The guy at 53:00 said what I was going to say but did it so much better than I could have. .. I'm a long time SC backer (2.3 iirc) and I get annoyed when I'm told that I'm either a] an idiot for falling for a scam or b] a poor innocent victim of a scam. I am neither. I went into it with my eyes wide open and with the full understanding that the project could eventually fail. It was a risk I was, and still am, willing to take because I believe in the vision. There's nothing more to it than that. .. anyway, thanks for another great video Grolo. Appreciate you taking the time to do these.
You bet and _I_ hear ya! The guy at 53:00 is Esfand. He's awesome. If you are looking for more level headed folks in your feed... he's one. Thanks so much for taking the time to join the discussion here. Means a LOT.
The trend in time to complete decreased initially because those who were making the games were passionate risk takers dedicated to their craft, and not just paycheck seekers. They could have gone and got a stable paycheck in a businesses software studio like IBM, Microsoft or Novell, but opted instead to take risks with electronic games, which was niche in the 90s. The teams were smaller, and the pool of developers willing to take that risk, smaller, so they had less dead weight to carry. Games went mainstream, and due to necessity caused by increasing complexity, game production scaled up by a factor of 10 or more for AAA titles. We are now seeing team sizes in the thousands, most of which see the job as a paycheck, whereas 90s era games were developed with teams of 30-100 passionate dedicated people. The vast size of titles now, Price's law and the pool of "run of the mill" paycheck seeking developers due to game development establishing legitimacy as a career, has caused scaling issues on modern games. This is why it takes 10 years for a game to be developed. It takes 2 weeks to go through the burocracy of large scale development to add in a simple agro table to the codebase, whereas before, it would have taken a single developer a couple of hours.
I mean... you're not wrong. The industry (software dev) has changed dramatically, not just in gaming, but all over. I didn't want to jump down this rabbit hole in the video so I just mentioned "changes in the industry & field".
Grolo, well done! I really enjoy your videos which give a unagitated, entrepreneurial point of view on the SC infrastructure and company itself. Hope you get many more subscribers and CIG may take notice from it. :) And as someone who also has to guide IT teams, I can confirm that having, defend, and preserve a vision over time is the hardest thing you can be confronted with in project work. Followed by and "endless stream" of learning from failures.
100% correct on the investor thing, the best companies in gaming now are private, Rockstar, Valve etc. They produce better products because they aren't on the quarterly earnings clock
Take Two, which of course owns Rockstar, is a publicly-traded corporation actually. Rockstar is allowed the run of their own mill because they've established themselves as a safe bet. And that's mentioning when discussing why no one has yet announced a viable alternative - 🙄 Star Atlas the NFT Interactive Expérience - to SC. GTA is practically GUARANTEED to make $2B back and then some, based on past releases. SC is not only a new IP but really the first of a new type of game. Investors can sometimes handle expensive. Expensive AND risky? Investors don't tend to like that.
I made a comment that got me banned on Piratesoftware's channel. The comment went so where does Robert's find this ethical investor that will just give him a near billion dollars to make the game without having to outsource the funding. No investor in their right mind is going to write a blank check for a billion dollars and not ask for a return on investment. With CIG they know who their investors are and they know they have to keep them happy.
Only 10 mins in but wanted to put my thoughts before I forget... Gamers complained how many times this year that X game is shit, Y game is woke, Z game is safe as can be? We're FULL to the brim with safe games, remasters, remakes, sequels with no changes to the recipe. It's mind boggling. Even the new consoles, how many years it was crossgen? No balls to make an amazing looking game exclusive for your brand new box, not even Sony!. Open up any digital store for games, any. They're full of games made by committees, verified by groups of peoples making sure nothing is triggering, with just a sniff you can smell the marketing team took control over the game decisions rather than the directors, and well budgeted with some outsourcing to third world countries for low costs but with a dash of layoffs also in your main offices. Imagine Bethesda, a studio that had a known hierarchy, they've found their leaders from over a decade of big hitter development, studio is full of peoples with tons of experiences, known inhouse engine that delivered multiple heavy hitters and big sellers. Yet it took them 8 years and $400M to make a single player space RPG that didn't break any mold as far as tech go. Then you have like what, 30~50 peoples with a project idea and they make a demo with crytek for a kickstarter. Then you have to strip everything from that engine down to the bolts and nuts and rebuild from scratch, you have to expand to over thousand employees. You have to find your leaders, because it is an unknown. You have now three major projects in your hands. 1) a graphic engine, 2) an MMO, 3) an ambitious single player with big actors. Was there feature creep? Yes. Was it mismanaged? Well yes I have to say yes to this, and Grolo, maybe we have a different definition of it, but when they were throwing "soon" dates early on and not even their devs internally believed it, that's a lot of BS coming from the management side, but ok. Still one of the most ambitious project to date. Not a single publisher would have approved this. But they will never make anything like this either. Shitting on the principles of what Star Citizen and Ashes of Creation set out to do, break molds and create tech that no AAA publisher will ever touch with a ten foot pole because of the risks, is why my $45 from 2013 is just a gamble and a hope they pull it off. If it crashes and burn, so be it. I wasted more money on kickstarters with games that actually released but might as well have never (mighty no.9 comes to mind). Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Well said @Alexb115! Your comments on deadlines and promises are fair! I'm primarily looking at post 3.0 SC as the starting point. I wouldn't argue your points on communications.
I think I can add on to the "soon" comments. A lot of that came from the louder part of the community basically the SaltEMikes of SC who kept hounding CIG with "when is it coming out." To the point CIG just kept saying soon, instead of putting their foot down like adults and saying "it'd be ready when its ready". This is what I call the "are we there yet" syndrome, where kids kept asking when they would get to their destination because most children lack the ability to understand time & distance. Sometimes you get parents saying "we'll get there when we get there" and you have others' going "soon." Again I attribute that more of the nature of the beast and growing pains. Plus a dash of Crytek overselling their engine to CIG.
I don’t often post comments on TH-cam, subscribe, or like any videos I watch. But I just turned my computer back on to comment on this one. x) After 12 years of following Star Citizen, I have to admit that this journey has turned into a frustrating experience. But Grolo’s perspective on the topic has just changed my mind, and I’d like to thank you for that, Grolo. This video reminded me how incredible this project is-where we started, what its funding model means compared to other games… the kind of things I had forgotten were so important over time. I’ve also watched your videos about Server Meshing and learned a ton. I’ve already shared those videos with some friends, and I’ll be sharing this one too.
Let's be fair. Chris Robert's is making two games and building a multinational company from scratch, all with an indefinite amount of money. Of course that's going to be a rocky road. Starfield came from an established company, had half the tech, was single player, and took how long?
Server meshing has to be the biggest example of innovation by developers like CIG and Intrepid. AAA just churn out dros at the moment with a few rare pearls here and there.
These videos actually make me feel more excited about Star Citizen than CitCon did. There is too much negativity in the SC community, a loud minority of individuals complaining about development times and making everyone else (formerly including myself) believe that the game is a scam and to stay away from it. You showing that the level of progress is actually on schedule makes me excited to play the game and dream about what the future of it might be again. Thank you Grolo.
Absolutely thankful for saying that… People talk about SC managing like the current of state gaming is just freaking perfect. I want gaming to actually go next gen, not stuck on the never ending crap been put out and actually making money. How many fortnight madden, FIFA and all of that are we going to shoved in our throats for us to say. Let’s let someone else PUSH the envelope and move forward in any form.
And mind you its roughly half of the money spent that gta 6 has gone through... and gta 6 by release will hit roughly 12 total years, and following that they had teams, tools and a company etc that CIG had to build, intrepid had to build... and Star Citizen had its first like demo in 2013 if I remember it was in pre production at best and didn't really start until 2013-2014, so really its been around 10 years of actual development 12 if you count the pre production phasing and technically 13 or so since I think 2011 was its first idea and inception
Scaling up a highly specialized project is very difficult due to Price's law. The square root of the number of employees working on a project produces half the value. This is where the perks come in, you have to attract the top 10% of talent or else your scaling is a net loss.
Hey, another great video and again I 100% resonate with your take on all of this. Thanks for the content. On a side note, we live in a world where perception becomes reality, and often the most disseminated perceptions are from people who don't really understand how stuff works. Ignorance generates wrong expectations and frustration when those expectations aren't met. Drama sells, and so it goes. I'm sure even if these projects succeed entirely, they'll still be ever surrounded by drama.
Nailed it. I saved this video and will defer to it anytime people talk about time and costs. I usually use the GTA 6 and Beyond Good & Evil 2 examples as games that are big and ambitious that take a lot of time. I also agree that if people are so down and negative about the project, and feel it's "taking too long", there are biannual CoD releases, annual Madden and FIFA releases, and tons of other derivative games to play to fill the entertainment void.
I've seen a lot of criticism that is something like "they haven't even got X feature yet" or "they have had a crappy tier 0 version of Y feature for years, it should be better by now" often pointing to examples of other games that have these things and saying this is down to poor prioritization (if they even understand that there is only so many man hours to go around). People are (understandably) thinking about it from the perspective of a player wanting to play a great game, but from the perspective of a developer trying to create a complex risky project - you prioritize reducing risk. You work on the systems that have the least chance of working out with the highest impact on everything else (e.g. server meshing), plus securing the resources that will allow you to continue (e.g. selling ships). From a naïve player perspective it doesn't make sense why we don't have a decent chat system already (it is so easy because chat in MMO's is a solved problem), from the developer perspective it would be strange if we did have anything more than a barely usable chat at this point (there is basically no risk because it's basically a solved problem and has relatively little impact on other systems currently in the game, work on it later). Obviously now is a good time to start working on coordination tools because we are getting server meshing and multicrew gameplay and a more fleshed out plan for large scale org gameplay, so to test that stuff (reduce the risk) you need that system.
Thanks so much for the very insightful comment! I agree with everything... except possibly chat being a solved problem in mmo's ( lol ). I complain all the time that so many ship w/ bad chat systems... I don't know why!! But yeah... this comment is generally spot on. THANK you!
@@PirateKing-tb9ev Well aware, been following since the Kickstarter and backed when the AC module came out. Just pointed out that the graph he had on screen showed CIG under 1,500 people even in 2024, when because of Turbulent, they reached that in July of 2023.
The main issue I have with CIG, is that they have set really poor expectations. No one in the community, Chris or the community team believed we'd be at this point in the game's development in 2024, 10 years ago. Most people had the impression back in 2014, that the game would be out in 4 to 5 years at most. If they had come out front and said hey guys this is going to take as long as it takes, could be 10,20,30 years, they'd have a lot more runway of good will from the community. Chris continues to add more depth and features to the game, which is great, but it's having the side effect of the engineering teams having to go back and rework entire foundational systems over and over again. I don't see that loop being broken until they run out of money.
In my experience, engineering teams are always "reworking entire foundational systems over and over again". Extends beyond gaming. It's _very_ rare to see any system hold up more than 5 to 10 yrs w/out a rewrite. It's hard to say for sure without being on the inside, but I would assume these systems are being rewritten because they were always intended to be rewritten more often than because of CR raising the bar. I _sincerely_ doubt any engineer at CIG thought "yup, this is the target and this system we're adding right now will be just as it is now in 1.0!" All that said, I'm not going to say you're wrong about comms. That could be one area CIG needs to improve. From my POV they have improved over the time I've followed them, but I can't possibly have all the perspectives on that... and as I said in the vid - no such thing as perfect. I absolutely am sure there's been missteps and its possible this ranks among them. But in my mind, that doesn't change much, even if true. The broader points of the vid remain.
@07:18 - 08:00 Actually a very good point that i didn't consider. One of the reasons i've stayed with the company im with for almost 9 years now, even though i could get 10% more money 3 doors down, is because of the random perks like that (and the people) that makes all the difference.
Appreciate this perspective! There's a surprising number of people even in these comments who take issue with my espresso bar comment... haha. But I know I'm right on this one. Ive been around long enough to have observed this in action : ) So thanks for chiming in!!
@@grolo-af If there's one thing my near decade in IT has taught me (6 in SysOps, 2 in cloud, and the last 2 in dev) it's that us tech guys don't function without their coffee. lord knows i don't; i'm pretty sure i'm not allowed into sprint meetings without a mug in hand!
I think what Star Citizen REALLY needs right now, is for them to stop showing off flashy vertical slices, and bring all those faucets together as a cohesive product, that for the average user, does what is expected of it at least 90% of the time. That means you need to have the economy, a series of missions across the various professions, and some interesting locations to do them in. They have the last two, and for all I care, they should just SIMULATE what they want the economy of the future to look like, and make sure the players can trade items properly. However, the truth beyond this is, they need to have a hit team grabbing at all the loose fibers of the game, because no matter how awesome your trailers look, or how many other people recorded themselves having fun, if the user CAN'T because ship spawning doesn't function properly, then all the rest of your effort is for nothing.
No, they don't. 1. Without marketing, they don't make money they need to pay people who work on the game. 2. You can't tie together systems on top of a framework still in development. In large software development you don't plan every small detail of components at the start, that isn't possible because you don't have enough information. Requirements and visions change while you work on something. 3. If you mean fixing all the bugs and making it stable just to make players happy. It will extend development a lot. What do you think happens when they continue making changes after that, tearing out old systems, and adding new ones? You are back where you started. It will take another 10 years if you want safe development, where every feature is perfect and stable before it goes to the PU. Then you get the issue that months of work will be trashed because no one tested it, and it turned out not to be fun or they leave it in because of the (time)cost. Want to solve this? Get a time machine, give them 2 billion in 2012, let them do their thing in secret, and pray that the result turned out how you envisioned it.
@@grolo-af Watching it now, great so far. **Edit: Ok Grolo, I finished watching the video; this was high quality tech-talk just like your previous efforts. I'm sorry that I can't come up with some pithy response that challenges your assumptions, but my own experiences in project management support everything you're saying. I've been a backer since 2016, and I have watched CIG move relentlessly forward on the projects (SC & SQ42), and I have been perpetually frustrated reading posts complaining about how long it is taking; people fail to wrap their heads around the fact that it not only takes longer than a "normal" game development project might take because they maintain a 24/7/365 live environment, but also just how much CIG's transparency makes it SEEM like it's taking longer.
this video is the thoughts iv had about SC forever. thank you for putting it in video form. this is the video il show anyone that asks about why this stuff takes so long
Good vid. Having worked in tech for 30 years, what you say def resonates with me. It is refreshing to hear someone talking about this, from a professional perspective, instead of farming views for the drama.
Star Citizen is the game I always wanted but nobody, but Chris Roberts would ever dare to try. The sole reason I backed in 2013 was because I was tired of the same old reskinned games from publishers again and again. Publishers have ruined gaming, and CR promised an unpublished game that would live up to his vision. CR is the only person I'd trust to create a game like this. When I heard it was him, I was in. I wasn't worried about how long it would take because I knew it would be a LONG time. I knew what I was in for. It's simple; If you want a game fast, then don't complain when it's so so, and boring. Don't complain that there's never anything new to play that has ingenuity and creativity. For the future, Star Citizen is software as a service (SaaS). How it started out is irrelevant. The development is going to continue exactly like this for years to come, and it will never be finished. If you can't deal with that then move along. this game isn't for you. Just keep playing the same old boring, bland, reskinned trash that we've been served for years by publishers who are only interested in how much money they can make. Not whether the game is artistic, fun, or has replay ability.
Here’s my somewhat philosophical and socially critical take on these reactions: Advertising has been softening up our brains for decades, and now almost every content creator follows the same formula when it comes to pitching or spinning a story, it’s either hyped or hated. There’s not much left in between. The entire media landscape is built on these meticulously crafted psychological principles. There are exceptions, of course, but they usually don’t perform well because polarization is nearly as effective as sex when it comes to grabbing attention. It’s all just attention economy now. But with games, it’s a bit different, and this ties into Asmon's comment: games are boring because studios want to appeal to the widest possible audience. To do that, they have to avoid polarization, and as a result, games become dull and shallow. This is also reflected in their lack of complexity.
What people don't understand the vision of these products is way beyond the scope of what exists. So once you have an out of scope of normalcy then you have the exact same type of development.
yeah the 5AU of Stanton alone is over 740 million kilometers in total.. There is no game world even close to that to date so its tens to hundreds of times larger, I think one of bethesdas game had a total of around 36 million kilometers in total space or 6 million squared but it is nothing like star citizen etc, stanton is well 2.5x that size or almost 3x the size of stanton that's a bit ridiculous, planets or at least the old estimations were planets were around 2000 kilometers squared and moons 600 kilometers squared, this was around 8 years ago or so, as such they could be larger or smaller.. probably lager all things considered.
YT content creators and SC would be a better place if they would follow your lead. Pathfinders navigate uncertainty and no one wants to be one but all want the freedom without accountability.
Honestly some of the bigger star citizen youtubers should take notice of your channel and do collabs and such. Excellent work thank you. Hope to see you on some of the more popular SC podcasts soon.
Thank you so much for this! I've been a backer since 2020 in Star Citizen and have spend $450 on my account. I know exactly what I have signed up for and I love being a part of it. Sometimes everything is just broken and then sometimes everything just comes together and I am in awe of this game. (Sitting in my Starlancer in the Pyro System while watching this) I have been told many times that I'm falling for a scam. Yet when I think of feeling scammed my mind goes back to Diablo3 on release day and it's market, being an Arch Age Alpha/Beta backer and what became of that game, falling for the hype of Anthem. I have so many single player games that I have never finished because of live services and their respective stores. Really enjoyed this video! Subscribed.
Gotta say, about Anthem, it had the base for a solid game, and great competition to the looter shooter of the time (Destiny), but EA cut it before it could rise and let their devs cook the product properly, not to disregard the facts that it came out in a rough shape and it certainly had it's development hell phases. Still i managed to play it like 6 months ago or so, and it was a fun experience, if anything looking at what i managed to gather from it's development, Anthem wasn't necessarily a scam, it became one when they decided to cut it and abandon the project.
Love what you had to say at multiple parts. At the 38 min mark you talk about different teams working on different things and then go on to dependencies. I think it is important to high-lite how bad the existing dependencies / dependency graph is and why fixing unrelated things breaks features so often. It would seem to indicate they rushed so much of the earlier code and are now dealing with the ticking time bombs of those "designs" / those dependencies. The mission system not being suitable for server meshing is a great example. Who approved that design? Who reviewed that code and merged it in? Why did management allow / choose that "code standard"?
Well, it could be part of delivering a live service game while it's in dev, right? Obviously they weren't going to have a meshing plan in place in the first 5 years. It could be hard to predict how the mission system would need to accommodate meshing, or if it would have to. They may have made the assumption that the meshing system wouldn't require cooperation. Or, they could have shipped some questionable code. All of these things happen with great regularity on all teams I've been on. One of my primary responsibilities in roles I've filled over the last decade have been improving code quality. Everywhere I go it's a concern. I can't tell you the last time I entered a codebase and thought, "wow! These people were planning for the future!" The mentality has shifted to "just do what works now, we'll rewrite it if we have to". So you may have some valid points; however, this feels like an industry wide issue and not a CIG specific one. Remember - CIG hired engineers from other places. They brought opinions with them. Even if CIG intended to change this culture of rewriting, it would have taken them a significant amount of time to affect such change and see the payoff.
48:29 regarding why they didn't do lots of small investors; there are SEC rules about who can invest directly in companies. You have to be an accredited investor ( have allot of money).
I really like the development timeline chart, and it really puts into context how much time and money goes into a lot of these games. Slotting Star Citizen in this chart does not make it feel like an outlier. "But SC has raised over $750 million for 12 years of development and has not released yet." Yeah, and the unreleased GTA 6 is at $1500 million (twice as much) for 11 years of development. Plus, let's not forget that CIG is making two games with that development time and monetary investment, and we have good reason to believe that most of these resources have gone into making the other game (Squadron 42) and the game engine they both use. If they can deliver on an experience we're all hoping for, I'm fine waiting until it's ready.
I often hear people complain about the $700 million, and I think it is mostly because we are not used to thinking in amounts like that. It feels like a huge amount until you put it in perspective with the number of years, employees, assets, costs of doing business, research, development, loans, taxes, and compare it to other companies of this size. CIG burns through 100 million roughly every year and has that same amount in the bank as reserves, not making profits. Stopping marketing will slow down sales, and without other investors, they will go belly up within two years. As Grolo mentioned, if you have a better idea...
I've been waiting for Beyond Good & Evil 2 since i was a wee lad, I haven't heard them post anything for a while so assumed it was canceled. As for Star Citizen, I don't think most people are mad at the development speed but more on what's being prioritized. I personally could care less about 90% of the ships, I want gameplay, I want Missions, Lore, Events, STuff to do in-game. The reason i personally get mad at them is because they tease stuff like basebuilding or server meshing or the npc crew and then casually cut a lot of the stuff they literally just discussed from the development plan. I hate when you ask them questions and they dodge the question with "Well, I can't talk about that" or "We can't talk about that until (X) team is caught up and then maybe . . " It's always when you ask basic questions like "Do bodies float" "Will i be able to wear clothing under my armor?" "Will terrain modification be possible" "Any plans to do stuff about people abandoning ships within armistice zones?" ETC. Star Citizen as a concept i like, I Really despise how they prioritize things the ship content should be their final focus not primary.
It's a fair way to feel for sure. But you must know, as I outlined in the video, that slowing down ship deliver would NOT speed up delivery of gameplay. All it would do is slow down funding. And result in us having fewer ships when the game finally launches (in exactly the same amount of time mind you). Watch the video again if you disagree then come back and let's debate! : )
I'm a software engineer myself and it's crazy hard to explain all of this to people. They all seem to think that a game start when they see the trailer and that to go faster you just throw bodies at the problem. It's so frustrating.
My business plan for CiG is as follows: From this day forward, CiG only releases cosmetic things on the shop, any new ships are only available in game immediately upon release, where cosmetic paints and skins for said ships can be sold on the storefront. Cosmetics and skins for guns and armor can also be added to the shop. Furniture and other things for people to decorate their hangers and ships can be added to the shop. All ships should be removed from the shop. The only things sold on the shop are in game usable immediately for already released ships, armor, weapons, furniture, and game loops. No more Jpegs or selling dreams. Only tangible, non pay to win options, priced to sell. I believe this would actually raise more money overall, and bring more backers into the game over time. All the while protecting the integrity of the game into the long run, and prevent an inevitable pay to win death like every other MMO (mostly asian ports) suffers from once people play for a few months and hit that pay to win wall to be competitive.
Hm. I 100% agree that this should be the plan upon release; however, im not convinced it would sustain development. I know I personally have never bought a cosmetic item from CIG. Not an armor skin, not a couch, nothing. There's no point because there's no long-term persistence yet. I'm not going to decorate my hangar just to see it reset in a week for the next minor patch. I'm not going to spend time customizing my character just to fall through a planet. Now upon beta or release, I'll absolutely do those things and I'll absolutely buy cosmetics. But now? No way for me. Appreciate the ideas and discussion!!
I think I can answer your point at 7:22. Streamers think they can do it better. Its all sophistry at this point and it comes from people who have not worked in a business from a higher Management level. Even from someone like Piratesoftware who already has the mentality of "I am the smartest person in the room" has issues with his own credentials. Namely that he was low on the totem poll in Blizzard, got the job primarily due to family connections and overall he just comes off pompous. It also does not help that while Piratesoftware trashes SC, and he praises AoC. Then you go on his channel and conviently there's a AoC interview with the director. Then again the Director of AoC is leveraging social media in a certain way vs Roberts who is more traditional when interacting with media as a whole. Going back to my first point, this is typical of the Armchair Quarterback, the guy who watches his favorite sports team on the television and goes "The Coach is an idiot, I can do better" just by looking at a delayed transmission at the comfort of his chair. Mike, Pirate and others get the flack they get due to the lack of understanding. If they do understand they are seriously misleading people for their own benefits as bad news always sells better then good news. They also refuse to understand the climate & culture in running an operation that's over 5 people. People who chase paychecks think those above them have it easy. While lower middle managers may be a overall waste of space, and fuel this culture of "managers do nothing". Those above that level are busy with coordinating inter-office communication between departments. The left hand needs to know what the right is doing on the development side. While sure the marketing dept needs to stay on a tight leash, and will often slip the hands of the owner. At least its primary goal is to make sure the coffers are filled with cash to pay the talent. Social Media has its role to play in game development but it should not dictate the vision of the game itself. Want to see a game that is by far a complete wreck, just take a look at Escape from Tarkov. EFT has serious issues within its own code because they have not kept the game updated each and every time Unity has updated. This has lead to game breaking issues for players themselves. Then you have the streamers and streamer items in game, all of whom have some pull on how ETF is designed. IF the game needs to become more brutal due to Pestily not having fun, you can bet next wipe they will adjust the game so their streamers can have more fun at the expense of everyone else. Nikita has also gone on record that he loves hackers, will not do much about them because they buy...ETF, that he's more then happy to monetize hackers because that's what he did in Contract Wars. Then his whole rant about a PvE mode for ETF, that it goes against the game. Well he had no choice to add a PvE mode because majority of the players were playing a mod SPT (Single Player Tarkov) that ran far better then the base game. Instead of hiring the passionate creators of SPT he went after them consecutively before well the big dip in his sales. It took Battlestate Games losing money before a PvE mode was added into the game, why because of his soft on hackers position. The community got fed up overall with how the state of the game was, and overall still not happy with the state even with PvE because of Nikita wanting to force players into PvP. Why force players who are happy in PvE, because the PVP TTV streamers are unhappy about the lack of easy kills for them to make content. That right there is the difference between Star Citizen and other games, Roberts has his vision. He will listen and take under consideration what the players want but he will not bow to streamer/influencer pressure. To me that's why people like SaltEMike and Avenger One constantly sling mud at CIG, their "influence" is being ignored.
Thank you for this! Well said and well articulated. The two companies definitely gave different approaches to social media. SC tends to operate above it while AoC is "in". I hope both navigate it well. Really interesting to read your perspective on EFT. I've never played but sounds like a cautionary tale!
@@grolo-af ETF is what people consider the gold standard for extraction shooters. It has loot agency that you can lose everything or come out on top. The problem is Battlestate Game's overall poor management of their own game. Contract wars as a game failed horribly. The game itself only got as big because it was something fresh in the FPS market. Streamer's always looking to entertain first flocked to the game in droves. Summit1G and others drove the popularity. Its more apt to think that without social media exposure Escape from Tarkov would not have been a success. Funding would have dried up quickly had there been no push. So in a sense social media/streamers helped turn a game that should have died into a game that thrived. This is where I think Nikita allowed his greed to overshadow his ambition. As more people flooded to back the game and gain access to it. The gameplay loop itself is shallow at its core (loot, shoot and scoot). The issue is that to keep the streamers happy Nikita kept tinkering with the game. It revolved around what the streamers found fun. So if everyone could gain access to a certain type of ammo to challenge streamers. Next cycle that ammo would be limited. If a streamer was having issues getting stuff off the player market, the player market would be restricted. A good example was streamers complaining they couldnt build up their bitcoin farms because people would hatchet run at a certain map that had a tech store spawn. Hatchet running was basically having a melee item, a secure container (that cannot be looted) empty, and a combat stim to enhance endurance. So to combat this Nikita made it so items could only be sold with the found in raid tag, that if you ran without a kit you were marked so the AI would specifically focus you. All of that was done because streamers complained. Oh and when BSG started to lose money they screwed over people who had the highest tier of backing that was the Edge of Darkness for 125 bucks. They created a new package called Unheard edition for 250 dollars. Again greed because people were just buying the 40 dollar package and downloading Single Player Tarkov. The funny thing is SPT fixed a lot of issues that BSG has failed to remedy, from sound design to glitching issues. Instead of Nikita reaching out to these talented devs, they went full on lawfare to shut it down to no effect.
We sometimes forget that even if they are based in the same tech, SQ42 is also being developed. There is bespoke assets and mechanics for the single player story. So it is not one game, it is 2 extremely ambitious games. BGAE 2 is a co-op, but it has planet to space without loading screens. For the dev presentations I saw it is very ambitious, but it also felt like a playground for new tech. We will see what happens. Eve took 4 years, but it is in continuous dev. When it came out was buggy, but after 21 years of dev, it is in a pretty good state
I think its also notable to consider that star citizen was developing 2 games , a very complex game engine, NEW TECHNOLOGY, and build new game STUDIOS to be able to to it and started with 5 people in a basement on their FIRST projectas a yeam , as well as, in 2015 had to basically reset most of its progress from scratch because they figured out full scale planitary tech , as well as train new devs on their engine , thats 750 million devided between 2 games , a game engine, new tech , and several new studios . Thats like 200mil for each game , 200 mil for the game engine and 200 mil for the studios. You cant compare that to games like red dead 2 or cyberpunk that are made by studios that are already pre established, have trained devs from day one , and have previous projects under their belt and aren't breaking boundaries in gaming , and even those took 8 years more than 200 million and one of them came out buggy and needed an extra 3 years to get good, i say star citizen is doing just fine both price wise and time wise when you consider everything and not to mention the dev count that started as 5 people in a littleral basment
I 100% agree with you! I gave a little more attention to some of your points in prior videos so didn't do so again here, but DEFINITELY worth repeating. Thank you!
It's funny that since most people only see a game when it's first announced and then it's published a couple years later, they ACTUALLY think the game only takes about 2 years to make and anything that takes more is a scam or dead in the water.
Development time isn't scaling linear. It takes a long time to develop fun mechanics and a new kind of backend. It's much faster and more predictable to make it look good and work flawlessly. SC is still in the network prototyping phase, just with a screenshot simulator attached, so money keeps flowing.
Your comment about the coffee bar is a poignant one. Space-X tried to cut its 24/7 baristas once and outraged the entire engineering staff. No one will understand office amenities unless they have ever worked in an office where the top talent basically doesn't go home of their own volition.
What's the main difference between SC and other large technology production put there? Usually such productions/technology evolutions are spread across entire trilogies, quadrologies or even pentalogies, which gives audiences a solid retail game release every couple of years while still maintaining a technology progression. CIG on the other hand had the financial freedom to aim straight for the technological end goal and not bother with "stepping stone retail releases" along the way to please audiences and especially shareholders. In a way the critics and sceptics were right (to some extent): CIG did embezzle backer money to do their own thing. That this thing broadly aligns what most backers can agree with, doesn't change the fact that CIG at some point realised, that the money keeps flowing in no matter what they do, and that they can do everything they want. Which they did. Luckily for us their goal was not buy Chris Roberts a yacht and get every lead developer a Porsche, but to R&D next-level technologies for the absolute MMO space sim. In a perfect world they would have had a ten or twelve year roadmap with three or four retail game releases that all build on one another, while quietly researching and developing MMO technologies like server meshing in the background. And who knows, that might have been the plan in 2012. Get a good singleplayer campaign game out as quickly as possible and hope that is successful enough to start a franchise that can carry long tech R&D endeavours. But like I said above, at some point they realised that they had already crated something that can pay for years and years of tech R&D, and that they don't have to jump through the usual "release a game and secure funding for the next game" loops every other studio has to jump through. I'm not sure if such an alternative roadmap would have been preferable for their production (probably not), but it would have definitely made their marketing and their communications much easier and would have been a lot more transparent to the audiences. More importantly it would have avoided that huge discrepancies between what audiences were made believe about what was going on inside the production, and what actually came out of the production.
@@grolo-af It would have basically been an MMO version of Starfield. Planets and Landing Locations would have been simple maps with skyboxes and other tricks to create the illusion of being on a planet. space between celestial bodies would have been instanced and non-existent. For space travel the game would have moved you into an empty instance, again with skybox trickery to create the illusion of being in space. The game would have rolled dice to check if you run into an encounter in that travel instace. - Large World Maps with 64 bit coordinate systems - Procedural Planets - Object Container Streaming and other components leading to - server meshing only slowly started to appear on the horizon after CIG opened the game to all backers in late 2015, thus transforming their business model from crowdfunding to the "early access"-style business model we have now. Obviously I happy that they opted to take the risk and jump into this tech R&D journey. However, I blame them for not being abundantely clear about where they were going with this. They only said that this move will enable them to develop more features and better technologies. Many backers back then believed that more money means more and better features in less time. Only few understood that tech R&D means years and years of hard work with only few playable results for many years.
@@sverebom7069 You're aware that changed only a couple years into development correct? The game started in 2013-2014 after its first demo was put out, and in 2016 or so it was voted on and we were told it was changing quite massively because thats what the backers wanted to see happen, in 2016-2018 we saw them overhaul a lot of things and use amazons lumberyard engine was is just cry engine 3 but heavily modified and upgraded and even they realized the engine feel very short of what they wanted, that's how we get to the 2017-2019 versions of the game, in 2016 was also the vote to delay sq42 which was going to release in 2018, the players voted on that. Then we have covid that hits and what did they do? Entirely overhaul sq42, and Star Citizen while continually growing the company, that's damn impressive in a few years to do so.
@@yulfine1688 What demo? The pitch trailer wasn't a demo. And that vote was nonsense. No one actually knew what they were voting about. Do you really believe, that anyone who participated in the vote (me included) realies "Okay, if we do this, SQ42 won't come before 2026 and SC will take even longer, but I'm okay with it!". Or that the people would have voted overwhelmingly in favour if the question had been "Are okay with not having SQ12 for another 12 years, and waiting for solid gold version of Sc until 2030, if we deliver groundbreaking next gen technologies in return"? Not even CIG knew exactly what they were getting into. Not because they are incapable (to the contrary, I think they are as capable as any dev studio could possible be) but because with tech R&D endeavours like this you cannot know or plan how long things will take; what complexities and obstacles you will face. But instead of being honest about this, they exploited the hype of a community that would have yelled "yes!" to everything that sounds like "more and better!" without thinking about what this means for the production. Let's take CIG out of the argument for second and approach this from a more fundamental level: My point is merely that a production should not be run like this. A dev studio should always be able to fly on sight so that they properly inform the audiences and their supporters where they are heading and how far they still have to go. That's what CIG failed to achieve that which is the root cause for all these controversies surrounding this production. I don't really blame CIG for anything. They had a once in century opportunity to develop the absolute Space Sim MMO that runs on true next-gen technologies. they took that chance and I'm elated that they did and to be here now that it slowly takes form. Plus: I'm sure that with the knowledge that they have today (like what kind of monster server meshing would turn out to be), they would have certainly handled things differently in 2014.
I honestly think that SC should be looked at more like an OS, instead of a game, given the complexity they are aiming for, look at Linux for example, over 25 years in active and consecutive development, and just recently it has started to be an actual real alternative to the crap show Windows has become, thanks to tools like Wine, Proton, Wayland and many other projects, not that it was unusable before, but stuff like playing games was out the window for the most part. This isn't another Super Mario Bros DS made in a year or two. I think people should take a look at the actual development process of CIG, remember that they got screwed up with Cryengine, and switched to Lumberyard from amazon games if i remember correctly, after that they just modified the Lumberyard engine into the Star Engine they are using today. Lots of other seat backs like finding out they had to develop a new server system, never even been concept-ed before let alone made came into the table, this ain't stuff that gets made in a week, specially when you have to gather the resources (as in people knowledgeable enough to begin with, apart from the tools needed) to make said systems, this ain't you're script kiddie project to put a trollface emoji in a public monitor, if anyone has ever worked on big server deployment projects, even with already made tech, it's something that can take months, imagine if on top you have to develop the software, from scratch. On top of that, correct me if i'm wrong, but StarCitizen started as a sandbox test bed for features to be put in Squadron42, which was the original project that was crowdfunded in 2012~2013, and was deployed i think around 2014 with the hangar module, but it didn't shift towards and MMO game until 2016 due to popular demand. Again, correct me if i'm wrong. Overall i think people should cut CIG some slack, yeah, they raised a lot of money, a lot of it got wasted due circumstances like the Cryengine situation, or the fact that suddenly they faced the fact that an MMO was actually HAPPENING because people asked for it.
I just want to chime in and say this. I paid $110 for a game package for SC back in early 2013. Promises were made in the kickstarter. Since then I have been given and offered way more than I originally paid for. Not once, was I ever forced to pay more for the expanded promises. I have never been given more than I paid for by any company. Meanwhile other space games in the last 12 years are forcing their players to pay more for expanded content. Much of that content was promised from the start. I got no complaints about SC. I have huge respect for Hello Games and how they handled NMS for their community. Blame CIG for feature creep is understandable. But have you ever noticed the amount of content requests from players on a daily basis? Irony!?!
A game that is missing from your list and is more comparable IMO is Elite Dangerous. First announced in 1997 as being in active development, it took 17 years to reach a release in 2014 and it lacks a lot of the complex features Star Citizen has. Add on to this a further 6 years for Elite to release `space-legs` and still isn't comparable to the technical ability of the Alpha of Star Citizen.
ED did not have its Kickstarter until 2012, that is when it was announced. After the Kickstarter dev started and was released in 2014. You might have accidentally added some Frontier: First Encounters info by accident.
This is an extremely good video that actually sheds light on the reality of these 2 projects that people have FAILED so miserably to understand over the years. I really hope this vid gets linked to all the naysayers and armchair/streamer "devs" to see their responses to this video and how badly it destroys their arguments, as well as link it to all the whining naysayer threads all around to attempt to educate people to the realities of projects like these 2 and what makes them even possible to attempt vs the triple A "safe" mass produced junk that gets thrown out "on schedule". Well done giving some insight and showing points regular people would never consider like employee count over time vs progress. Stuff like that is never considered in naysayer threads.
I enjoyed this video thanks, i wish cgi would focus more on stabilty of servers, because iv not been able to play in like 2 months now and im finding it frustrating, cant wait to just play star citizen
I feel that! Just cause the dev time makes sense doesn't mean it can't be frustrating. I've had plenty of frustrating experiences in the game! Some good ones too.
Not all developers / artists are fungible / interchangeable. Anyone making a comment implying this is more of an advertisement of their ignorance than anything else. Sadly, due to culture and the bell curve distribution, we know that most of "us" are not well suited (with information, knowledge and sufficient understanding / IQ) to make the comments we often make,
I like your takes, but the coffee bar thing is a really valid criticism. If you asked me if I’d rather work in a fake spaceship with a coffee bar, or make .50 cents more per hour - it’s a no brainer. A coffee bar is not attracting the talent you are suggesting. Money does, and CIG would not be in short supply of it if they didn’t build an overly extravagant office space
Hey thanks! It's funny you say that though, because I have engineers from other companies in these comments saying the opposite. Turns out, different people have different opinions : ) What is important to one person may not be important to another. Funny! Polarized takes don't want you to think this though! It's too nuanced.
In fairness, it's very difficult to criticize a company for the amount they spend on making their product when the money is coming from their own coffers from previous success. Also when the money they get for it from their customers is at or after release. Even Duke Nukem Forever, which was the iconic vapoware game for it's 12 years of development, wasn't criticized for its budget for the game even though it was horrifically mismanaged from the start, because it was their own money. Granted, that was only like $20m, so nowhere near these kinda numbers, but criticism of the expenditure was generally along the lines of "wow, that was stupid", cause people weren't paying them for it that whole time. People complain about it with these games because they've been taking money from players for it. Not making any judgements on it, myself, just saying it's a different situation.
Cyberpunk didn't take 8 years either. Polish concept artists were drawing a surprising amount of cyberpunk chicks long before 2012. They were cooking with a small team for way longer, figuring out the feel and fun mechanics.
I'm absolutely sure you're right. That's probably true to varying degrees for a lot of games on the list. There's always nuances. Appreciate the insight!!
My only real criticism of CIG / CR is that of improperly managing expectations and disingenuous ETAs. On top of that communicating that they have x or y tech or gameplay in a semi mature state, but when it releases to the public is just shadow of their demo. A lot of this is because of their funding model, but it still dirties everything it touches. Note that CIG is much better at this now, thanks Lando! Until we have a large success with these new kickstarted MMO projects, we have yet to know if this model works. The frustrating part about SC PU is not only has it been in dev for a very long time, but also that there is no end in sight. Not a trivial amount of people who kickstarted this project are dying off, that is unacceptable. A big part of leading a project is not just having vision but also knowing what can be done in a reasonable amount of time; It is a delicate balance.
How is that unacceptable? I don't follow. I could pass before this project finishes too. Could get hit by a bus tomorrow. There was a major pivot in the project that was voted on by backers. At that time, they knew they were in for a long haul. Or should have. I'm sure you're right that comms could be better. I'm not trying to say CIG has been a perfect steward, but I am saying they've done reasonably well, and nobody else would do it. Can't choose our heroes, etc. Given the ambitious scope, the company size & growth over the years, and etc - there's nothing about the development timeline or current state that greatly concerns me. It sits in line (or better) with other titles.
@@grolo-af It is more of a people than a tech thing. If they are going to accept people's money for something, it is nice to try to finish it before too many drop dead. I personally really like a lot of the things CIG is doing (meshing), but a lot of kick starters just wanted a game to play around the announced timeline. If they could not meet that timeline or if they wanted to completely change the scope, they should have offered refunds to those who were expecting less of a development odyssey and just wanted a game. As for me personally, I am not really upset about the game taking ten years, I am worried it will take ten more.
I'm 42. Almost 1k spend in star cititzen over the past 10ish years. The ONLY critique I can give Chris is, that he micromanaged TOO much at the beginning and has/had a problem with letting loose. And I can even understand it. THIS is his baby. His project he wanted for ages to make and tech couldn't do it. His vision. And I am fully onboard with it. If it fails - yeah, so I don't really care, aside from the fact that I might never get to enjoy a more final version. Star citizen is not a scam. They deliver and you can see the development. The difference here is - and most might have the problem with exactly that - that SC has to spend money and dev. time to let backers play. It is needed for their kind of finance model. Thats also where a lot of criticism comes from - people forget that we are still in Alpha. They nag about not fixed bugs or things not done in 12 years. Yeah - thats for a reason. They keep the verse playable somewhat, fixing only the most game breaking bugs till the end of the alpha. That means all tools are done, all basic system work and the basis is finished. Then we enter the beta realm. Here comes bugfixing, new content, balancing, ship updates etc. First they need to tackle the most important features to go forward - server meshing, replication layer etc. - this is sadly nothing you see, as it is in the background. And it really is not a scam. Sure they use hype and sell tactics like everyone with a brain would do. But really, look at real scam games. SC is not it. Also I am not saying they are without fail. Humans after all. But its far from whatever parts of the "community" want to make it out to be.
As far as star citizen : The money stuff is always funny to me. I don't personally care how much money they get. I'm not giving them any more because, as I said on another of your vids recently (you responded but dunno if you'd remember), I don't agree with the way they've gone about development since I backed, plus I'm particularly unhappy with certain bits of behavior from them, but I know they have to make the sales to fund their operation and it's just how it's gonna be. Tons and tons of money - whatever, if people are willing to spend the money on it it's theirs to spend. The timeline - I wouldn't care, if they didn't keep making more timelines that were unrealistic and then so consistently failing at those timelines. Little bit better last few years, it seems, but they've failed so much at meeting their own stated goals that even getting like half of what they said done and the other half seeming to disappear into the void can feel like a win and I don't like that. 😅 But that would all be minor quibbles for me. It's the way they've gone about development that's a bigger deal to me (particularly the constantly shifting focus), and some of their behavior. Would ignore the rest if it weren't for that. One thing about the overall timeline does kinda tick me off a bit extra, though - Sq42, every time they show it off so much progress has been made, it's so much better, now it's feature complete, in polishing, blah blah blah... Then, every time - 2 years away. It's been 2 years away for the last 12 years. Saying it's 2 years away now just feels like saying "we want you to think we're close to release but we're not!" After so many times, it just feels like a scummy lie and I hate seeing them give the same estimate again when it's already been six times as long as the estimate, which is the same one they've given since the start.
Quite a few people have come in here about communications. Seems like the sentiment is their comms suck. Maybe they do. I'm not here to defend their comms, heh. If folks are upset about comms, so be it. Not going to tell you or anyone else they're wrong. I'm just here to talk about the stuff I understand, and I'm telling folks, based on my experience, it all checks out. I don't see alarming things. Within the context of the broader industry, I'd go so far as to say they seem above average in competence to me. I do remember ya FWIW, and REALLY appreciate you being here and engaging (repeatedly)! Folks like yourself have helped for a 'lil community here which makes this a ton of fun and motivates me to keep doing it. :)
@grolo-af Good memory. And talking reasonably about the stuff you know is why your vids are good. I've got some limited experience in much much smaller scale game dev, so I do have some specific complaints and worries about the development process there - but the shifting focus is one of two main things for me. Mostly, I think they're doing good work, just not making as much progress as they could. Still way beyond my current skills. The comms definitely need work, yeah. But people fixate so much on stuff that should be normal, or that isn't a big deal, or the little changes and adjustments they don't like... Don't often find people talking about the actual serious examples.
The pay for game devs is subpar globally. Don't pin this on just CIG. I don't know why this is, but I have friends in the space... I tell em, if they want a raise, just leave game dev. Go to any non-game tech company. This seems to be the case more broadly with professions of passion. I'd love to see this change.
I've got 12 years of entertainment being part of SC growing so (shrug) Can't remember the last "AAA" game that I played for years CR for the most part has handed the reigns off to Rich Tyler to handle SC while CR focus's on Squadron 42 and it's Pt 2&3
Star Citizen is a buggy mess 70/80% of the time . But and its a yuge BUT . In those 30/20% of the time its working well it makes other games look ancient . As a 2013 backer having spent ( spent not invested ) around £3000. I can say hand on heart with 100% genuine honesty . I've had my moneys worth and then some . And the best days are yet to come .
I feel what you're saying! I find it hard to articulate sometimes... but your exactly right. Those 20% moments DO make other games feel like... what's the point? Well said.
I'm a SC player/backer and yes I actually played it this year. Put some 700+ hrs in it, just this 2024. What I don't like about the negative responses or reviews or whatever you like to call them; it's just clickbait. At this point in time, unless you have played some 100 hrs in this game, your opinion on it is just null and void. Often complained about 750+ million, they use this for every argument. - Squadron apparently cost 750 million - Sc also cost 750 million - the starengine cost 750 million - they bought studios for 750 million - the star cast cost 750 million - the entire staff cost 750 million In what economy are these folks living, where they get to spend the same stack of money more than once? Several single player games came out this year, costing a nice 400 million. Some MMOs cost 350 mil and counting, while being updated. Take 75k salary for a thousand people over 10 years, hmmm.... Ow yeah, we need licences for the software that is running on those thousands of pc's and let's just say they got the hardware for free, ey? Manchester is probably sponsoring them with a free office, because jobs for the region. No heat necessary either, the sun is free. Ofcourse none of these cost and/or incomes are taxable, because they are excempt form that plebeian stuff. I think they're doing it on the cheap, to be fair ;-)
Excellent breakdown. I could listen to you explain how engineering projects work for literal hours at a time. This video reminded me of a recent (non-engineering related) Spectrum thread about how the ship teams need to focus solely on the ship backlog and while i didn't participate in the discussion i was just so annoyed. People can just demand things without looking at the bigger picture. "Stop selling ships, make meshing work!" Or "CIG doesn't need anymore money to finish the game(s)!" The ignorance. Maybe CIG can't justify doing some of the (SHRINKING BTW) backlog because the engineers are needed for certain tech?! Like, yeah let's demand the Crucible and Vulcan when we don't have Repair tech fully fleshed out? Let's demand the Endeavor before scanning, medical, farming, and overclocking are even finished being concepted? We're getting Apollo, Perseus, Ironclad, and PIONEER in the next couple years... that's BACKLOG you mthrfkn...you get the point thx for letting me vent and also thx for letting me relax with your great content.
haha, you're on a tear! Seriously - means so much that you enjoy the content. THANK you for taking the time to let me know and to drop some comments. Really really appreciated.
It's very difficult to identify all requirements of a small software project up-front. Entire disciplines have sprung up around exactly this. Identifying all requirements & features at the start of a project the size of SC or Ashes... I'm just going to say it: impossible. They had an enormous pivot, which was voted upon by backers. They only recently committed to the 1.0 feature set. Again, not claiming perfection. Surely things could have been done better here or there, but I don't have enough inside knowledge to point out where here and there is.
I don't know man, I do want new and interesting games, but at the same time I do NOT want those CEOs behaving as rock starts nor becoming the new Todd Howard or Peter Molyneux, they DID overpromise a lot, even if we only take roadmaps in consideration. The idea that time doesn't matter may sound smart, but remember for the consumers it's the ONLY thing that matters. People change a LOT in 12 years and in 12 more some of the backers may no longer be alive, let alone still enjoy what they backed 24 years before. It's 2024, AI companies are making deals with nuclear power plants, how can we be sure a game launched this far into the future will even be competitive with others that still are not even into production? Also the fact Chris Roberts said himself he earns as much as a large AAA company CEO, hired his wife and brother (and I doubt for their unparalelled competence alone or by competitive salaries) smells really bad when you consider the fact that CIG already took money and made SC no longer a pure crowd funded game. Mind you, he didn't say the value, just the large company CEO line, so people are rightfully asking themselves, did he drain half the money paying himself as much as Activision Blizzard payed Boddy Kotick? In the end of the day, those games are still in the marketing pitch phase, and you can't sell a pitch if people lose trust in what you promise. And that's what is happening, not some "revolt of the normies". I'm a backer who just forgot about SC, returned last year and spent a lot because I was ultra hyped again and now feel kinda disheartened, and you can't find a single place where SC backers don't sound burned out.
Thanks for the discussions! My feedback to you would be: if you really think games will suddenly get way easier to make because of AI... then you're buying into a LOT of vapor :) Look - the only thing that will compete with SC _if_ it launches successfully... are games that started development 5 to 10 years ago. Which means you'll be waiting a long time. There are no shortcuts in software engineering. Just good 'ole fashion hard work and slogging. Why do you think Nvidia has such a wide moat protecting it against competition in the AI space? It's not the hardware....
I get your argument if it was just Steven not being judged for mismanagement because Sharif hasn't made a game before, but Chris has a track record of not having any accountability for himself when it comes to deadlines. Dude's a tinkerer and iterator. I respect that. I don't respect his inability to draw lines in the sand for himself when it comes to feature and scope creep and moving development goal posts. All that to say, he is sorely mismanaging that game's development.
@@grolo-af Didn't have time, but I also only commented on the part I watched so it doesn't really affect anything else. I did keep watching after I commented about Chris and heard your thoughts about it. He's just proven over and over to me that he's happy to say something's coming, and not happy to say when he's taken it back to the drawing board. Taking it back to the drawing board is fine. Not telling us he's doing it isn't. And he's done that multiple times now with SQ42. Polish doesn't take 3 years for a very on rails and cinematic game. He stood on that CitizenCon stage last year and said they were in polish for SQ42 which again is a very linear, cinematic shooter/on rails flight game. That was what I was alluding to in my original post. He's a tinkerer. He's not a good communicator or accountability guy. Go back and watch his old "Ten from the Chairman" episodes. He could literally be taking bong rips and spitballing all of that because so much of it doesn't even fit this new design paradigm for the PU. The Pyro presentation from 2019 is a wildly different Pyro from what we're getting "Soon TM" and that was only 5 years ago. The 1.0 presentation at this year's CitizenCon? That's over 7 years away if CIG's track record is anything to go off of and history always is, so it stands to reason 1.0 will look nothing like they presented. Chris was happy to stand with tears in his eyes as everyone gave him a standing ovation for saying SQ42 was in polish, but this year he walked off stage before they showed a graphic that it was coming in 2026. If you're gonna soak up the adulation you gotta face the music too.
@@STRATUSPHERE01 I can too but not for SQ42. It's exactly like COD games in the aughts. I gave reasons too. It's because Chris goes back and changes things and doesn't tell us. We're not in polish. How many times out of Chris's mouth are we two years away from SQ42? 3 times? 4 times?
For SC, I get the feeling that the vision is rather blurred and self contradicting. For example the second IAE video about capital ship combat. Why bring smaller ships if you can just bring more capital ships, especially if they keep those NPC crew/AI blade ideas in the game (which I very much dislike, that is playing like EVE with one human pilot and everything else is automated). I have a hard time imagining how they are going to build an economy around LTI and store ships as well.
Every MMO balances between solo and group play. They're still iterating on that. They've given us some pretty big indicators on economic impact of store sales and LTI. Store sales are base ship. Everyone will want a tier 3 ship. This effectively makes it a discount. Its still more of an impact than none, which would be ideal; however I went into why it was needed in video. Appreciate the comment!!
Simple, look at the real world. Why does the US want so many Aircraft carriers more than Hard-hitters like Battleship Yamato? Everyone wants a big ship. It was because you must learn how tactical it is and be a solo player only. People who play in ORG would know that fighters and other small-size ships are best to keep the Capital ship busy. While letting the big ships do their own jobs, like the Rail cannon from Idris, would shoot the enemy in safety. Not to mention, aircraft carriers are always the best choice due to their mobility and quick deployment ability on the battlefield. You might not find it helpful when SC 1.0 since it is only 5 systems are gonna provided. However, when more and more systems are introduced. People would drop Idris and tend to use Javelin and Kraken more. To make Javelin and Kraken GREAT, you need A LOT of smaller ships and ACE pilot.
@@grolo-af I know their current funding model depends heavily on ship sales, but especially the video about insurance was quite disheartening for me. For example, i buy the best t3 ship with the best 999 quality tier x gear from a crafter (the way it should be) and get pirated. Now the pirate has all the nicest guns, maybe even the ship as well if i understood them correctly. Then i get my ship back from insurance with all gear (level 2 warrenty). Now those quali 999 tier x items are dubbed and the crafter will never sell anything again, because the pirate insures his ship to continue dubbing the items via insurance.
You're making a lot of assumptions. We have a strong indication of how insurance will work, but I don't know if it's safe to begin predicting how it'll be leveraged by players in the game. Things could still change (as they have been). On top of that, we have existing examples to look at: Look at EVE Online. Insurance is available for ships, and yet not every ship is insured. Why is that? What you're describing COULD very well be a problem. But I wouldn't say it certainly will be. And if it is, it can be further tuned.
@ The EVE insurance system is the exact opposite of SC, you don’t get back the ship or the gear just ISK. Even on T1 ships, all equipment is either destroyed or lootable and you need to find a replacement on the market for the hull (usually at a loss). All higher tier hulls are almost 100% loss.
No offence to anyone but so many of the angry takes and negative noises and due to the audience of these games being composed of many unrealistic kiddies with no, or insufficient experience, and too few, rational, informed, perhaps more mature individuals.
But he was a blizzard dev at blizzard the company that made WOW and then fucked it up so bad they rereleased the old version which is the only version people play, and then continued to drop disappointment after disappointment Yay. It's like an ex Starfield dev coming out and shitting on stalker. Your company made some good games, but that's irrelevant. Experienced massive dev companies have proven time and time again that past successes have no impact on further ones.
These people complaining about a "Western gaming crash" and "No good games anymore" are out to fucking lunch! Ya, maybe Call of Duty XXIV is a snoozefest, but how is that surprising? Almost ALL the action is at indy dev houses. Games like Enshrouded, and BG3, and even 7DTD are where the fun is. Maybe the "crash" is a crash of AAA houses - but I don't have a problem with that. Make GOOD games or die. Why does that concern these dudes?
You have a point that there's a lot of Indy action in the single or low player count space. I loved BG3. But even still, if you compare the number of high quality titles we're getting per year now to 10 years ago... I don't know that it compares favorably. Also... what you're describing does not extend to the MMO scene, which is the what the clips I included were focused on. Still,appreciate the comment and thoughts!
Pirate software guy always has the most random takes. He worked as a developer at blizzard for a few years so people take his word as gospel, when in reality he's wrong as often as he's right If anyone can't grasp the simple concept of ship sales funding development, they can't have an opinion. If they don't sell ships, the game stops being developed. You can have a problem with the marketing or the direction of the game, but if you just say generally they should "stop developing the storefront and finish the game" but don't realize "finishing" would mean it releases in its current state tomorrow you're braindead.
Not even worth coming up with any other argument. You like AAA endless sequel and remake slop? That exists in abundance. You want a game like star citizen or ashes to come out? There are no other options. Play throne and liberty (actually a pretty good MMO) or new world. (I like new world) Play elite dangerous (used to be pretty good) or no mans sky (couldn't get into it but there's content). Nothing comes close
No gamer has a problem with innovation and studios taking risk. You’re preaching to the choir. WE have a problem with Studios like CIG lying to us about development time, game feature promises and internal management issues that contribute to delays. CIG took our money. Ashes took our money. In doing so, we deserve honesty about the development process and expected reasonable estimates on dev time to meet milestones. Just be honest…
Who's innovating in a way you approve of? 8 - 12 years is a long time to not expect things to change and evolve. Estimates are far easier to demand than accurately give. You should try estimating where you'll be in 10 years with precision : )
@@grolo-af Tell us who's problem it is that Criss promissed more than was possible? CIG or our that did pay on what he said it will be? If it was his money and only his, do what you want, how you want and let it take as long as you want, but if you tell me "give me money you wil get a/b/c" - why the f would i care that your estimates are wrong? Don't promiss in the first place.
@@grolo-af Ok, when 1.0 releases in 2032 you let me know how many people you think would have backed the project in 2013-14. SC would have never seen the funding numbers they enjoy right now if folks would have know how long the “flash to bang” was. Good vid, good discussion by the way.
Hey thanks @swiftbow2110 - appreciate it! If people knew in 2013-2014 if 2030 was a possibility (we'll go 6 more years - I expect that to be more reasonable)... making the grand total dev time 16 - 17 years... would they still have invested? It's a good question. My assumption is that many would. You're looking at 8 years for a game like Starfield. 8 to 10 years for a good single player game like Cyberpunk. 13 years for an "ok" MMO like Throne & Liberty.... you really don't think people would be willing to go 16 or 17 for something as grand in scale as Star Citizen, when compared to these other titles? I think they would. I know I would. You can continue to argue they were misled and what does it matter... that's fine. You may have a point - I would not say it was intentional. People inconvenience me, even hurt me, in unintentional ways all the time and I give them a pass. Intent matters a LOT here. If I thought the team intentionally and willfully deceived me, I may have another opinion of the situation. But I do not think that. I think if anything, they made some gross miscalculations at the start. Which is par for the course in this industry. Something I've PERSONALLY done. Happens. I give 'em a pass on that. Doesn't bother me in the least. If it _did_ bother me, as much as it seems to bother some, I would simply leave this project. I wouldn't hang around bashing it and tearing it down. I'd move on. But that's me : )
You asked for feedback so here it is. If you want to get your information across to your viewers, don't record yourself rambling at a camera and have your points and slides prepared ahead of time.
If you don't think amenities factor into the decision making process, you either don't have a ton of work experience in this industry, or you don't have a lot of connections. Why do you think places like Facebook pay for laundry services? Why do you think places like Etsy provide onsite chefs and a rotating seasonal lunch menu? Why does Google provide free transportation? Amenities matter greatly to a significant portion of the software engineering population...ESPECIALLY when you're trying to cultivate and foster an in-office environment which CIG is.
@@grolo-af They don't do it with backers money GTFO. It is an absolute disgrace that they use money for this kind of thing. This is NOT google. BTW NOBODY picks the job at google because of the cafeteria or the laundry. They do it because of the stock options. For the love of god what kind of company have your worked for? 50 employees? We value REMOTE work, not transportation... Transportation means NOTHING when you earn above 200k
Indeed, the first like demo to show off they had in 2013 and it was a white box and barley able to fly in an empty space.. its actual development didn't start until later, part of that also is because of sq42 as well, though I do think they technically started development in 2014 for Star Citizen, leaving the pre production and planning phase.
@yulfine1688 2014 to 2016 they faffed with engines, direction and some proof of concepts on tech. Had a vote (backers voted) in the direction of the game and then actual real development started.
The thought bubbles are a good way to communicate what you are thinking without pausing the video every 10 seconds. I appreciate it.
The guy at 53:00 said what I was going to say but did it so much better than I could have. .. I'm a long time SC backer (2.3 iirc) and I get annoyed when I'm told that I'm either a] an idiot for falling for a scam or b] a poor innocent victim of a scam. I am neither. I went into it with my eyes wide open and with the full understanding that the project could eventually fail. It was a risk I was, and still am, willing to take because I believe in the vision. There's nothing more to it than that. .. anyway, thanks for another great video Grolo. Appreciate you taking the time to do these.
You bet and _I_ hear ya! The guy at 53:00 is Esfand. He's awesome. If you are looking for more level headed folks in your feed... he's one.
Thanks so much for taking the time to join the discussion here. Means a LOT.
I darent think of such a scenario as star citizen failing, I would physically cry if it did.
I feel ya, backed since 2012.
I couldn't put it any better!
The trend in time to complete decreased initially because those who were making the games were passionate risk takers dedicated to their craft, and not just paycheck seekers. They could have gone and got a stable paycheck in a businesses software studio like IBM, Microsoft or Novell, but opted instead to take risks with electronic games, which was niche in the 90s. The teams were smaller, and the pool of developers willing to take that risk, smaller, so they had less dead weight to carry.
Games went mainstream, and due to necessity caused by increasing complexity, game production scaled up by a factor of 10 or more for AAA titles. We are now seeing team sizes in the thousands, most of which see the job as a paycheck, whereas 90s era games were developed with teams of 30-100 passionate dedicated people.
The vast size of titles now, Price's law and the pool of "run of the mill" paycheck seeking developers due to game development establishing legitimacy as a career, has caused scaling issues on modern games. This is why it takes 10 years for a game to be developed.
It takes 2 weeks to go through the burocracy of large scale development to add in a simple agro table to the codebase, whereas before, it would have taken a single developer a couple of hours.
I mean... you're not wrong. The industry (software dev) has changed dramatically, not just in gaming, but all over. I didn't want to jump down this rabbit hole in the video so I just mentioned "changes in the industry & field".
Grolo, well done! I really enjoy your videos which give a unagitated, entrepreneurial point of view on the SC infrastructure and company itself. Hope you get many more subscribers and CIG may take notice from it. :)
And as someone who also has to guide IT teams, I can confirm that having, defend, and preserve a vision over time is the hardest thing you can be confronted with in project work. Followed by and "endless stream" of learning from failures.
Thank you so much and well said! You know! ;)
I wish, your words & logic would be much more present on CIG spectrum. Thanks for your analysis!
100% correct on the investor thing, the best companies in gaming now are private, Rockstar, Valve etc.
They produce better products because they aren't on the quarterly earnings clock
1000% this. The quarterly tick has become a real pervasive problem throughout IMO.
Take Two, which of course owns Rockstar, is a publicly-traded corporation actually. Rockstar is allowed the run of their own mill because they've established themselves as a safe bet.
And that's mentioning when discussing why no one has yet announced a viable alternative - 🙄 Star Atlas the NFT Interactive Expérience - to SC. GTA is practically GUARANTEED to make $2B back and then some, based on past releases. SC is not only a new IP but really the first of a new type of game. Investors can sometimes handle expensive. Expensive AND risky? Investors don't tend to like that.
Without the storefront, there would be no game; they don't have 700 million in the bank, and they used that mostly to get where we are now.
I made a comment that got me banned on Piratesoftware's channel.
The comment went so where does Robert's find this ethical investor that will just give him a near billion dollars to make the game without having to outsource the funding. No investor in their right mind is going to write a blank check for a billion dollars and not ask for a return on investment.
With CIG they know who their investors are and they know they have to keep them happy.
Exactly. What other way was/is there..
Only 10 mins in but wanted to put my thoughts before I forget...
Gamers complained how many times this year that X game is shit, Y game is woke, Z game is safe as can be? We're FULL to the brim with safe games, remasters, remakes, sequels with no changes to the recipe. It's mind boggling. Even the new consoles, how many years it was crossgen? No balls to make an amazing looking game exclusive for your brand new box, not even Sony!.
Open up any digital store for games, any. They're full of games made by committees, verified by groups of peoples making sure nothing is triggering, with just a sniff you can smell the marketing team took control over the game decisions rather than the directors, and well budgeted with some outsourcing to third world countries for low costs but with a dash of layoffs also in your main offices.
Imagine Bethesda, a studio that had a known hierarchy, they've found their leaders from over a decade of big hitter development, studio is full of peoples with tons of experiences, known inhouse engine that delivered multiple heavy hitters and big sellers. Yet it took them 8 years and $400M to make a single player space RPG that didn't break any mold as far as tech go.
Then you have like what, 30~50 peoples with a project idea and they make a demo with crytek for a kickstarter. Then you have to strip everything from that engine down to the bolts and nuts and rebuild from scratch, you have to expand to over thousand employees. You have to find your leaders, because it is an unknown. You have now three major projects in your hands. 1) a graphic engine, 2) an MMO, 3) an ambitious single player with big actors.
Was there feature creep? Yes. Was it mismanaged? Well yes I have to say yes to this, and Grolo, maybe we have a different definition of it, but when they were throwing "soon" dates early on and not even their devs internally believed it, that's a lot of BS coming from the management side, but ok. Still one of the most ambitious project to date. Not a single publisher would have approved this. But they will never make anything like this either.
Shitting on the principles of what Star Citizen and Ashes of Creation set out to do, break molds and create tech that no AAA publisher will ever touch with a ten foot pole because of the risks, is why my $45 from 2013 is just a gamble and a hope they pull it off. If it crashes and burn, so be it. I wasted more money on kickstarters with games that actually released but might as well have never (mighty no.9 comes to mind).
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Well said @Alexb115! Your comments on deadlines and promises are fair! I'm primarily looking at post 3.0 SC as the starting point. I wouldn't argue your points on communications.
I think I can add on to the "soon" comments. A lot of that came from the louder part of the community basically the SaltEMikes of SC who kept hounding CIG with "when is it coming out."
To the point CIG just kept saying soon, instead of putting their foot down like adults and saying "it'd be ready when its ready".
This is what I call the "are we there yet" syndrome, where kids kept asking when they would get to their destination because most children lack the ability to understand time & distance. Sometimes you get parents saying "we'll get there when we get there" and you have others' going "soon."
Again I attribute that more of the nature of the beast and growing pains.
Plus a dash of Crytek overselling their engine to CIG.
I don’t often post comments on TH-cam, subscribe, or like any videos I watch. But I just turned my computer back on to comment on this one. x)
After 12 years of following Star Citizen, I have to admit that this journey has turned into a frustrating experience.
But Grolo’s perspective on the topic has just changed my mind, and I’d like to thank you for that, Grolo. This video reminded me how incredible this project is-where we started, what its funding model means compared to other games… the kind of things I had forgotten were so important over time.
I’ve also watched your videos about Server Meshing and learned a ton. I’ve already shared those videos with some friends, and I’ll be sharing this one too.
Wow! This is some crazy awesome encouragement. Thank you! Thrilled to have played even a tiny part in nudging perspectives. It's tough out here! o7
Love these technical breakdowns. Thanks for putting in the time and effort. o7
o7
Let's be fair. Chris Robert's is making two games and building a multinational company from scratch, all with an indefinite amount of money. Of course that's going to be a rocky road. Starfield came from an established company, had half the tech, was single player, and took how long?
Right??
Server meshing has to be the biggest example of innovation by developers like CIG and Intrepid. AAA just churn out dros at the moment with a few rare pearls here and there.
These videos actually make me feel more excited about Star Citizen than CitCon did. There is too much negativity in the SC community, a loud minority of individuals complaining about development times and making everyone else (formerly including myself) believe that the game is a scam and to stay away from it. You showing that the level of progress is actually on schedule makes me excited to play the game and dream about what the future of it might be again.
Thank you Grolo.
Wow; super encouraging to hear that! Glad to be doing this! o7
exactly this man! I posted a similar comment on spectrum but that community reported me so much that CIG had to delete the post!
Absolutely thankful for saying that…
People talk about SC managing like the current of state gaming is just freaking perfect.
I want gaming to actually go next gen, not stuck on the never ending crap been put out and actually making money. How many fortnight madden, FIFA and all of that are we going to shoved in our throats for us to say. Let’s let someone else PUSH the envelope and move forward in any form.
100%
How dare you not endlessly consume corporate slop!!!!!
And mind you its roughly half of the money spent that gta 6 has gone through... and gta 6 by release will hit roughly 12 total years, and following that they had teams, tools and a company etc that CIG had to build, intrepid had to build... and Star Citizen had its first like demo in 2013 if I remember it was in pre production at best and didn't really start until 2013-2014, so really its been around 10 years of actual development 12 if you count the pre production phasing and technically 13 or so since I think 2011 was its first idea and inception
Scaling up a highly specialized project is very difficult due to Price's law. The square root of the number of employees working on a project produces half the value. This is where the perks come in, you have to attract the top 10% of talent or else your scaling is a net loss.
Hey, another great video and again I 100% resonate with your take on all of this. Thanks for the content.
On a side note, we live in a world where perception becomes reality, and often the most disseminated perceptions are from people who don't really understand how stuff works. Ignorance generates wrong expectations and frustration when those expectations aren't met. Drama sells, and so it goes. I'm sure even if these projects succeed entirely, they'll still be ever surrounded by drama.
Much appreciated!! Yeah... not wrong.
Nailed it. I saved this video and will defer to it anytime people talk about time and costs. I usually use the GTA 6 and Beyond Good & Evil 2 examples as games that are big and ambitious that take a lot of time. I also agree that if people are so down and negative about the project, and feel it's "taking too long", there are biannual CoD releases, annual Madden and FIFA releases, and tons of other derivative games to play to fill the entertainment void.
Really appreciate you taking the time to leave this feedback! Glad to help by being a reference video ;)
I've seen a lot of criticism that is something like "they haven't even got X feature yet" or "they have had a crappy tier 0 version of Y feature for years, it should be better by now" often pointing to examples of other games that have these things and saying this is down to poor prioritization (if they even understand that there is only so many man hours to go around).
People are (understandably) thinking about it from the perspective of a player wanting to play a great game, but from the perspective of a developer trying to create a complex risky project - you prioritize reducing risk. You work on the systems that have the least chance of working out with the highest impact on everything else (e.g. server meshing), plus securing the resources that will allow you to continue (e.g. selling ships).
From a naïve player perspective it doesn't make sense why we don't have a decent chat system already (it is so easy because chat in MMO's is a solved problem), from the developer perspective it would be strange if we did have anything more than a barely usable chat at this point (there is basically no risk because it's basically a solved problem and has relatively little impact on other systems currently in the game, work on it later).
Obviously now is a good time to start working on coordination tools because we are getting server meshing and multicrew gameplay and a more fleshed out plan for large scale org gameplay, so to test that stuff (reduce the risk) you need that system.
Thanks so much for the very insightful comment! I agree with everything... except possibly chat being a solved problem in mmo's ( lol ). I complain all the time that so many ship w/ bad chat systems... I don't know why!!
But yeah... this comment is generally spot on. THANK you!
Just so you know at around 19:00, CIG did actually hit 1,500 employees when they aquired Turbulent Studios back in 2023.
Well there ya go : ). Exactly 1/3rd then. Thanks for the reminder!
@@MrRoblcopter most companies have that many staff per game at initiation and concept stage of game a budget and a company. CIG did not
@@PirateKing-tb9ev Well aware, been following since the Kickstarter and backed when the AC module came out. Just pointed out that the graph he had on screen showed CIG under 1,500 people even in 2024, when because of Turbulent, they reached that in July of 2023.
The main issue I have with CIG, is that they have set really poor expectations. No one in the community, Chris or the community team believed we'd be at this point in the game's development in 2024, 10 years ago. Most people had the impression back in 2014, that the game would be out in 4 to 5 years at most. If they had come out front and said hey guys this is going to take as long as it takes, could be 10,20,30 years, they'd have a lot more runway of good will from the community.
Chris continues to add more depth and features to the game, which is great, but it's having the side effect of the engineering teams having to go back and rework entire foundational systems over and over again. I don't see that loop being broken until they run out of money.
In my experience, engineering teams are always "reworking entire foundational systems over and over again". Extends beyond gaming. It's _very_ rare to see any system hold up more than 5 to 10 yrs w/out a rewrite.
It's hard to say for sure without being on the inside, but I would assume these systems are being rewritten because they were always intended to be rewritten more often than because of CR raising the bar. I _sincerely_ doubt any engineer at CIG thought "yup, this is the target and this system we're adding right now will be just as it is now in 1.0!"
All that said, I'm not going to say you're wrong about comms. That could be one area CIG needs to improve. From my POV they have improved over the time I've followed them, but I can't possibly have all the perspectives on that... and as I said in the vid - no such thing as perfect. I absolutely am sure there's been missteps and its possible this ranks among them.
But in my mind, that doesn't change much, even if true. The broader points of the vid remain.
9:25 "Why are you here?" Preach, brother. Amen.
@07:18 - 08:00 Actually a very good point that i didn't consider. One of the reasons i've stayed with the company im with for almost 9 years now, even though i could get 10% more money 3 doors down, is because of the random perks like that (and the people) that makes all the difference.
Appreciate this perspective! There's a surprising number of people even in these comments who take issue with my espresso bar comment... haha. But I know I'm right on this one. Ive been around long enough to have observed this in action : ) So thanks for chiming in!!
@@grolo-af If there's one thing my near decade in IT has taught me (6 in SysOps, 2 in cloud, and the last 2 in dev) it's that us tech guys don't function without their coffee.
lord knows i don't; i'm pretty sure i'm not allowed into sprint meetings without a mug in hand!
I think what Star Citizen REALLY needs right now, is for them to stop showing off flashy vertical slices, and bring all those faucets together as a cohesive product, that for the average user, does what is expected of it at least 90% of the time. That means you need to have the economy, a series of missions across the various professions, and some interesting locations to do them in. They have the last two, and for all I care, they should just SIMULATE what they want the economy of the future to look like, and make sure the players can trade items properly.
However, the truth beyond this is, they need to have a hit team grabbing at all the loose fibers of the game, because no matter how awesome your trailers look, or how many other people recorded themselves having fun, if the user CAN'T because ship spawning doesn't function properly, then all the rest of your effort is for nothing.
No, they don't.
1. Without marketing, they don't make money they need to pay people who work on the game.
2. You can't tie together systems on top of a framework still in development. In large software development you don't plan every small detail of components at the start, that isn't possible because you don't have enough information. Requirements and visions change while you work on something.
3. If you mean fixing all the bugs and making it stable just to make players happy. It will extend development a lot. What do you think happens when they continue making changes after that, tearing out old systems, and adding new ones? You are back where you started.
It will take another 10 years if you want safe development, where every feature is perfect and stable before it goes to the PU. Then you get the issue that months of work will be trashed because no one tested it, and it turned out not to be fun or they leave it in because of the (time)cost.
Want to solve this? Get a time machine, give them 2 billion in 2012, let them do their thing in secret, and pray that the result turned out how you envisioned it.
Well put!
Hey @Grolo! Good to see this new vid up. :)
o/ Hello! Hope you like it!
@@grolo-af Watching it now, great so far.
**Edit: Ok Grolo, I finished watching the video; this was high quality tech-talk just like your previous efforts.
I'm sorry that I can't come up with some pithy response that challenges your assumptions, but my own experiences in project management support everything you're saying.
I've been a backer since 2016, and I have watched CIG move relentlessly forward on the projects (SC & SQ42), and I have been perpetually frustrated reading posts complaining about how long it is taking; people fail to wrap their heads around the fact that it not only takes longer than a "normal" game development project might take because they maintain a 24/7/365 live environment, but also just how much CIG's transparency makes it SEEM like it's taking longer.
Yes! You get it. Appreciate the thoughts, as always!!!
this video is the thoughts iv had about SC forever. thank you for putting it in video form. this is the video il show anyone that asks about why this stuff takes so long
Thank you!
Good vid. Having worked in tech for 30 years, what you say def resonates with me. It is refreshing to hear someone talking about this, from a professional perspective, instead of farming views for the drama.
Hey there! Really happy to hear that. Happy to be a person adding the type of perspective to the videosphere that resonates : )
Star Citizen is the game I always wanted but nobody, but Chris Roberts would ever dare to try. The sole reason I backed in 2013 was because I was tired of the same old reskinned games from publishers again and again. Publishers have ruined gaming, and CR promised an unpublished game that would live up to his vision. CR is the only person I'd trust to create a game like this. When I heard it was him, I was in. I wasn't worried about how long it would take because I knew it would be a LONG time. I knew what I was in for.
It's simple; If you want a game fast, then don't complain when it's so so, and boring. Don't complain that there's never anything new to play that has ingenuity and creativity. For the future, Star Citizen is software as a service (SaaS). How it started out is irrelevant. The development is going to continue exactly like this for years to come, and it will never be finished. If you can't deal with that then move along. this game isn't for you. Just keep playing the same old boring, bland, reskinned trash that we've been served for years by publishers who are only interested in how much money they can make. Not whether the game is artistic, fun, or has replay ability.
Really appreciate you taking the time to drop these thoughts. :highfive:
Thanks for taking the time to discuss this. Hope to see you in the verse someday to pick your brain. o7
You shall; fly safe! o7
This man just speaks the truth..more people need to watch his videos.
Hey Grolo! Glad to see another video! Got a beer and gonna listen to you chat.. oh, hope you're feelin' better.
Boom! Awesome! Hope you enjoy the vid & the brew! : ) I am feel'n better; thank you!!
Here’s my somewhat philosophical and socially critical take on these reactions:
Advertising has been softening up our brains for decades, and now almost every content creator follows the same formula when it comes to pitching or spinning a story, it’s either hyped or hated. There’s not much left in between.
The entire media landscape is built on these meticulously crafted psychological principles. There are exceptions, of course, but they usually don’t perform well because polarization is nearly as effective as sex when it comes to grabbing attention.
It’s all just attention economy now. But with games, it’s a bit different, and this ties into Asmon's comment: games are boring because studios want to appeal to the widest possible audience. To do that, they have to avoid polarization, and as a result, games become dull and shallow. This is also reflected in their lack of complexity.
Well said! I don't know that I disagree with any of this.
What people don't understand the vision of these products is way beyond the scope of what exists. So once you have an out of scope of normalcy then you have the exact same type of development.
Truth. Well said.
yeah the 5AU of Stanton alone is over 740 million kilometers in total.. There is no game world even close to that to date so its tens to hundreds of times larger, I think one of bethesdas game had a total of around 36 million kilometers in total space or 6 million squared but it is nothing like star citizen etc, stanton is well 2.5x that size or almost 3x the size of stanton that's a bit ridiculous, planets or at least the old estimations were planets were around 2000 kilometers squared and moons 600 kilometers squared, this was around 8 years ago or so, as such they could be larger or smaller.. probably lager all things considered.
YT content creators and SC would be a better place if they would follow your lead. Pathfinders navigate uncertainty and no one wants to be one but all want the freedom without accountability.
Honestly some of the bigger star citizen youtubers should take notice of your channel and do collabs and such. Excellent work thank you.
Hope to see you on some of the more popular SC podcasts soon.
That'd be cool! Who knows, maybe one day : )
Great video, you're speaking the truth here, thanks a lot
CIG has about 1300 employees and is still hiring today.
Thank you so much for this! I've been a backer since 2020 in Star Citizen and have spend $450 on my account. I know exactly what I have signed up for and I love being a part of it. Sometimes everything is just broken and then sometimes everything just comes together and I am in awe of this game. (Sitting in my Starlancer in the Pyro System while watching this) I have been told many times that I'm falling for a scam. Yet when I think of feeling scammed my mind goes back to Diablo3 on release day and it's market, being an Arch Age Alpha/Beta backer and what became of that game, falling for the hype of Anthem. I have so many single player games that I have never finished because of live services and their respective stores. Really enjoyed this video! Subscribed.
Gotta say, about Anthem, it had the base for a solid game, and great competition to the looter shooter of the time (Destiny), but EA cut it before it could rise and let their devs cook the product properly, not to disregard the facts that it came out in a rough shape and it certainly had it's development hell phases.
Still i managed to play it like 6 months ago or so, and it was a fun experience, if anything looking at what i managed to gather from it's development, Anthem wasn't necessarily a scam, it became one when they decided to cut it and abandon the project.
@@unlimitedslashAnthem had so much potential. I think it was poor management and their wasted effort on the player hub.
Loved reading this comment. Thanks so much for taking the time! And I REALLY APPRECIATE the sub!! Much gratitude!
Love what you had to say at multiple parts. At the 38 min mark you talk about different teams working on different things and then go on to dependencies. I think it is important to high-lite how bad the existing dependencies / dependency graph is and why fixing unrelated things breaks features so often. It would seem to indicate they rushed so much of the earlier code and are now dealing with the ticking time bombs of those "designs" / those dependencies. The mission system not being suitable for server meshing is a great example. Who approved that design? Who reviewed that code and merged it in? Why did management allow / choose that "code standard"?
Well, it could be part of delivering a live service game while it's in dev, right? Obviously they weren't going to have a meshing plan in place in the first 5 years. It could be hard to predict how the mission system would need to accommodate meshing, or if it would have to. They may have made the assumption that the meshing system wouldn't require cooperation. Or, they could have shipped some questionable code. All of these things happen with great regularity on all teams I've been on. One of my primary responsibilities in roles I've filled over the last decade have been improving code quality. Everywhere I go it's a concern. I can't tell you the last time I entered a codebase and thought, "wow! These people were planning for the future!"
The mentality has shifted to "just do what works now, we'll rewrite it if we have to". So you may have some valid points; however, this feels like an industry wide issue and not a CIG specific one. Remember - CIG hired engineers from other places. They brought opinions with them. Even if CIG intended to change this culture of rewriting, it would have taken them a significant amount of time to affect such change and see the payoff.
Loving these man, keep it up.
🙌
The Grolominations are my favorite tech ruminations!
Grolominations 😁; haha
48:29 regarding why they didn't do lots of small investors; there are SEC rules about who can invest directly in companies. You have to be an accredited investor ( have allot of money).
Oh wow; this is great info! Gives me something to read up on and understand better. Thanks for taking the time to drop the comment!!
fantastic video, thanks for sharing your opinion and insight
Glad you enjoyed it!
I really like the development timeline chart, and it really puts into context how much time and money goes into a lot of these games. Slotting Star Citizen in this chart does not make it feel like an outlier.
"But SC has raised over $750 million for 12 years of development and has not released yet." Yeah, and the unreleased GTA 6 is at $1500 million (twice as much) for 11 years of development. Plus, let's not forget that CIG is making two games with that development time and monetary investment, and we have good reason to believe that most of these resources have gone into making the other game (Squadron 42) and the game engine they both use. If they can deliver on an experience we're all hoping for, I'm fine waiting until it's ready.
Appreciate hearing this was useful! I agree with what you're say'n!
I often hear people complain about the $700 million, and I think it is mostly because we are not used to thinking in amounts like that. It feels like a huge amount until you put it in perspective with the number of years, employees, assets, costs of doing business, research, development, loans, taxes, and compare it to other companies of this size.
CIG burns through 100 million roughly every year and has that same amount in the bank as reserves, not making profits. Stopping marketing will slow down sales, and without other investors, they will go belly up within two years.
As Grolo mentioned, if you have a better idea...
I've been waiting for Beyond Good & Evil 2 since i was a wee lad, I haven't heard them post anything for a while so assumed it was canceled.
As for Star Citizen, I don't think most people are mad at the development speed but more on what's being prioritized. I personally could care less about 90% of the ships, I want gameplay, I want Missions, Lore, Events, STuff to do in-game. The reason i personally get mad at them is because they tease stuff like basebuilding or server meshing or the npc crew and then casually cut a lot of the stuff they literally just discussed from the development plan.
I hate when you ask them questions and they dodge the question with "Well, I can't talk about that" or "We can't talk about that until (X) team is caught up and then maybe . . " It's always when you ask basic questions like "Do bodies float" "Will i be able to wear clothing under my armor?" "Will terrain modification be possible" "Any plans to do stuff about people abandoning ships within armistice zones?" ETC.
Star Citizen as a concept i like, I Really despise how they prioritize things the ship content should be their final focus not primary.
It's a fair way to feel for sure. But you must know, as I outlined in the video, that slowing down ship deliver would NOT speed up delivery of gameplay. All it would do is slow down funding. And result in us having fewer ships when the game finally launches (in exactly the same amount of time mind you). Watch the video again if you disagree then come back and let's debate! : )
Appreciate your video. Thoughtful.
o7
Holy shit, an actual level-headed star citizen and ashes of creation take
Haha; I try. Thanks!
Damn, i love what you said at 0:40 about debating. as a electrical test engineer, i debate alot. 😊
You get it! Haha. :high-five:
Beyond Good and Evil 2 is in dev hell, its been reconcepted over and over
Sounds about right : )
I'm a software engineer myself and it's crazy hard to explain all of this to people. They all seem to think that a game start when they see the trailer and that to go faster you just throw bodies at the problem. It's so frustrating.
Yup. We do what we can : ). Keep try'n! Let's bring the sanity!
My business plan for CiG is as follows:
From this day forward, CiG only releases cosmetic things on the shop, any new ships are only available in game immediately upon release, where cosmetic paints and skins for said ships can be sold on the storefront. Cosmetics and skins for guns and armor can also be added to the shop. Furniture and other things for people to decorate their hangers and ships can be added to the shop. All ships should be removed from the shop. The only things sold on the shop are in game usable immediately for already released ships, armor, weapons, furniture, and game loops. No more Jpegs or selling dreams. Only tangible, non pay to win options, priced to sell. I believe this would actually raise more money overall, and bring more backers into the game over time. All the while protecting the integrity of the game into the long run, and prevent an inevitable pay to win death like every other MMO (mostly asian ports) suffers from once people play for a few months and hit that pay to win wall to be competitive.
Hm. I 100% agree that this should be the plan upon release; however, im not convinced it would sustain development. I know I personally have never bought a cosmetic item from CIG. Not an armor skin, not a couch, nothing. There's no point because there's no long-term persistence yet. I'm not going to decorate my hangar just to see it reset in a week for the next minor patch. I'm not going to spend time customizing my character just to fall through a planet.
Now upon beta or release, I'll absolutely do those things and I'll absolutely buy cosmetics. But now? No way for me.
Appreciate the ideas and discussion!!
I think I can answer your point at 7:22.
Streamers think they can do it better. Its all sophistry at this point and it comes from people who have not worked in a business from a higher Management level. Even from someone like Piratesoftware who already has the mentality of "I am the smartest person in the room" has issues with his own credentials. Namely that he was low on the totem poll in Blizzard, got the job primarily due to family connections and overall he just comes off pompous. It also does not help that while Piratesoftware trashes SC, and he praises AoC. Then you go on his channel and conviently there's a AoC interview with the director. Then again the Director of AoC is leveraging social media in a certain way vs Roberts who is more traditional when interacting with media as a whole.
Going back to my first point, this is typical of the Armchair Quarterback, the guy who watches his favorite sports team on the television and goes "The Coach is an idiot, I can do better" just by looking at a delayed transmission at the comfort of his chair. Mike, Pirate and others get the flack they get due to the lack of understanding. If they do understand they are seriously misleading people for their own benefits as bad news always sells better then good news. They also refuse to understand the climate & culture in running an operation that's over 5 people. People who chase paychecks think those above them have it easy. While lower middle managers may be a overall waste of space, and fuel this culture of "managers do nothing". Those above that level are busy with coordinating inter-office communication between departments. The left hand needs to know what the right is doing on the development side. While sure the marketing dept needs to stay on a tight leash, and will often slip the hands of the owner. At least its primary goal is to make sure the coffers are filled with cash to pay the talent.
Social Media has its role to play in game development but it should not dictate the vision of the game itself. Want to see a game that is by far a complete wreck, just take a look at Escape from Tarkov. EFT has serious issues within its own code because they have not kept the game updated each and every time Unity has updated. This has lead to game breaking issues for players themselves. Then you have the streamers and streamer items in game, all of whom have some pull on how ETF is designed. IF the game needs to become more brutal due to Pestily not having fun, you can bet next wipe they will adjust the game so their streamers can have more fun at the expense of everyone else. Nikita has also gone on record that he loves hackers, will not do much about them because they buy...ETF, that he's more then happy to monetize hackers because that's what he did in Contract Wars. Then his whole rant about a PvE mode for ETF, that it goes against the game. Well he had no choice to add a PvE mode because majority of the players were playing a mod SPT (Single Player Tarkov) that ran far better then the base game. Instead of hiring the passionate creators of SPT he went after them consecutively before well the big dip in his sales. It took Battlestate Games losing money before a PvE mode was added into the game, why because of his soft on hackers position. The community got fed up overall with how the state of the game was, and overall still not happy with the state even with PvE because of Nikita wanting to force players into PvP. Why force players who are happy in PvE, because the PVP TTV streamers are unhappy about the lack of easy kills for them to make content.
That right there is the difference between Star Citizen and other games, Roberts has his vision. He will listen and take under consideration what the players want but he will not bow to streamer/influencer pressure. To me that's why people like SaltEMike and Avenger One constantly sling mud at CIG, their "influence" is being ignored.
Thank you for this! Well said and well articulated. The two companies definitely gave different approaches to social media. SC tends to operate above it while AoC is "in". I hope both navigate it well. Really interesting to read your perspective on EFT. I've never played but sounds like a cautionary tale!
@@grolo-af ETF is what people consider the gold standard for extraction shooters. It has loot agency that you can lose everything or come out on top.
The problem is Battlestate Game's overall poor management of their own game. Contract wars as a game failed horribly. The game itself only got as big because it was something fresh in the FPS market. Streamer's always looking to entertain first flocked to the game in droves. Summit1G and others drove the popularity. Its more apt to think that without social media exposure Escape from Tarkov would not have been a success. Funding would have dried up quickly had there been no push.
So in a sense social media/streamers helped turn a game that should have died into a game that thrived. This is where I think Nikita allowed his greed to overshadow his ambition. As more people flooded to back the game and gain access to it. The gameplay loop itself is shallow at its core (loot, shoot and scoot).
The issue is that to keep the streamers happy Nikita kept tinkering with the game. It revolved around what the streamers found fun. So if everyone could gain access to a certain type of ammo to challenge streamers. Next cycle that ammo would be limited. If a streamer was having issues getting stuff off the player market, the player market would be restricted. A good example was streamers complaining they couldnt build up their bitcoin farms because people would hatchet run at a certain map that had a tech store spawn. Hatchet running was basically having a melee item, a secure container (that cannot be looted) empty, and a combat stim to enhance endurance. So to combat this Nikita made it so items could only be sold with the found in raid tag, that if you ran without a kit you were marked so the AI would specifically focus you. All of that was done because streamers complained.
Oh and when BSG started to lose money they screwed over people who had the highest tier of backing that was the Edge of Darkness for 125 bucks. They created a new package called Unheard edition for 250 dollars. Again greed because people were just buying the 40 dollar package and downloading Single Player Tarkov.
The funny thing is SPT fixed a lot of issues that BSG has failed to remedy, from sound design to glitching issues. Instead of Nikita reaching out to these talented devs, they went full on lawfare to shut it down to no effect.
We sometimes forget that even if they are based in the same tech, SQ42 is also being developed. There is bespoke assets and mechanics for the single player story. So it is not one game, it is 2 extremely ambitious games.
BGAE 2 is a co-op, but it has planet to space without loading screens. For the dev presentations I saw it is very ambitious, but it also felt like a playground for new tech. We will see what happens. Eve took 4 years, but it is in continuous dev. When it came out was buggy, but after 21 years of dev, it is in a pretty good state
All great & insightful points! Thanks for taking the time to make them!
I think its also notable to consider that star citizen was developing 2 games , a very complex game engine, NEW TECHNOLOGY, and build new game STUDIOS to be able to to it and started with 5 people in a basement on their FIRST projectas a yeam , as well as, in 2015 had to basically reset most of its progress from scratch because they figured out full scale planitary tech , as well as train new devs on their engine , thats 750 million devided between 2 games , a game engine, new tech , and several new studios . Thats like 200mil for each game , 200 mil for the game engine and 200 mil for the studios. You cant compare that to games like red dead 2 or cyberpunk that are made by studios that are already pre established, have trained devs from day one , and have previous projects under their belt and aren't breaking boundaries in gaming , and even those took 8 years more than 200 million and one of them came out buggy and needed an extra 3 years to get good, i say star citizen is doing just fine both price wise and time wise when you consider everything and not to mention the dev count that started as 5 people in a littleral basment
I 100% agree with you! I gave a little more attention to some of your points in prior videos so didn't do so again here, but DEFINITELY worth repeating. Thank you!
Thank you.
It's funny that since most people only see a game when it's first announced and then it's published a couple years later, they ACTUALLY think the game only takes about 2 years to make and anything that takes more is a scam or dead in the water.
Development time isn't scaling linear. It takes a long time to develop fun mechanics and a new kind of backend. It's much faster and more predictable to make it look good and work flawlessly. SC is still in the network prototyping phase, just with a screenshot simulator attached, so money keeps flowing.
Your comment about the coffee bar is a poignant one. Space-X tried to cut its 24/7 baristas once and outraged the entire engineering staff.
No one will understand office amenities unless they have ever worked in an office where the top talent basically doesn't go home of their own volition.
Another good point, yeah. Been there!
What's the main difference between SC and other large technology production put there? Usually such productions/technology evolutions are spread across entire trilogies, quadrologies or even pentalogies, which gives audiences a solid retail game release every couple of years while still maintaining a technology progression. CIG on the other hand had the financial freedom to aim straight for the technological end goal and not bother with "stepping stone retail releases" along the way to please audiences and especially shareholders.
In a way the critics and sceptics were right (to some extent): CIG did embezzle backer money to do their own thing. That this thing broadly aligns what most backers can agree with, doesn't change the fact that CIG at some point realised, that the money keeps flowing in no matter what they do, and that they can do everything they want. Which they did. Luckily for us their goal was not buy Chris Roberts a yacht and get every lead developer a Porsche, but to R&D next-level technologies for the absolute MMO space sim.
In a perfect world they would have had a ten or twelve year roadmap with three or four retail game releases that all build on one another, while quietly researching and developing MMO technologies like server meshing in the background. And who knows, that might have been the plan in 2012. Get a good singleplayer campaign game out as quickly as possible and hope that is successful enough to start a franchise that can carry long tech R&D endeavours. But like I said above, at some point they realised that they had already crated something that can pay for years and years of tech R&D, and that they don't have to jump through the usual "release a game and secure funding for the next game" loops every other studio has to jump through.
I'm not sure if such an alternative roadmap would have been preferable for their production (probably not), but it would have definitely made their marketing and their communications much easier and would have been a lot more transparent to the audiences. More importantly it would have avoided that huge discrepancies between what audiences were made believe about what was going on inside the production, and what actually came out of the production.
Can you talk about what the first release of Star Citizen should have looked like?
@@grolo-af It would have basically been an MMO version of Starfield. Planets and Landing Locations would have been simple maps with skyboxes and other tricks to create the illusion of being on a planet.
space between celestial bodies would have been instanced and non-existent. For space travel the game would have moved you into an empty instance, again with skybox trickery to create the illusion of being in space. The game would have rolled dice to check if you run into an encounter in that travel instace.
- Large World Maps with 64 bit coordinate systems
- Procedural Planets
- Object Container Streaming and other components leading to
- server meshing
only slowly started to appear on the horizon after CIG opened the game to all backers in late 2015, thus transforming their business model from crowdfunding to the "early access"-style business model we have now.
Obviously I happy that they opted to take the risk and jump into this tech R&D journey. However, I blame them for not being abundantely clear about where they were going with this. They only said that this move will enable them to develop more features and better technologies. Many backers back then believed that more money means more and better features in less time. Only few understood that tech R&D means years and years of hard work with only few playable results for many years.
@@sverebom7069 You're aware that changed only a couple years into development correct?
The game started in 2013-2014 after its first demo was put out, and in 2016 or so it was voted on and we were told it was changing quite massively because thats what the backers wanted to see happen, in 2016-2018 we saw them overhaul a lot of things and use amazons lumberyard engine was is just cry engine 3 but heavily modified and upgraded and even they realized the engine feel very short of what they wanted, that's how we get to the 2017-2019 versions of the game, in 2016 was also the vote to delay sq42 which was going to release in 2018, the players voted on that.
Then we have covid that hits and what did they do? Entirely overhaul sq42, and Star Citizen while continually growing the company, that's damn impressive in a few years to do so.
@@yulfine1688 What demo? The pitch trailer wasn't a demo.
And that vote was nonsense. No one actually knew what they were voting about. Do you really believe, that anyone who participated in the vote (me included)
realies "Okay, if we do this, SQ42 won't come before 2026 and SC will take even longer, but I'm okay with it!". Or that the people would have voted overwhelmingly in favour if the question had been "Are okay with not having SQ12 for another 12 years, and waiting for solid gold version of Sc until 2030, if we deliver groundbreaking next gen technologies in return"?
Not even CIG knew exactly what they were getting into. Not because they are incapable (to the contrary, I think they are as capable as any dev studio could possible be) but because with tech R&D endeavours like this you cannot know or plan how long things will take; what complexities and obstacles you will face.
But instead of being honest about this, they exploited the hype of a community that would have yelled "yes!" to everything that sounds like "more and better!" without thinking about what this means for the production.
Let's take CIG out of the argument for second and approach this from a more fundamental level: My point is merely that a production should not be run like this. A dev studio should always be able to fly on sight so that they properly inform the audiences and their supporters where they are heading and how far they still have to go. That's what CIG failed to achieve that which is the root cause for all these controversies surrounding this production.
I don't really blame CIG for anything. They had a once in century opportunity to develop the absolute Space Sim MMO that runs on true next-gen technologies. they took that chance and I'm elated that they did and to be here now that it slowly takes form.
Plus: I'm sure that with the knowledge that they have today (like what kind of monster server meshing would turn out to be), they would have certainly handled things differently in 2014.
I honestly think that SC should be looked at more like an OS, instead of a game, given the complexity they are aiming for, look at Linux for example, over 25 years in active and consecutive development, and just recently it has started to be an actual real alternative to the crap show Windows has become, thanks to tools like Wine, Proton, Wayland and many other projects, not that it was unusable before, but stuff like playing games was out the window for the most part.
This isn't another Super Mario Bros DS made in a year or two.
I think people should take a look at the actual development process of CIG, remember that they got screwed up with Cryengine, and switched to Lumberyard from amazon games if i remember correctly, after that they just modified the Lumberyard engine into the Star Engine they are using today.
Lots of other seat backs like finding out they had to develop a new server system, never even been concept-ed before let alone made came into the table, this ain't stuff that gets made in a week, specially when you have to gather the resources (as in people knowledgeable enough to begin with, apart from the tools needed) to make said systems, this ain't you're script kiddie project to put a trollface emoji in a public monitor, if anyone has ever worked on big server deployment projects, even with already made tech, it's something that can take months, imagine if on top you have to develop the software, from scratch.
On top of that, correct me if i'm wrong, but StarCitizen started as a sandbox test bed for features to be put in Squadron42, which was the original project that was crowdfunded in 2012~2013, and was deployed i think around 2014 with the hangar module, but it didn't shift towards and MMO game until 2016 due to popular demand. Again, correct me if i'm wrong.
Overall i think people should cut CIG some slack, yeah, they raised a lot of money, a lot of it got wasted due circumstances like the Cryengine situation, or the fact that suddenly they faced the fact that an MMO was actually HAPPENING because people asked for it.
Well done.
I just want to chime in and say this.
I paid $110 for a game package for SC back in early 2013. Promises were made in the kickstarter.
Since then I have been given and offered way more than I originally paid for. Not once, was I ever forced to pay more for the expanded promises.
I have never been given more than I paid for by any company.
Meanwhile other space games in the last 12 years are forcing their players to pay more for expanded content. Much of that content was promised from the start.
I got no complaints about SC.
I have huge respect for Hello Games and how they handled NMS for their community.
Blame CIG for feature creep is understandable.
But have you ever noticed the amount of content requests from players on a daily basis?
Irony!?!
A game that is missing from your list and is more comparable IMO is Elite Dangerous. First announced in 1997 as being in active development, it took 17 years to reach a release in 2014 and it lacks a lot of the complex features Star Citizen has. Add on to this a further 6 years for Elite to release `space-legs` and still isn't comparable to the technical ability of the Alpha of Star Citizen.
ED did not have its Kickstarter until 2012, that is when it was announced. After the Kickstarter dev started and was released in 2014. You might have accidentally added some Frontier: First Encounters info by accident.
We've been having a western games crash, for 10 years. That's why a little Kickstarter project started called Star citizen
Speak it!
33:10 i scoff at your 2D graph, draw a Z axis rating the quality of coffee and snacks availible in the office.
hahaha, definitely some room for improvement there. Thanks for holding me to it!!!
This is an extremely good video that actually sheds light on the reality of these 2 projects that people have FAILED so miserably to understand over the years. I really hope this vid gets linked to all the naysayers and armchair/streamer "devs" to see their responses to this video and how badly it destroys their arguments, as well as link it to all the whining naysayer threads all around to attempt to educate people to the realities of projects like these 2 and what makes them even possible to attempt vs the triple A "safe" mass produced junk that gets thrown out "on schedule".
Well done giving some insight and showing points regular people would never consider like employee count over time vs progress. Stuff like that is never considered in naysayer threads.
Thanks so much for the comment @CatalystDestiny ! Means a ton. Happy this resonates with you!
I enjoyed this video thanks, i wish cgi would focus more on stabilty of servers, because iv not been able to play in like 2 months now and im finding it frustrating, cant wait to just play star citizen
I feel that! Just cause the dev time makes sense doesn't mean it can't be frustrating. I've had plenty of frustrating experiences in the game! Some good ones too.
@grolo-af sc is so addictive already, and that's when it barely works, can only imagine how it will be once it's stable.
Great vid!
Not all developers / artists are fungible / interchangeable. Anyone making a comment implying this is more of an advertisement of their ignorance than anything else. Sadly, due to culture and the bell curve distribution, we know that most of "us" are not well suited (with information, knowledge and sufficient understanding / IQ) to make the comments we often make,
Well said Grolo
I like your takes, but the coffee bar thing is a really valid criticism. If you asked me if I’d rather work in a fake spaceship with a coffee bar, or make .50 cents more per hour - it’s a no brainer. A coffee bar is not attracting the talent you are suggesting. Money does, and CIG would not be in short supply of it if they didn’t build an overly extravagant office space
Hey thanks! It's funny you say that though, because I have engineers from other companies in these comments saying the opposite. Turns out, different people have different opinions : )
What is important to one person may not be important to another. Funny! Polarized takes don't want you to think this though! It's too nuanced.
they never questioned GTAs 2billion spent.
In fairness, it's very difficult to criticize a company for the amount they spend on making their product when the money is coming from their own coffers from previous success. Also when the money they get for it from their customers is at or after release.
Even Duke Nukem Forever, which was the iconic vapoware game for it's 12 years of development, wasn't criticized for its budget for the game even though it was horrifically mismanaged from the start, because it was their own money. Granted, that was only like $20m, so nowhere near these kinda numbers, but criticism of the expenditure was generally along the lines of "wow, that was stupid", cause people weren't paying them for it that whole time.
People complain about it with these games because they've been taking money from players for it. Not making any judgements on it, myself, just saying it's a different situation.
Cyberpunk didn't take 8 years either. Polish concept artists were drawing a surprising amount of cyberpunk chicks long before 2012. They were cooking with a small team for way longer, figuring out the feel and fun mechanics.
I'm absolutely sure you're right. That's probably true to varying degrees for a lot of games on the list. There's always nuances. Appreciate the insight!!
This is true for the majority of games which is pre production which can be a few years or much much longer
My only real criticism of CIG / CR is that of improperly managing expectations and disingenuous ETAs. On top of that communicating that they have x or y tech or gameplay in a semi mature state, but when it releases to the public is just shadow of their demo. A lot of this is because of their funding model, but it still dirties everything it touches. Note that CIG is much better at this now, thanks Lando!
Until we have a large success with these new kickstarted MMO projects, we have yet to know if this model works. The frustrating part about SC PU is not only has it been in dev for a very long time, but also that there is no end in sight. Not a trivial amount of people who kickstarted this project are dying off, that is unacceptable.
A big part of leading a project is not just having vision but also knowing what can be done in a reasonable amount of time; It is a delicate balance.
How is that unacceptable? I don't follow. I could pass before this project finishes too. Could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
There was a major pivot in the project that was voted on by backers. At that time, they knew they were in for a long haul. Or should have. I'm sure you're right that comms could be better. I'm not trying to say CIG has been a perfect steward, but I am saying they've done reasonably well, and nobody else would do it. Can't choose our heroes, etc.
Given the ambitious scope, the company size & growth over the years, and etc - there's nothing about the development timeline or current state that greatly concerns me. It sits in line (or better) with other titles.
@@grolo-af It is more of a people than a tech thing. If they are going to accept people's money for something, it is nice to try to finish it before too many drop dead. I personally really like a lot of the things CIG is doing (meshing), but a lot of kick starters just wanted a game to play around the announced timeline.
If they could not meet that timeline or if they wanted to completely change the scope, they should have offered refunds to those who were expecting less of a development odyssey and just wanted a game.
As for me personally, I am not really upset about the game taking ten years, I am worried it will take ten more.
Fair things to be worried about. I think we're closer to 4 to 6 yrs out, but I could be wrong.
I'm 42. Almost 1k spend in star cititzen over the past 10ish years. The ONLY critique I can give Chris is, that he micromanaged TOO much at the beginning and has/had a problem with letting loose. And I can even understand it. THIS is his baby. His project he wanted for ages to make and tech couldn't do it. His vision.
And I am fully onboard with it. If it fails - yeah, so I don't really care, aside from the fact that I might never get to enjoy a more final version. Star citizen is not a scam. They deliver and you can see the development. The difference here is - and most might have the problem with exactly that - that SC has to spend money and dev. time to let backers play. It is needed for their kind of finance model. Thats also where a lot of criticism comes from - people forget that we are still in Alpha. They nag about not fixed bugs or things not done in 12 years. Yeah - thats for a reason. They keep the verse playable somewhat, fixing only the most game breaking bugs till the end of the alpha. That means all tools are done, all basic system work and the basis is finished. Then we enter the beta realm. Here comes bugfixing, new content, balancing, ship updates etc.
First they need to tackle the most important features to go forward - server meshing, replication layer etc. - this is sadly nothing you see, as it is in the background.
And it really is not a scam. Sure they use hype and sell tactics like everyone with a brain would do. But really, look at real scam games. SC is not it.
Also I am not saying they are without fail. Humans after all. But its far from whatever parts of the "community" want to make it out to be.
Really appreciate this comment. I love reading the various perspectives!
As far as star citizen :
The money stuff is always funny to me. I don't personally care how much money they get. I'm not giving them any more because, as I said on another of your vids recently (you responded but dunno if you'd remember), I don't agree with the way they've gone about development since I backed, plus I'm particularly unhappy with certain bits of behavior from them, but I know they have to make the sales to fund their operation and it's just how it's gonna be. Tons and tons of money - whatever, if people are willing to spend the money on it it's theirs to spend.
The timeline - I wouldn't care, if they didn't keep making more timelines that were unrealistic and then so consistently failing at those timelines. Little bit better last few years, it seems, but they've failed so much at meeting their own stated goals that even getting like half of what they said done and the other half seeming to disappear into the void can feel like a win and I don't like that. 😅
But that would all be minor quibbles for me. It's the way they've gone about development that's a bigger deal to me (particularly the constantly shifting focus), and some of their behavior. Would ignore the rest if it weren't for that.
One thing about the overall timeline does kinda tick me off a bit extra, though - Sq42, every time they show it off so much progress has been made, it's so much better, now it's feature complete, in polishing, blah blah blah... Then, every time - 2 years away. It's been 2 years away for the last 12 years. Saying it's 2 years away now just feels like saying "we want you to think we're close to release but we're not!" After so many times, it just feels like a scummy lie and I hate seeing them give the same estimate again when it's already been six times as long as the estimate, which is the same one they've given since the start.
Quite a few people have come in here about communications. Seems like the sentiment is their comms suck. Maybe they do. I'm not here to defend their comms, heh. If folks are upset about comms, so be it. Not going to tell you or anyone else they're wrong. I'm just here to talk about the stuff I understand, and I'm telling folks, based on my experience, it all checks out. I don't see alarming things. Within the context of the broader industry, I'd go so far as to say they seem above average in competence to me.
I do remember ya FWIW, and REALLY appreciate you being here and engaging (repeatedly)! Folks like yourself have helped for a 'lil community here which makes this a ton of fun and motivates me to keep doing it. :)
@grolo-af Good memory.
And talking reasonably about the stuff you know is why your vids are good.
I've got some limited experience in much much smaller scale game dev, so I do have some specific complaints and worries about the development process there - but the shifting focus is one of two main things for me. Mostly, I think they're doing good work, just not making as much progress as they could. Still way beyond my current skills.
The comms definitely need work, yeah. But people fixate so much on stuff that should be normal, or that isn't a big deal, or the little changes and adjustments they don't like... Don't often find people talking about the actual serious examples.
Well said:)
No coffe will help when the pay is subpar by CIG.
The pay for game devs is subpar globally. Don't pin this on just CIG. I don't know why this is, but I have friends in the space... I tell em, if they want a raise, just leave game dev. Go to any non-game tech company. This seems to be the case more broadly with professions of passion. I'd love to see this change.
I've got 12 years of entertainment being part of SC growing so (shrug) Can't remember the last "AAA" game that I played for years
CR for the most part has handed the reigns off to Rich Tyler to handle SC while CR focus's on Squadron 42 and it's Pt 2&3
Heard!
Star Citizen is a buggy mess 70/80% of the time . But and its a yuge BUT . In those 30/20% of the time its working well it makes other games look ancient . As a 2013 backer having spent ( spent not invested ) around £3000. I can say hand on heart with 100% genuine honesty . I've had my moneys worth and then some . And the best days are yet to come .
I feel what you're saying! I find it hard to articulate sometimes... but your exactly right. Those 20% moments DO make other games feel like... what's the point? Well said.
I'm a SC player/backer and yes I actually played it this year. Put some 700+ hrs in it, just this 2024.
What I don't like about the negative responses or reviews or whatever you like to call them; it's just clickbait.
At this point in time, unless you have played some 100 hrs in this game, your opinion on it is just null and void.
Often complained about 750+ million, they use this for every argument.
- Squadron apparently cost 750 million
- Sc also cost 750 million
- the starengine cost 750 million
- they bought studios for 750 million
- the star cast cost 750 million
- the entire staff cost 750 million
In what economy are these folks living, where they get to spend the same stack of money more than once?
Several single player games came out this year, costing a nice 400 million.
Some MMOs cost 350 mil and counting, while being updated.
Take 75k salary for a thousand people over 10 years, hmmm....
Ow yeah, we need licences for the software that is running on those thousands of pc's and let's just say they got the hardware for free, ey?
Manchester is probably sponsoring them with a free office, because jobs for the region. No heat necessary either, the sun is free.
Ofcourse none of these cost and/or incomes are taxable, because they are excempt form that plebeian stuff.
I think they're doing it on the cheap, to be fair ;-)
I see no indication they're overspending. Some good points. Thank you!
Based on the 2022 yearly financials, they paid 460 million in total salaries (with 2023 and 2024 guessed), averaging 63K per person.
Excellent breakdown. I could listen to you explain how engineering projects work for literal hours at a time.
This video reminded me of a recent (non-engineering related) Spectrum thread about how the ship teams need to focus solely on the ship backlog and while i didn't participate in the discussion i was just so annoyed.
People can just demand things without looking at the bigger picture. "Stop selling ships, make meshing work!" Or "CIG doesn't need anymore money to finish the game(s)!"
The ignorance. Maybe CIG can't justify doing some of the (SHRINKING BTW) backlog because the engineers are needed for certain tech?!
Like, yeah let's demand the Crucible and Vulcan when we don't have Repair tech fully fleshed out?
Let's demand the Endeavor before scanning, medical, farming, and overclocking are even finished being concepted?
We're getting Apollo, Perseus, Ironclad, and PIONEER in the next couple years... that's BACKLOG you mthrfkn...you get the point thx for letting me vent and also thx for letting me relax with your great content.
haha, you're on a tear! Seriously - means so much that you enjoy the content. THANK you for taking the time to let me know and to drop some comments. Really really appreciated.
Cyberpunk took 8 years to release but only because they released in early access. Finished Cyberpunk took 10+ years.
Good point!! I should have mentioned that.
Well unplanned scope creep is still mismanagaement
It's very difficult to identify all requirements of a small software project up-front. Entire disciplines have sprung up around exactly this.
Identifying all requirements & features at the start of a project the size of SC or Ashes... I'm just going to say it: impossible.
They had an enormous pivot, which was voted upon by backers.
They only recently committed to the 1.0 feature set.
Again, not claiming perfection. Surely things could have been done better here or there, but I don't have enough inside knowledge to point out where here and there is.
you may want to actually use those critical thinking skills you never learned in school before making a poor comment.
I don't know man, I do want new and interesting games, but at the same time I do NOT want those CEOs behaving as rock starts nor becoming the new Todd Howard or Peter Molyneux, they DID overpromise a lot, even if we only take roadmaps in consideration.
The idea that time doesn't matter may sound smart, but remember for the consumers it's the ONLY thing that matters. People change a LOT in 12 years and in 12 more some of the backers may no longer be alive, let alone still enjoy what they backed 24 years before. It's 2024, AI companies are making deals with nuclear power plants, how can we be sure a game launched this far into the future will even be competitive with others that still are not even into production?
Also the fact Chris Roberts said himself he earns as much as a large AAA company CEO, hired his wife and brother (and I doubt for their unparalelled competence alone or by competitive salaries) smells really bad when you consider the fact that CIG already took money and made SC no longer a pure crowd funded game. Mind you, he didn't say the value, just the large company CEO line, so people are rightfully asking themselves, did he drain half the money paying himself as much as Activision Blizzard payed Boddy Kotick?
In the end of the day, those games are still in the marketing pitch phase, and you can't sell a pitch if people lose trust in what you promise. And that's what is happening, not some "revolt of the normies". I'm a backer who just forgot about SC, returned last year and spent a lot because I was ultra hyped again and now feel kinda disheartened, and you can't find a single place where SC backers don't sound burned out.
Thanks for the discussions! My feedback to you would be: if you really think games will suddenly get way easier to make because of AI... then you're buying into a LOT of vapor :)
Look - the only thing that will compete with SC _if_ it launches successfully... are games that started development 5 to 10 years ago.
Which means you'll be waiting a long time.
There are no shortcuts in software engineering. Just good 'ole fashion hard work and slogging.
Why do you think Nvidia has such a wide moat protecting it against competition in the AI space? It's not the hardware....
I get your argument if it was just Steven not being judged for mismanagement because Sharif hasn't made a game before, but Chris has a track record of not having any accountability for himself when it comes to deadlines. Dude's a tinkerer and iterator. I respect that. I don't respect his inability to draw lines in the sand for himself when it comes to feature and scope creep and moving development goal posts.
All that to say, he is sorely mismanaging that game's development.
Did you watch the whole video?
@@grolo-af no they probably didn't..
@@grolo-af Didn't have time, but I also only commented on the part I watched so it doesn't really affect anything else.
I did keep watching after I commented about Chris and heard your thoughts about it. He's just proven over and over to me that he's happy to say something's coming, and not happy to say when he's taken it back to the drawing board.
Taking it back to the drawing board is fine. Not telling us he's doing it isn't. And he's done that multiple times now with SQ42.
Polish doesn't take 3 years for a very on rails and cinematic game. He stood on that CitizenCon stage last year and said they were in polish for SQ42 which again is a very linear, cinematic shooter/on rails flight game.
That was what I was alluding to in my original post. He's a tinkerer. He's not a good communicator or accountability guy. Go back and watch his old "Ten from the Chairman" episodes. He could literally be taking bong rips and spitballing all of that because so much of it doesn't even fit this new design paradigm for the PU.
The Pyro presentation from 2019 is a wildly different Pyro from what we're getting "Soon TM" and that was only 5 years ago.
The 1.0 presentation at this year's CitizenCon? That's over 7 years away if CIG's track record is anything to go off of and history always is, so it stands to reason 1.0 will look nothing like they presented.
Chris was happy to stand with tears in his eyes as everyone gave him a standing ovation for saying SQ42 was in polish, but this year he walked off stage before they showed a graphic that it was coming in 2026. If you're gonna soak up the adulation you gotta face the music too.
@@DaringDan polish can and does indeed take 2 to 3 years. I can give you multiple examples to be the case.
@@STRATUSPHERE01 I can too but not for SQ42. It's exactly like COD games in the aughts.
I gave reasons too. It's because Chris goes back and changes things and doesn't tell us. We're not in polish. How many times out of Chris's mouth are we two years away from SQ42? 3 times? 4 times?
For SC, I get the feeling that the vision is rather blurred and self contradicting.
For example the second IAE video about capital ship combat. Why bring smaller ships if you can just bring more capital ships, especially if they keep those NPC crew/AI blade ideas in the game (which I very much dislike, that is playing like EVE with one human pilot and everything else is automated).
I have a hard time imagining how they are going to build an economy around LTI and store ships as well.
Every MMO balances between solo and group play. They're still iterating on that.
They've given us some pretty big indicators on economic impact of store sales and LTI. Store sales are base ship. Everyone will want a tier 3 ship. This effectively makes it a discount. Its still more of an impact than none, which would be ideal; however I went into why it was needed in video.
Appreciate the comment!!
Simple, look at the real world. Why does the US want so many Aircraft carriers more than Hard-hitters like Battleship Yamato?
Everyone wants a big ship. It was because you must learn how tactical it is and be a solo player only. People who play in ORG would know that fighters and other small-size ships are best to keep the Capital ship busy. While letting the big ships do their own jobs, like the Rail cannon from Idris, would shoot the enemy in safety. Not to mention, aircraft carriers are always the best choice due to their mobility and quick deployment ability on the battlefield.
You might not find it helpful when SC 1.0 since it is only 5 systems are gonna provided. However, when more and more systems are introduced. People would drop Idris and tend to use Javelin and Kraken more. To make Javelin and Kraken GREAT, you need A LOT of smaller ships and ACE pilot.
@@grolo-af I know their current funding model depends heavily on ship sales, but especially the video about insurance was quite disheartening for me.
For example, i buy the best t3 ship with the best 999 quality tier x gear from a crafter (the way it should be) and get pirated. Now the pirate has all the nicest guns, maybe even the ship as well if i understood them correctly. Then i get my ship back from insurance with all gear (level 2 warrenty).
Now those quali 999 tier x items are dubbed and the crafter will never sell anything again, because the pirate insures his ship to continue dubbing the items via insurance.
You're making a lot of assumptions. We have a strong indication of how insurance will work, but I don't know if it's safe to begin predicting how it'll be leveraged by players in the game. Things could still change (as they have been). On top of that, we have existing examples to look at:
Look at EVE Online. Insurance is available for ships, and yet not every ship is insured. Why is that?
What you're describing COULD very well be a problem. But I wouldn't say it certainly will be. And if it is, it can be further tuned.
@ The EVE insurance system is the exact opposite of SC, you don’t get back the ship or the gear just ISK. Even on T1 ships, all equipment is either destroyed or lootable and you need to find a replacement on the market for the hull (usually at a loss).
All higher tier hulls are almost 100% loss.
No offence to anyone but so many of the angry takes and negative noises and due to the audience of these games being composed of many unrealistic kiddies with no, or insufficient experience, and too few, rational, informed, perhaps more mature individuals.
But he was a blizzard dev at blizzard the company that made WOW and then fucked it up so bad they rereleased the old version which is the only version people play, and then continued to drop disappointment after disappointment
Yay. It's like an ex Starfield dev coming out and shitting on stalker. Your company made some good games, but that's irrelevant. Experienced massive dev companies have proven time and time again that past successes have no impact on further ones.
Tbf, Rockstar have taken risks, GTA Online is buggy af and there's no such thing as balance unless you buy several Shark Cards or whatever
Ha!
Ashes is getting the hate that sc has had for a decade plus 😅
Yeah. If anything, I hope the fans of both games can have empathy for one another : )
These people complaining about a "Western gaming crash" and "No good games anymore" are out to fucking lunch!
Ya, maybe Call of Duty XXIV is a snoozefest, but how is that surprising?
Almost ALL the action is at indy dev houses. Games like Enshrouded, and BG3, and even 7DTD are where the fun is.
Maybe the "crash" is a crash of AAA houses - but I don't have a problem with that. Make GOOD games or die. Why does that concern these dudes?
You have a point that there's a lot of Indy action in the single or low player count space. I loved BG3. But even still, if you compare the number of high quality titles we're getting per year now to 10 years ago... I don't know that it compares favorably. Also... what you're describing does not extend to the MMO scene, which is the what the clips I included were focused on. Still,appreciate the comment and thoughts!
Pirate software guy always has the most random takes. He worked as a developer at blizzard for a few years so people take his word as gospel, when in reality he's wrong as often as he's right
If anyone can't grasp the simple concept of ship sales funding development, they can't have an opinion. If they don't sell ships, the game stops being developed. You can have a problem with the marketing or the direction of the game, but if you just say generally they should "stop developing the storefront and finish the game" but don't realize "finishing" would mean it releases in its current state tomorrow you're braindead.
Not even worth coming up with any other argument.
You like AAA endless sequel and remake slop? That exists in abundance.
You want a game like star citizen or ashes to come out? There are no other options. Play throne and liberty (actually a pretty good MMO) or new world. (I like new world) Play elite dangerous (used to be pretty good) or no mans sky (couldn't get into it but there's content). Nothing comes close
Here here!
I never wasted my time in useless game called Starfield
No gamer has a problem with innovation and studios taking risk. You’re preaching to the choir. WE have a problem with Studios like CIG lying to us about development time, game feature promises and internal management issues that contribute to delays. CIG took our money. Ashes took our money. In doing so, we deserve honesty about the development process and expected reasonable estimates on dev time to meet milestones. Just be honest…
Who's innovating in a way you approve of?
8 - 12 years is a long time to not expect things to change and evolve. Estimates are far easier to demand than accurately give. You should try estimating where you'll be in 10 years with precision : )
@@grolo-af Tell us who's problem it is that Criss promissed more than was possible? CIG or our that did pay on what he said it will be? If it was his money and only his, do what you want, how you want and let it take as long as you want, but if you tell me "give me money you wil get a/b/c" - why the f would i care that your estimates are wrong? Don't promiss in the first place.
Oh get over it already.
@@grolo-af Ok, when 1.0 releases in 2032 you let me know how many people you think would have backed the project in 2013-14. SC would have never seen the funding numbers they enjoy right now if folks would have know how long the “flash to bang” was. Good vid, good discussion by the way.
Hey thanks @swiftbow2110 - appreciate it!
If people knew in 2013-2014 if 2030 was a possibility (we'll go 6 more years - I expect that to be more reasonable)... making the grand total dev time 16 - 17 years... would they still have invested?
It's a good question. My assumption is that many would. You're looking at 8 years for a game like Starfield. 8 to 10 years for a good single player game like Cyberpunk. 13 years for an "ok" MMO like Throne & Liberty.... you really don't think people would be willing to go 16 or 17 for something as grand in scale as Star Citizen, when compared to these other titles?
I think they would. I know I would.
You can continue to argue they were misled and what does it matter... that's fine. You may have a point - I would not say it was intentional. People inconvenience me, even hurt me, in unintentional ways all the time and I give them a pass. Intent matters a LOT here. If I thought the team intentionally and willfully deceived me, I may have another opinion of the situation. But I do not think that. I think if anything, they made some gross miscalculations at the start. Which is par for the course in this industry. Something I've PERSONALLY done. Happens. I give 'em a pass on that. Doesn't bother me in the least.
If it _did_ bother me, as much as it seems to bother some, I would simply leave this project. I wouldn't hang around bashing it and tearing it down. I'd move on.
But that's me : )
You asked for feedback so here it is.
If you want to get your information across to your viewers, don't record yourself rambling at a camera and have your points and slides prepared ahead of time.
Thanks buddy.
Nobody chooses to work at a company because of its cafeteria wtf
If you don't think amenities factor into the decision making process, you either don't have a ton of work experience in this industry, or you don't have a lot of connections. Why do you think places like Facebook pay for laundry services? Why do you think places like Etsy provide onsite chefs and a rotating seasonal lunch menu? Why does Google provide free transportation? Amenities matter greatly to a significant portion of the software engineering population...ESPECIALLY when you're trying to cultivate and foster an in-office environment which CIG is.
@@grolo-af They don't do it with backers money GTFO. It is an absolute disgrace that they use money for this kind of thing. This is NOT google. BTW NOBODY picks the job at google because of the cafeteria or the laundry. They do it because of the stock options. For the love of god what kind of company have your worked for? 50 employees? We value REMOTE work, not transportation... Transportation means NOTHING when you earn above 200k
With regards to SC. its not. Actual Development sstarted 2016. Stop moaning now go to bed.
Yep, the first years were just company building and engine fine tuning, wish is still going on today
@@4hire565 Its staggering that there are so many saltymikes that dont know and understand this.
Indeed, the first like demo to show off they had in 2013 and it was a white box and barley able to fly in an empty space.. its actual development didn't start until later, part of that also is because of sq42 as well, though I do think they technically started development in 2014 for Star Citizen, leaving the pre production and planning phase.
@yulfine1688 2014 to 2016 they faffed with engines, direction and some proof of concepts on tech. Had a vote (backers voted) in the direction of the game and then actual real development started.
2017 if I recall we only had a hanger to walk in.