STAR CITIZEN ALLEGEDLY GOING BANKRUPT, DEVELOPMENT MIRED BY TURNOVER, RACISM, SEXISM

I don't know if I could trust Chris Robers strictly because he thinks throwing a bunch of money at making the biggest, best game ever is actually going to yield positive results. We around here know the crushing reality of such an undertaking.

It's never good.

author=ratty
I'm not familiar with either of these names, but why is Derek Smart so villainized, here?

Is he a sane, competent individual? If not, then how is he working in this business?

From a competency side, well...

@Darken: Oh wow, the lack of a professional attitude he has towards his audience is absolutely disgusting. This definitely lowers his credibility. His game seems to have pay-to-win.

On the other hand, Star Citizen looks absolutely boring and at least at this stage, I fail to see how this project can't be pulled off by a AAA company. Also, THIS game has pay-to-win, or as the vid demonstrated, win-to-pay?

I don't think these two development leads are all that different in that regard, so I guess they're both scummy in their own ways?

Honestly, I've been keeping tabs. Star Citizen sure doesn't look like it's going bankrupt.

I'm a lurker but I had to register for this thread. Someone should clear the air.

The author of that Escapist piece is friends with Derek Smart, and they had collaborated on an article before. Derek Smart is a documented pathological liar with decades of trolling and lies. Don't take my word for it. Do some Googling and find out for yourself. He has claimed to have multiple PHDs and of course lied about it. He is responsible for one of the worst game releases of all time. His games are usually vaporware. And he has been on a Star Citizen crusade from day 1.

The Escapist claims they had multiple CIG employees all come forward separately with the same claims. They verified they are real CIG employees with employee badges, except CIG has no employee badges. These employees all called the author of the article directly and unsolicited, getting her phone number from a third party.

Derek Smart had been recently asking for any ex-CIG employees to contact him to get a story out in the media, and he had the author's phone number.

While it may be possible some actual pissed off ex-employees were involved, that isn't even certain and none of the claims add up.

All the claims in the article were all posted at the same time by anonymous sources to Glass Door first, before the article. That happened right after someone suggested to Derek Smart that anyone can post anything at Glass Door, claiming to be an employee of a company. As an anonymous site, there is no checking.

The article claims they were going to lay everyone off. Derek Smart went a step further, saying they'd be bankrupt and closed in 90 days. The article claims they refuse to hire anyone over 40, hire anyone black, and that all the money was stolen and no game is being made.

Immediately after the article was published, tons of CIG employees openly volunteered to be interviewed to refute these claims. People posted pictures of older employees and black employees. CIG offered to let media tour all 4 studios to see the hundreds of paid employees and the game in progress.

Since then, CIG announced the cast for the single player game which includes:

• Gary Oldman - Playing Admiral Ernst Bishop
• Mark Hamill
  
• Mark Strong
  
• Sophie Wu
  
• Sandi Gardiner
  
• Gillian Anderson - Playing Admiral Bishop's Daughter
  
• Craig Fairbrass
  
• Liam Cunningham - Playing Captain Noah White on the UEES Stanton
  
• Ben Mendelsohn
  
• Ian Duncan - Playing the Player (IT'S YOU!)
  
• Jack Huston - Playing "Sky Captain" Cal Mason
  
• John Rhys-Davies
  
• Rhona Mitra - Playing Executive Officer Kelly on the UEES Stanton
  
• Andy Serkis
  
• Gemma Whelan
  
• Harry Treadaway

If they're not making a game and Chris Roberts stole all the money, how and why did he pay all those actors? Many of those actors took to Twitter to defend the game and project. They've been raving about the filming. We saw behind the scenes of those actors filming.

Every week CIG posts to the forums, and Reddit answering people's questions and showing us new info.

There are several YouTube series with new videos weekly, showing us progress on the game in various ways such as Around the Verse, 10 for the Chairman, Bugsmashers, Reverse the Verse, Meet the Devs, The Next Great Starship, Wingman's Hangar, etc.

Despite the claims by The Escapist and Derek Smart, no studios closed their doors. No one went bankrupt. Total headcount went up. They have nearly 300 employees working for them. Funding went through the roof. They're up to 104 million and still growing.

And then they released the 2.0 module that Derek Smart said would never come out. Right now you can log on and play the first taste of the persistent universe/MMO side. You can walk around on land, enter a ship (even steal a ship from another player) fly around to different destinations, go on missions, enter space combat, and go EVA out of your space ship and enter FPS combat. It is all seemless and playable right this moment. There is of course the initial game-within-a-game of Arena Commander as the dogfighting module. There is racing in game right now. They keep adding new ships all the time.

Multi-crew ships are in. You can get together with other players and operate different roles on a single large/capital ship.

Derek Smart said he knew no one was making these ships. People were buying JPEGs of ships that would never be in game. They're in game and playable now.

It is a shame that people believe a guy who is a documented, repeated liar over the litany of evidence that suggests this is a legit project.

You can say "there is nothing to show", except we're all busy playing the game right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA7oKiR8h1U&t=2m50s

Has it been 90 days yet? is it bankrupt?

author=Ratty524
'Guess that clears it up! I still don't understand why anyone would be insane enough to go on some vendetta against a game project. The time Derek spends slandering this project could be spent working on his own games and being less of a condescending prick to his audience.

I believe he made the 90 days comment in October, so we're close. He did have legitimate insider knowledge of some smaller layoffs that did happen. CIG was restructuring the company, and moving some of the jobs to their new German office. CIG gave employees 8 weeks notice if they were being laid off, and a severance package on top of that. Derek Smart pointed to those layoffs as proof of his fraud/bankruptcy/studio completely closing down accusations, but the reality is that they were hiring so many people in Germany that head count went up, even with the layoffs.

The backstory of that was that CIG outsourced the FPS module to Ilfonic, who had experience making a FPS. Chris Roberts has really high standards, and Ilfonic hasn't demonstrated amazing work. The FPS game-within-a-game (Star Marine) has been delayed significantly, even though the FPS mechanics did ship with 2.0. When Ilfonic handed over their work, it wasn't to Chris Robert's standards. Most of it was refactored or replaced. They decided to redo the animation system so that 1st and 3rd person animations are all perfectly synced and look good in a way that pretty much no one has ever done before. They redid the maps, weapons, and more.

And then on top of that, CIG decided to replace all their "netcode", but it was more than that. They tossed out the basic CryEngine netcode and wrote new matchmaking systems and more, including the systems that provisioned servers for different modules (racing, persistent universe, FPS, dog-fighting, whatever) as needed. That all delayed the FPS, but it improves every facet of the game in the long run.

Rewriting a lot of core underlying systems meant moving more jobs to Germany, where CIG has hired a lot of the original/core CryEngine engineers. CryTek (the company that makes CryEngine and Crysis) is actually facing potential bankruptcy and CIG is using their millions to hire a lot of those guys away so that Star Citizen is still viable, even if CryTek goes under.

As for why Derek would have this massive vendetta, he apparently has a history with Chris Roberts from back when his Battlecruiser game was competing with the Wing Commander games. He also has a history trolling IRC and early internet forums way back in the day.

Derek Smart was charging money over 3 years ago for a game he said was in beta 3 years ago, and is now in Steam Early access. Others earlier in this thread posted YouTube clips of a German magazine reviewing it, and despite Line of Defense being in development for a good 7 years now, there is no content, no features and yet it is impressively broken.

When Derek Smart tells everyone he knows for a fact that a game like Star Citizen can't be made and a project must be fraudulent, it is important to note that Derek Smart is trying to sell a similar project of his own. Is he projecting his own fraud?

It is sad, but a quick check of his Twitter feed, Facebook pages, etc. shows all he does is post online all day, every day, which is odd given that he is supposedly hard at work at making a game. A few months ago he posted on Steam it would be done by the end of 2015, and there has been no progress at all.

He also sells this online only game, telling people it will be Free To Play eventually, with a large player base. Literally no one is playing it currently, and now he is saying the game will never be Free To Play, because he doesn't want to cater to entitled players. He is selling virtual items that don't exist for a game that doesn't exist, while accusing Star Citizen of selling "jpegs of ships that won't exist", except they do exist now, and people are flying them.

It is sad really. I feel bad. I think the guy is literally unwell and an actual case of a pathological liar. He can't help it, nor can he acknowledge what he is, even when repeatedly confronted by his long history of incessant lying.

I only know all this because CIG has been exceptionally transparent with all the forum posts, videos, Reddit posts, chats, etc. We know exactly what is going on with Star Citizen and Squadron 42. But I urge people to find out for themselves.

tl;dr
Watch video of people playing Star Citizen. Read up on Derek Smart yourself. Google for debunking of The Escapist article. Don't trust one opinion. Find the facts.

Oooh, he did Privateer? I played that at a friend's house as a kid and remember liking it :D

Saw this in a tweet earlier and it made me laugh:

"India literally built and launched an entire Mars mission in less time than it took to get the first Star Citizen alpha, for less money"

On a basic level, Star Citizen sounds like a beautiful and brilliant concept... but a great concept isn't worth much. It's unbelievable how much money has been thrown around for a game that barely has a prototype, y'know?

author=Sailerius
How much were you paid to post that?

I was paid tons of money to say don't listen to me, do some research on your own and come to your own conclusions. Clearly, that is the behavior of a shill.

Edit: You repeated the article's claim that they were going bankrupt and had nothing to show for their development time. Since then, we saw a huge Hollywood cast unveiled, and the launch of 2.0 with a persistent online universe, tons of new ships, new flight physics, new damage models, FPS elements, tons of new playable ships, etc.

Do you honestly believe that counts as nothing to show for development?

author=slash
Saw this in a tweet earlier and it made me laugh:

"India literally built and launched an entire Mars mission in less time than it took to get the first Star Citizen alpha, for less money"

On a basic level, Star Citizen sounds like a beautiful and brilliant concept... but a great concept isn't worth much. It's unbelievable how much money has been thrown around for a game that barely has a prototype, y'know?

A lot of AAA games spend years in development. That is actually the standard. We just don't hear about them until they are close to launch.

Fallout 4 had seven years of development for a single player only game, and they started with a completed Fallout 3/NV engine.

Star Citizen designed all of its systems from scratch and is playable today. The fact that you can walk around, enter a space ship, fly around, go EVA and enter FPS combat all seamlessly (no load screens) means that most of the game cycle exists and is playable right now.

SWTOR cost $200 million to launch and took five years to develop, and at launch it was cited for lacking tons of standard MMO features that took another two years to appear.

Star Citizen had their Kickstarter three years ago and looks to launch next year. If they do in fact successfully launch in less than four years with a project that is perhaps bigger and more ambitious than any previous game in history, then that is no small feat and pretty impressive.

A standard AAA title takes between 18 months (rushed sequel like Dragon Age 2) and five years. Dragon Age Inquisition took four years, for example.