Nope, don't think so. I was just expressing an opinion from the content overall...in a general sense. It does lean toward ridicule at times and focuses way too much on the spending habits of individuals. There's not much going on with SC worth discussion...so let's make fun of the backers. Hell...even I do it
When I originally backed Star Citizen up in 2012, I was prepared to pay a “subscription fee” in cosmetics, similar to what I’ve done in other MMOs that didn’t charge a subscription, to the tune of $120 a year, as long as I felt it was worth playing ,
and I felt the developers were doing a good job, after the game released… in 2014. This was to be the game that would keep me occupied until Elite Dangerous got a couple paid updates under its belt, so that the game would resemble Frontier: Elite 2 in content. I figured I’d be playing it for 4-6 years, perhaps longer, if even my pessimistic timeline proved to be over generous, so I could’ve easily paid $1000 to CIG had fulfilled those 2012 promises.
But they didn’t, and much like Mechwarrior Online, development of SC moved away from what I’d been promised, in a direction I don’t consider as much fun. Rather than holding CIG in general, and Chris Roberts in particular, to those promises, the community
rewarded failure financially. Which
really baffled, but at the time I had dismissed it as part of the original pay-to-win aspect of the game.
Still, as long as they seemed to be developing the game in good faith, I was willing to keep up my end of the bargain. People in general tend to underestimate the amount of work required, and overestimate their own abilities, especially in video game development, so I tend to add a generous 50% to any time estimates I’m given. So I wasn't surprised that it wasn't ready in 2014. Disappointed, but not surprised. I was surprised, however, by the state the game was in when 2015 came to a close.
This made me curious about why the project was so far behind, despite having raised a hundred times the original estimate, so I started diving into the details of this game’s development. It didn’t take long to to get a sense that this game
wasn’t being developed in good faith. It started with the revelation that Chris Roberts, through the “Roberts Family Trust,” had bought a mansion in LA, which is something I consider inherently dishonest. It's a method of evading individual taxes, while still receiving the individual benefits.
Then came the discovery that he had kept secret his years long marriage to his head of marketing, a struggling actress who had no previous experience at the job. And, of course, there was the blinging out of his LA headquarters and the lavishly appointed annual conventions, which is something
successful game developers do, and successful in no way described CIG's
repeated failures to deliver on their promises. A deep dive into the public and independent audits of the UK branch of the company included a six-figure "directors remuneration", which was essentially the Roberts Clan paying themselves
twice to do their jobs... and rewarding themselves very generously as well.
Finding out in 2017 that CIG was not one company operating in three countries, or a very understandable three companies in three countries to take advantage of local tax breaks, but over
two dozen shell companies, was drove me to get a refund. That reeked of "Hollywood Accounting," which is a way of legally draining profit out of a project, in order to avoid fulfilling your promises to those who supported you making it.
In the case of Hollywood, this is a way studios avoid paying copyright holders, writers, directors, actors, and all the other people who helped make the movie, their fair share in its success. It's a practice I consider unethical, but the fact that Hollywood studios do this is well known. The fact that
CIG was doing this, on the other hand, was alarming. Because in the case of Star Citizen, the role of the studios were the Roberts Clan, and the people who were being denied "their fare share in its success" were the backers themselves. This was the ultimate violation of
every promise CIG had initially made, as well as an utterly unethical abuse of the crowd funding model.
And still bafflingly, backers continue to reward incompetence with ever increasing financial success. So if I occasionally ridicule backers, its not for how much they spend. If CIG had fulfilled their promises, and retained my attention long enough through great gameplay I enjoyed, I could've easily been one of those people who had spent $1000 not on virtual pay-to-win space ships, but on virtual decorations for those space ships, my virtual avatar, my virtual property, and so on. Instead, that $1000 has been spread over multiple games, including single player space games like Space Engineers for camoflage patterns and a variety of windows that have no in-game advantage, and Surviving Mars, so I have a wider variety of "radio stations" to groove along with as I keep one ear out for alerts from the game as I clean the bathroom.
I ridicule backers for not
caring that a
crowd funded project is not only being grossly mismanaged, but has also been used made multi-millionaires of four people... the very same people that crowd funding is supposed to reward
last.