[h=4][/h] I wanted to look at this chart again. I was speculating on what has happened thus far and just how much all of this smoke and mirrors has helped them.
In 2015 through August they cleared roughly 19.5 million, versus roughly 18 million in 2016 through August. A slight dip but pretty good considering there's still no bloody game.
Gamescom earned them an extra 1.5 million over the average August. Let's say they finish this month with an extra 2.5 million over a normal October thanks to the Polaris JPG and CitCon. What the hell, I feel generous, 3 million.
2.2 dropped early March, 2.3 dropped late March, 2.4 dropped mid-June, 2.5 dropped mid-August, and there's little functional difference between them, maybe their new playground where they wander around waiting for nothing to happen and shopping. After March was when they stopped doing their monthly updates. We started hearing about the "maintenance mode" around this time, and it seemed like CIG was battening down the hatches to get something ready for E3. Given what we've seen from Gamescom and CitCon, it likely would have been another hacked-together heavily scripted turd that had nothing to do with anything that was being worked on for the game, but something that was put together to get Citizens to open their wallets. But they likely couldn't manage even that so they pulled out of E3.
The shopping update comes out because that's more important than anything else, but very little of any substance to the game itself. It took two more months for another update that basically has a couple of new places to clip through, but the rest of the game is still as lovely an unoptimized as ever....is anyone working on the game, or was mostly everyone working on the Gamescom scripted demo, which again pulled resources away from the main game and likely won't be ready to be implemented for months? They couldn't pull out of Gamescom as there would have been seismic rumblings among the whales and possibly the gaming media, as they're starting to figure a few things out.
So from 2.4 until now, almost 7 months, CIG appears to have been working on a bunch of stuff that's not going to be implemented into the game anytime soon, and bull that seemed to be specifically crafted just for conventions (citizencon_homestead lol). And they did this, to earn an extra 4.5 million dollars. Given the estimated 3 mil/month burn rate, that's 1 and a half months worth of keeping the lights on.
They wasted 7 months of crucial development time in order to earn enough extra money to cover 1.5 months. And reddit is proof that they could have just made incremental normal progress on what they had and kept selling jaypegs and kept up a stable income stream.
These people are flipping dumb.
The "there are no sand worms!" hate thread on reddit seemed to go on forever.
CIG and CR going "you can make SC whatever want to be" is weird, creepy and somehow a bit funny. This all demo was throwing all sci-fi references in and yaaaaay, this is like dream game you wanted as kid with all sci-fi references.
