Star Citizen Discussion Thread v11

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Arcondes

A
To the shell gameplay „loop“ i think it‘s more like this.
You buy an DLC aka space ship jepeg pledge from a company called robersspaceindustries ltd. after some time the company closes or gets a new name. So the Company you bought your shining space ship is gone. So wich one to sue? A closed company?
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Navigare Necesse Est said:
Is that even legal?
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In what way?

You can do all sorts of things with contracts that are perfectly legal.

He could have got something like "I give you 46 million in investment, in return we get dividends from CIG as a percentage of pledges made"

I'm not saying this is what they did, just a possibility.

But it would be funny as hell if it was true, if a percentage of all pledges were not going into development but directly into the pockets of Calder. Naturally CIG would not want this information made public.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Arcondes said:
To the shell gameplay „loop“ i think it‘s more like this.
You buy an DLC aka space ship jepeg pledge from a company called robersspaceindustries ltd. after some time the company closes or gets a new name. So the Company you bought your shining space ship is gone. So wich one to sue? A closed company?
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I seem to recall a few years ago someone tried to sue CIG but it got thrown out because they had filed the complaint against Cloud Imperium Games instead of Cloud Imperium Ltd (or something like that). Basically CIG, rather than saying "yeah, its us, just the wrong shell company, refile with this other company, then we can talk" just got it thrown out. Not sure what happened after that, presume they did refile against the correct company and presumably lost, which is why we heard no follow up. This is an advantage of having so many companies, they can make it very hard for people to determine which company you need to sue, and even if you are successful, they can say "Oh, sorry, that company has zero money, we can't pay you, ok, we file for bankruptcy" and a day later open shell company X to provide the same buffer.

This is all the stuff that CR learned in hollywood.
 

Arcondes

A
Pretty much this and I think it has more advantages to shifting money around for tax profit. You know sry all our company made a loss only the companys on some islands you 😉
 

Cotic

Cotic
LanceLord said:
You'd save yourself quite a bit of future potential botox brow surgery if you stopped stressing yourself out over the technicalities you know. Especially with official words like "preorder DLC" and phrases like "years in advance". And instead, simply embraced this profound and unending conundrum that is the marketing of the 'Verse.... :LOL:
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You're reading way, way too much into things there mate :rolleyes:
 

hairychris

hairychris
Agony_Aunt said:
Definitely income. Who'd want to gamble on CR making a profit? He worked in hollywood for years where the standard tactic is to show a loss on production so anyone who didn't get a contract for percentage of gross gets nothing.
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Ah yes, I'd forgotten about Hollywood accounting.

If this is the case then I wonder what backers would think about a %age of their pledges going directly into the Calders' pockets? All pledge cash goes towards development unless that's been (quietly) shelved.

EDIT: Ah, I see that you said exactly that in the next post. Hah!
 

Tippis

Tippis
hairychris said:
Ah yes, I'd forgotten about Hollywood accounting.

If this is the case then I wonder what backers would think about a %age of their pledges going directly into the Calders' pockets? All pledge cash goes towards development unless that's been (quietly) shelved.
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“This is good for Star Citizen because it means Calders has a stake in keeping development going so now we will definitely see a game being released in 2021 2022 2023 … 2030±5.”
 

Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
Agony_Aunt said:
In what way?

You can do all sorts of things with contracts that are perfectly legal.

He could have got something like "I give you 46 million in investment, in return we get dividends from CIG as a percentage of pledges made"

I'm not saying this is what they did, just a possibility.

But it would be funny as hell if it was true, if a percentage of all pledges were not going into development but directly into the pockets of Calder. Naturally CIG would not want this information made public.
Click to expand...
Afaik, you can only pay dividends from profits. Money you pay before interest and tax is cost and cost has to be for something in return.
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Navigare Necesse Est said:
Afaik, you can only pay dividends from profits. Money you pay before interest and tax is cost and cost has to be for something in return.
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The original Calder´s investment in the US was in a LLC. If I remember correctly LLC actually do not issue regular shares like corporations. The original CIG statement mentions "units" (not shares) for this etc. Units are basically a way to represent the owners percentage split. So the concept of dividends would not really apply here. What the LLC do need to have though is an operating agreement. This operating agreement describe among other things the conditions how the LLC members/owners have agreed to split profits. I would asume that when the Calders bought units of the US LLC the Operating Agreement had to be ammended somehow. And I would imagine that would be the place for them to inject any return conditions, if any, or any other kind of milestone targets etc.

In addition to pure LLC operating agreements you can also have all kinds of revenue based finance agreements that impose certain returns irrespective of the profit margins. The flexibility in this area for LLCs is huge.
 
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Navigare Necesse Est

Navigare Necesse Est
Viajero said:
The original Calder´s investment in the US was in a LLC. If I remember correctly LLC actually do not issue regular shares like corporations. The original CIG statement mentions "units" (not shares) for this etc. Units are basically a way to represent the owners percentage split. So the concept of dividends would not really apply here. What the LLC do need to have though is an operating agreement. This operating agreement describe among other things the conditions how the LLC members/owners have agreed to split profits. I would asume that when the Calders bought units of the US LLC the Operating Agreement had to be ammended somehow. And I would imagine that would be the place for them to inject any return conditions, if any, or any other kind of milestone targets etc.

In addition to pure LLC operating agreements you can also have all kinds of revenue based finance agreements that impose certain returns irrespective of the profit margins. The flexibility in this area for LLCs is huge.
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The venture capitalist doesnt usually tie in on operational level. But I can see some sort od mezzanine finance. Skimming off part of the revenue I find unlikely - then again there is already a nice web of companies that might allow all kinds of tricks.
 

Red Anders

Red Anders
Agony_Aunt said:
So, just watching this discussion from SaltEMike


Now, i assume this is based on something CIG have said, but apparently ToW has 10 devs allocated to it, including Sean Tracy (lead) and 3 artists, so only 6 devs.

So, they are still having problems making SC with 600 people while they expect to make ToW a decent product with 6? Counterpoint is made how like NMS started with 6 devs. Escape from Tarkov is being developed by 100 and still has issuers.

Mike talks about CIG trying to make multiple games (SQ42, SC, ToW, AC, SM) but then points out how they are dependent on the core functions that don't exist yet.

Its kind of a mix of clarity with the odd bit of fantasy.
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Whenever I see one of his videos these days, it occurs to me that a psychologist specialising in cognitive dissonance could probably get a doctorate out of his youtube channel.
 
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