Star Citizen, as a development project, has so many red flags in my opinion, that it just boggles the mind:
Perpetual Development
Software development, especially game development, that fails to meet its deadlines is so common that I mentally tack on an extra 50% to any estimate given about a game's release or patch. That being said, back in 2012, Chris Roberts promised a release in 2014, and in 2020 Star Citizen is farther than ever from a release.
Cart before the Horse Development
There's no denying that, for the most part, the game looks gorgeous. The million polygon models, the 4k textures, all the attention to minor details lovingly put into the game's assets, this game looks
polished. The thing is, games in alpha
shouldn't look polished. With the exception of a handful of assets in the game that are used for graphics testing purposes, everything else should be just good enough to get the job done.
The whole point of an Alpha, especially a playable Alpha like Star Citizen, is to get the game's mechanics working, so that they can be tested by the Alpha player base, so that the game breaking bugs, balance breaking exploits, and all the little things you didn't think of, but become obvious once you've got thousands of Alpha players logging in hundreds of hours. It's pointless to spend hundreds of man-hours on detail work on an asset that you discover has a fatal flaw in its current geometry. The polish comes later, after you've solidified the foundation of your game.
Penelope at Her Loom
Chris Roberts has a rather long history of being a perfectionist. As a result, this game's art assets being redone unnecessarily many times, often by a new artist. This is bad enough, but when you combine this the the above, what you basically get are hundreds of artists who are basically paid to
look busy, rather than actually be productive.
The Whitewashed Tomb
Chris Roberts seems to be obsessed with the
appearance of success. Hundreds of employees working from expensive studios spread across multiple countries. Expensive commissioned artwork, including paintings and sculptures of in-game assets. Slick marketing videos. Lavish spectacles at conventions celebrating the game. These are all things that many
successful gaming development companies do... with the profits made from released games they made with their
own money. Game development companies that are just starting out try to save as much money as possible, so that they can focus on making their first game.
The Kickstarter Lies
Chris Roberts' Kickstarter pitch, which raised millions of dollars, paints a very different picture of the state of development of Star Citizen in 2012, as opposed to what the reality was. Star Citizen in the 2012 Kickstarter Pitch was a game already a year into development by Chris and "his team," complete with a pre-alpha game play prototype. He claimed to have raised enough money to complete development, and all he needed a few million more to polish it up to AAA standards by 2014. It was only years after the fact that we discovered that all Chris
really had was a few CryEngine3 machinima videos... created by CryTech itself as part of a deal with Chris... with Chris' good buddy (and CiG co-founder while also CryTech's attorney) Ortwin negotiating
both sides of the deal.
Shell Company Shell Game
Over the years, Chris Roberts has created dozens of shell companies in support of Star Citizen. While it isn't unusual for a single company to have several subsidiary companies, usually for tax purposes in other countries,
dozens reeks of Hollywood Accounting. Speaking of which...
Hollywood Accounting
Hollywood Accounting is a practice where a company removes all profits it makes, by overcharging itself (via its subsidiary companies) for the services it performs. It gets its name from how film studios charge itself massive fees for distribution and marketing a film, do that a film that cost $45 million to make, and grossed over a billion dollars at the box office and home video, actually
lost money... thereby cheating the people who actually
made the film. We know Chris Roberts (the man) basically sold the rights to Star Citizen to
himself (in the form of CiG) for millions of dollars. We know Chris Roberts (the man), plus friends and family, are all on the boards of directors of all those shell companies, and thus drawing salaries from them. Chris Roberts & Company have clearly learned the most important Hollywood lesson well.
There's an old saying: "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action." The first couple things on my list is just plain old bad project management. It's the rest that transform Star Citizen from a good faith but badly managed attempt to make Chris Roberts' "dream game" into something that reminds me of the ending of
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (spoiler warning).
