Star Citizen Thread v6

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K-NINE

K-NINE
...not to mention having to hand over the IP would suggest that Coutts reckoned it a fair chance that CIG might not stay solvent long enough to receive the tax credit rebate.
 

tooterfish

T
Slopey said:
That's a really risky strategy just to hedge the GBP rate (which is doing quite well in the last week).

Remember it's not the end of the world making a loss, certainly in the tax year before the product ships, with the UK position on computer games rebate.
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The UK company will never make a profit, and so will never have to pay taxes. Ortwin is a master of tax avoidance.

It's not illegal, but IMO as a UK citizen it's highly unethical. The rebate is designed to give working companies a leg up during lean development years, not allow them to avoid paying taxes entirely even after their product is released.
 

Ian Skippy

Ian Skippy
Edith_The_Hutt said:
The explanation given in the Eurogamer article I could find on the Coutts loan here seems fairly straight forward: They don't trust the pound to retain its value.

My reading of the explanation is:

  • They need £4M GBP to pay UK developers for the next year or so
  • They have about £4M GBP due in a tax rebate in 2018
  • They don't have enough in GBP right now but they do have it in USD
  • If they convert USD to GBP to pay current costs then they're gambling that the £4M GBP they receive in 2018 will be worth the same amount of USD they just converted. This is far from certain.
  • If they take a loan in GBP which they will be able to pay back with money they know they will have then they will make a fixed loss.
  • They'd rather suffer a definite fixed loss to pay these costs than an uncertain loss which may be a lot bigger given currency shifts in the last 18 months.
  • Coutts will happily issue a loan with the IP as collateral because they know that the IP is absolutely essential to the project continuing; hence there's a pretty good motivation for the loan to be repaid on time so long as the project is solvent overall rather than in any one currency.
  • This certainty will reduce the interest payable on the loan, meaning it's in CIG's interest to offer the IP as collateral rather than anything which may appear less vital to the production of the game.

Please let me know if I've missed something but it seems to me that the existence of the Coutts loan isn't direct evidence that the project is in trouble, just that they've nearly exhausted their reserve of GBP.
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Suppose I ask the bank to loan me a tenner [because valid reasons], and they ask me for my liver if I fail to pay the loan back. Would you say 'it makes sense because the liver is absolutely essential to you, so you have a pretty good motivation to pay back. Plus, this will certainly reduce interest because a decent liver will easily be worth more than $10. So its a good deal for all involved.'

Most would say:"if it is such a minor financial loan, why put up your liver as collateral?"
 

Tippis

Tippis
sleutelbos said:
Suppose I ask the bank to loan me a tenner [because valid reasons], and they ask me for my liver if I fail to pay the loan back. Would you say 'it makes sense because the liver is absolutely essential to you, so you have a pretty good motivation to pay back. Plus, this will certainly reduce interest because a decent liver will easily be worth more than $10. So its a good deal for all involved.'

Most would say:"if it is such a minor financial loan, why put up your liver as collateral?"
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Never mind the why, let's start with the how?! :D
 

lysan

lysan
sleutelbos said:
Suppose I ask the bank to loan me a tenner [because valid reasons], and they ask me for my liver if I fail to pay the loan back. Would you say 'it makes sense because the liver is absolutely essential to you, so you have a pretty good motivation to pay back. Plus, this will certainly reduce interest because a decent liver will easily be worth more than $10. So its a good deal for all involved.'

Most would say:"if it is such a minor financial loan, why put up your liver as collateral?"
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This is really some convoluted way of financing your business, unless you're the owner of multi ad hoc children companies and speculate in ...... OH Wait a minute!!!!
 
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Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Britney said:
Their campaign was contradictory in that regard. On the kickstarter page you can still read the following:

"We have investors that have agreed to contribute the balance we need to complete this game as long as we can validate that there is a demand for a high end PC space game. By meeting or surpassing our target on Kickstarter you tell the world that you want a PC based Space Sim and allow us to make this game." https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen

So the idea was: collect a decent amount of money through crowdfunding --> investors will hand out additional funds.

Who these investors are or were, and how much funding they provided or would have provided was never made transparent. Anyway, this shows that the very original concept was not based on pure crowdfunding, and there has always been the possibility that funds from other sources form the basis for the project.
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I do not think the presentation of the independence premise was contradictory at all, especially early on once Chris Roberts decided to continue beyond initial Kickstarter / crowdfund on his own platform and considered he had enough funding not to need investors/publishers.

Britney said:
Edit:
btw.: I don't like when people make up arguments without referring to sources. Fans or critics alike generate random and baseless narratives by doing this, and everything becomes a mess in the end.
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Fair enough, but to be frank the premise of independence from investors/publishers and how it has been exploited to sell the idea of Star Citizen across the board (LFTC, press interviews etc) is well documented and can be easily checked with a cursory search out there.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14184-Letter-From-The-Chairman
"It’s not being developed like a normal game and it’s not being funded like a normal game. I’ve had to toss aside a lot of my knowledge from the old way of developing and embrace a completely new world. There is no publisher. There is no venture capitalist wanting a massive return in three years. There is no need to cram the game onto a disc and hope we got it all right. Star Citizen is not the type of game that will be played for a few weeks, then put on a shelf to gather dust. Instead of building a game in secrecy we can be fully open with you as a community who have made this game possible. We can involve the future player base in the creative feedback loop as we develop and iterate core systems. As a group we are all involved and united in our quest to make the best game possible."

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13783-Letter-From-The-Chairman-41-Million
"And last but not least I’m having way to much fun building the universe of my dreams for everyone to adventure in! I’ve been down the big company acquisition route twice before and there’s a reason I am making Star Citizen totally independently!... We don’t need to go to anyone with deep pockets to make OUR dream a reality"

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizen
"Those investors Roberts had been hoping to court with a small Kickstarter success and simple prototype? He didn’t need them any more.
“I think it’s for the betterment... not for them, but for the project,” Roberts told me. Without private investors, he explains, “there's no a 'I need my return on the money, I need you to get [the game] out so I can sell my stake' or 'We need you to sell to EA or someone'.”
Looking at it another way, however, Star Citizen has lots of private investors. Over 1,500,000 of them, at the time of writing. They might not be expecting to make money, but they are expecting a game."

http://archive.is/M0mHV#selection-2387.1-2387.301
"We are taking this approach to fund-raising for several reasons," said Roberts. "For one, this route takes the traditional game publisher out of the mix and enables us to take the millions of dollars normally used by publishers for a triple-A title and plow them right back into developing the game."

Etc etc


This independence premise and creative freedom mantra, only consulting with the player base, and whereby all the crowdfund money goes back to the project fourfold etc has been repeated in one form or another by CR/CIG multiple times either directly or to the press, and has since become a flagship of the idea of this project over which you will find many a testimony over at the CIG forums or reddit where backers amplify this message and confirm this is precisely one of the main reasons why they backed the game or keep pledging, especially when comparing it with other games. And it is hence a key selling point of the product.

If all of a sudden Chris Roberts had decided to revert to external investors or publishers, I would expect at the very least Chris Roberts to let all those backers know.
 
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lysan

lysan
Viajero said:
I do not think the presentation of the independence premise was contradictory at all, especially once Chris Roberts decided to continue beyond initial Kickstarter / crowdfund on his own platform and considered he had enough funding not to need investors/publishers.



Fair enough, but to be frank the premise of independence from investors/publishers and how it has been exploited to sell the idea of Star Citizen across the board (LFTC, press interviews etc) is well documented with a cursory search out there.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14184-Letter-From-The-Chairman
"It’s not being developed like a normal game and it’s not being funded like a normal game. I’ve had to toss aside a lot of my knowledge from the old way of developing and embrace a completely new world. There is no publisher. There is no venture capitalist wanting a massive return in three years. There is no need to cram the game onto a disc and hope we got it all right. Star Citizen is not the type of game that will be played for a few weeks, then put on a shelf to gather dust. Instead of building a game in secrecy we can be fully open with you as a community who have made this game possible. We can involve the future player base in the creative feedback loop as we develop and iterate core systems. As a group we are all involved and united in our quest to make the best game possible."

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13783-Letter-From-The-Chairman-41-Million
"And last but not least I’m having way to much fun building the universe of my dreams for everyone to adventure in! I’ve been down the big company acquisition route twice before and there’s a reason I am making Star Citizen totally independently!... We don’t need to go to anyone with deep pockets to make OUR dream a reality"

http://archive.is/M0mHV#selection-2387.1-2387.301
"We are taking this approach to fund-raising for several reasons," said Roberts. "For one, this route takes the traditional game publisher out of the mix and enables us to take the millions of dollars normally used by publishers for a triple-A title and plow them right back into developing the game."

Etc etc


This independence premise and creative freedom mantra, only consulting with the player base, and whereby all the crowdfund money goes back to the project fourfold etc has been repeated in one form or another by CR/CIG multiple times either directly or to the press, and has since become a flagship of the idea of this project over which you will find many a testimony over at the CIG forums or reddit where backers amplify this message and confirm this is precisely one of the main reasons they backed the game, especially when comparing it with other games. And it is hence a key selling point of the product.

If all of a sudden Chris Roberts had decided to revert to external investors or publishers, I would expect at the very least Chris Roberts to let all those backers know.
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I love this part.

I’ve had to toss aside a lot of my knowledge from the old way of developing and embrace a completely new world.
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Oh dear Oh dear...

reality_-_is_overrated_who_needs_it.jpg
 

tooterfish

T
ajcrean said:
You do realise that you're saying this about a company that sells expensive JPGs which probably won't ever appear in any game and whose CEO has lied about release dates? :D
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I'm not saying it's the only unethical thing they do, I'm saying it's yet another one.

Another nail in the coffin as it were, just in case anyone was still feeling generous towards them.
 

Backer42

B
ajcrean said:
...not to mention having to hand over the IP would suggest that Coutts reckoned it a fair chance that CIG might not stay solvent long enough to receive the tax credit rebate.
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That's point of this kind of loan, where the whole IP is on the chopping block: The bank is betting against CIG UK Ltd. not on it. They will win either way, but they will win bigger when CIG UK defaults on the loan. So much for probabilities. Backers will lose, that's for sure. I don't believe anything about the tax excuse.
 
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hairychris

hairychris
Lysander lysan said:
Average salary is around 10.000 USD if you take the article linked in this thread somewhere as a guideline? So top level positions around 15000 maybe?
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Is that monthly?

You can't really rent a property to live in in any of CIG's studio locations for $10k pa, let alone do anything else!
 

hairychris

hairychris
Zetta said:
FailureToReport talks about the state of the project, his own refund ($7,300 excl. grey market), feature creep, CIG's behaviour etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crFonNn6Vkc
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Crikey. Just started and at 0:30 he says "what is Star Citizen, at least for me personally?"... That may be part of the problem. It's different things to different people.... which is a major part of the problem!

*cough the same could be said for various political issues and religions if I wanted to get banned cough*

Is there an "innocently whistling" icon?
 
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