the last few years, when Chris Roberts thought the
Space Game race market would be fought over between him and his Frenemy of old, David Braben.
But 2016 has been a wake up call. and from what I can tell, yesteryear's sense of Manifest Destiny is beginning to crumble in the senior leadership. It is one thing to make offhand claims about developing a shooter on par with Call of Duty when you're primary competition is a space game that hasn't yet added space legs. It is quite another when the latest "Call of Duty" game is
set in space and includes space dogfighting missions and Zero G combat.
[timg]http://i.giphy.com/13oODBXndvZMYg.gif[/timg]
"I sense a disturbance in The Farce..."
Except they may not have anything super impressive to show. They unfortunately now live in a world where the Admiral Bishop speech will be compared with Infinite Warfare cutscenes. It's going to be really hard to compete against that kind of polish, especially when Infinity Ward
specifically prioritized improving the CoD storytelling elements and brought in some of the creatives behind "The Last of Us" and "Uncharted 4" to do just that.
Chris Roberts told us that AAA studios make creatively compromised games and subordinate creative visionaries to beancounter concerns. And in 3 years time, one of the biggest AAA franchises in gaming history has cooked up a Dogfighting and FPS movie game that Squadron 42 must now prove superior to, lest Chris' narrative be repudiated. I'm going out on a limb here, but I kinda think
he's parped on that front...
Hey, I agree with this.
When I originally
predicted a possible Hamill appearance, it was as much about reinforcing backer confidence during an event that's likely to erode it.
A Hamill appearance gets Chris a warmer crowd than he might otherwise enjoy, and that's going to come across better on the livestream, but Hamill can't use the Force and make new people buy this game when a lot of other E3 signals might be saying, "This aren't the games you're looking for. Move along. Move along." I think we might see a bump in sales, but only that.
The bigger problem coming out of E3 is one I've
harped for awhile.
These narratives are too ironic not to tempt a journalist or two, and Mark Hamill's presence makes the connection so obvious even a Gaming Journalist might figure it out.
If I were Chris, I'd be very, very worried about this. If he employed real Marketing and Brand expertise, they'd have warned of this very risk a long time ago, and they'd have made course corrections to reduce the risk. But he doesn't, and they didn't, and now we're here.
END POST
this was posted by GORF. A great poster who provides great analytical commentary about star citizen. Is the thread hostile to sc, then yes, but that's because cig just keep messing up and failing. Sure there is irrelevant things that don't apply but the general feeling is that this game is on a rocky path and will probably not be released as they promised.
! Unless you have been locked in eternal conflict in a number of arenas....
