Game Discussions Star Citizen Discussion Thread v12

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
LittleAnt said:
Directors are nicely paid in every companies.
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Well, i'm sure Elizabeth Holmes and Billy McFarlane paid themselves well.

The question is, how much should CR be enriching himself and his family before a product is released?

If you think he is entitled to the salary he pays himself and his family at this point in time, then ok. I suspect some would think its rather outrageous.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
LittleAnt said:
Again what is the alternative ?
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Other games. As i said, there are many games out there worth playing.

A beautiful alpha that a lot of backers have made their main game ?
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Its pretty. Pretty a good game does not make. I understand some are ok with it as it is, despite its current state. Making a buggy alpha your "main" game though is highly questionable.

It's not a problem for me. I give money to CIG to release a dream of a gamer. They succed, good for me. They fail, I'll play to other games. That's all.
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That's your call. Again, you seem willing to ignore CR's history and trust that this time will be different. That's quite a stretch.

For now, there is only one space game that give me a real pleasure to play, SC.
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You might want to broaden your horizons.

A play a lot of other games beside SC. Today I played Cyberpunk (level 21). So what ?
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I don't know. So what? Did you enjoy it? If not, why you playing it? If so, strange how many SC faithful point to Cyberpunk as being something so bad it makes SC look good.

I think you have invested a lot more of your time in SC than me. Your daily routine will be more impacted than mine if SC disappear.
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If SC dissapeared i'd be fine. Although i would miss the daily comedy and memes. I don't know about you, but i suspect that it would be an absoloute tragedy for you considering how invested you are in and how much faith you have in the project.
 

thistle

T
LittleAnt said:
You don't undersand that backers WANT that CIG take those risks on their behalf.
CIG is doing it with our money because we have allowed CIG to take those risks. I don't care that the risk is on me. And risk of what ? Loosing some money for a nice dream (which for me is not a dream anymore since a long time) ?
I want CIG to take risk with my money because no other company wants to takes those risks (private funding or not).
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Yes, it's a deliberately exploitative funding model. It didn't start that way. I mean originally Chris was going to make the game with the original money, and the stretch goals etc were not going to stop that, or be required to finish the game.
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But then the money kept coming in and ... things changed. It changed to making more money as a deliberate goal.



LittleAnt said:
And how do you want us to hold accountable CIG (while CIG showing us progress at each patch) ? By stopping funding them and killing them when no other company will take over ? Killing an alpha we enjoy to play ? What a great deal !
If tomorrow CIG disappears, which game do you recommend to replace it with ship interiors where I can play with my friends ?
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If stopping the funding in 2021 kills the game, with backers demanding CIG delivers before giving more money, does the game really exist? If not, I would say the funding model is exploitative.

You might respond and say but all crowd funded projects are like this, they need the backers money to carry on. But don't most (responsible) people who are crowd funding to make a product achieve their funding goals, then make the product?

Without inciting (and relying on) the fears of backers, if we fail you'll never get your dreams made real?

I just can't excuse or rationalise it lol.

Every so often SalteMike will say "I'm not spending more money, I've done my bit". If the high spending whales all did that, the people who already have the game but keep buying more ships for silly monthly earnings level money, the project would run of of funds.

That's not right, surely.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
thistle said:
You might respond and say but all crowd funded projects are like this, they need the backers money to carry on. But don't most (responsible) people who are crowd funding to make a product achieve their funding goals, then make the product?
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Which would be complete and utter horse radish.

Most crowd funded games have limited goals and then try and deliver on those goals.

If CIG had stuck to focus on delivering the things they initially promised, and after that delivering on additional goals provided by addional funding, there would have been a lot less criticism. They would be able to point to the released product and said "Backers gave us money to deliver this and we delivered. Now we are delivering more." But here we are, 9 years and almost half a BILLION later, and they still haven't delivered on what they said they could do for 5.5 million in 2-3 years.

And people like LittleAnt say they believe CIG can deliver.... it boggles the mind.
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
LittleAnt said:
Yes CIG is taking few financial risk (so what ? They should ?).
They are absolutly not wasting money, for me and a lot of others, because SC is already the main game of a lot.
Directors are nicely paid in every companies.
The product is not gold, but it is playable and good enough for me to be my main game.
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No risk means that there are virtually no consequences if they fail. Zero accountability for their actions.

Something similar happens with our children´s education. When kids don’t have consequences for their actions, they feel they can do whatever they want. It doesn’t matter if they do something wrong because nothing happens. There is no punishment or action that tells the child, what you just did is unacceptable. Giving children all love and support with no consequences and boundaries leads to behavior issues. Hopefully anyone with kids can relate.

By the same token how efficient and productive do you think a company can really be when there are no consequences for failing to deliver... anything at all. How much of a break through or leading edge technology you think such a company can come up with? In a normal market situation finance sources would dry up, and the business could be terminated, if a company didn´t deliver on the promises made in exchange for that finance. This pressure in turns incentivises and motivates companies to become better at what they do, more efficient and innovate. Companies or teams that do not have the same pressure more often than not lack the rigor and discipline to excel. The same goes for the control exerted by the stock market, product reviews, regulators and investors. It is never a guarantee, but without those basic controls chances of good results usually drop dramatically.

Some individuals in a given team may have a strong work ethics and self discipline but without those external standard motivational and control mechanisms organizations tend to become less and less efficient the more time goes by. People get too confortable with the status quo if there are no consequences for their failures.

This lack of discipline and rigor gets compounded if not only there are no consequences for failure but there are even rewards involved. In the case of CIG´s directors we have Erin Roberts with a salary just increased as of end of 2020 to the tune of £292,322 (€345,000). Chris Roberts salary is probably even larger. Now add up Sandi´s just so to have an idea of the total Roberts family intake. You with me? Ok, now add the "dividends" paid out amounting to £1,007,559 (€1,200,00) also during 2020. These were paid out of backers money to the owners of which Chris Roberts has around the 80%. And that is dividends known on the UK side of the business. I would presume the US side also has a similar transaction that we are not privy to.

All that without a single product delivered yet for over 10 years. Let that sink in.

Those are the kinds of salaries and dividends of a company with a good delivery track record, with an actual product/service line released in the market and returning serious profits. Not those of a company that is still crowdfunded, that has not even yet finished what it promised to do and that vowed to use all funding received in good will into development. Not only there are no consequences for failure in CIG´s directors case, but there are even pretty significant rewards.

This situation is very rarely conducive to efficiency, innovation or break through technology and often leads to huge waste of resources. 400 million for a 10+ year grossly incomplete, unstable and buggy alpha without delivery in sight and a literal "ready when it is ready" to be exact here.

The product so far is, put bluntly, crap. CIG knows it and it will do everything in their power to avoid the usual press reviews and formal critiques even though SC is being heavily (and seriously unethically imo) marketed as a ready/playable now thing. The fact you can enjoy it is great, but it is really neither here nor there.
 
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Phlegm

P
Darth Ender said:
well, i haven't been able to load star citizen since they added easy anti-cheat it seems. So until wine/linux support gets back to working, it's elite and NMS only for me.
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Gee, it's almost as if trying to run software on an unsupported operating system just MIGHT not work as well as you'd hope...
 

[VR] Merkir

[VR] Merkir
LittleAnt said:
Yes CIG is taking few financial risk (so what ? They should ?).
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Interesting question. And quite obviously from CIG's point of view, they have no reason to take any risk when they have eager backers doing that for them.

But as a backer you need to consider carefully that with no risk, CIG has no financial incentive to finish the game. In fact they have huge incentive not to finish the game. They've also now set a precedent in taking dividends (apparently £800k dividend last year to CRobbers alone), so henceforth there's even less incentive to finish the game. And if you look at their track record over the last 9 years, it seems quite apparent they will keep using the same backer-funded, risk free business model for as long as they possibly can.

That being the case, I find it strange that a backer / player such as yourself is so dismissive of this point, as if it doesn't matter. I think the 9 years of development so far, and a further 5, 10, 15+ years (take your pick), says otherwise.

They are absolutly not wasting money, for me and a lot of others, because SC is already the main game of a lot.
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Are you sure that answer applies to that question? I'm pretty sure money wastage is measured in different ways. ;)
 

sovapid

sovapid
Mole HD said:
It was for a bit, they hotfixed the restock issue at the end of 3.14. It worked briefly in 3.15 live but seems to have been broken again...it was yesterday at least since I saw a few grumbles on global chat.
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It was not fixed for me on a Saturday afternoon/evening.

Was trying to run fluorine. Could buy it, but not sell it without waiting for multiple refresh ticks to go by with a C2.

Won't be doing that again....

🤠
 

Mole HD

Mole HD
Skizomeuh said:
Quite shocking how the faithful takes on risk, money, time, priorities and such seem overlooked from a self-centered perspective.

They can paint us "haters" but after all it seems we care much more about the project than them :)
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Some of us just don't care that much...business folks fiddle the books, lie to the taxman and think more about lining their own pockets than being a paragon of business virtue. That's exactly how business and capitalism works...

For us, it's not that complicated... it's all about...

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Even me as a cynic...I've had a reshuffle of some store credit after a melting spree...got my BMM out of buyback at the original concept price of $250...by the time that beast appears as flyable, it'll be in the $1000 890J price range, you can guarantee it. Whether I resell it for a healthy profit purely depends on if I like it or not. Materialism at it's finest :)
 
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