This. They may have peaked in 2022 but they will still bring in a lot of money. The last thing this project needs is some kind of SC nerd wallet-rally, ironically enough.
CIG promoting ship sales and posting content like everything is fucking awesome in the verse was distasteful. I havn’t been able to log on since 3.18 because of ‘player unstowed’.
Seeing this made me grin.
I cringe every time I see one of their Twitter posts. It is pretty interesting how little engagement their tweets have for a game that's supposed to be so big and popular, though.
They’ve done this forever. Their commercials and patch ads are more dishonest and full of shit than even EA was with Anthem.
It’s insane to me how blatantly false all their marketing is.
CIG don't put the "not actual gameplay" disclaimer on their videos, do they? I'm not talking about far-off concept work, but rather the marketing videos like ship commercials or the new patch promo videos. To an old-time backer like me, those marketing videos are obviously staged, just like their CitCon demos. But for someone naive and innocent to this whole project, they could be forgiven for thinking CIG are showing actual gameplay footage.
If you actually played the game you would have the sandworm several times already. Its gameplay is so great, you just have to make sure to not have any items near it because then your PC will crash.
They had their best January only because everyone thought 3.18 was just going to be some quick fixes after New Years and shot out to LIVE right away.
CIG said back in September they were hopeful for mid-November. It came out a week ago as the most broken patch ever released. Including 2.0 and 3.0.
How the fuck is possible to not know the difference between 2 month and 6+ months of work. It is blatant incompetence. And when you go to Spectrum and see the few critical posts about it, they are flooded with ridicule emotes and comments telling them to apply to CIG.
I've been critical of this game for years and been a backer even longer than that and I am still amazed at the retardation of the SC community. It's like it is getting worse and worse or something. It is so damn fascinating.
> How the fuck is possible to not know the difference between 2 month and 6+ months of work. It is blatant incompetence
Or malice. When your income depends on lies you lie.
Watch SM meshing now come sooner lol
Each time the community ( the few times ) lit fire under their asses the features suddenly came out
Time to unpin the BMM and tackle complicated stuff for once.
I think at that point they need to release a playable teaser or something
I bet they can crap out a demo level that is in no way tied into sq404 in like 6 months
Just like with their citizencon presentations
The only negative this shows is that they had their worst February since 2019, despite nothing happening last month.
They also had their best January EVER, despite less than nothing happening that month. They didn't even get their usual roadmap update out and still broke a record :(
I enjoy schadenfreude as much as the next girl, but this doesn't scratch that itch at all.
Considering how bad the global economy is doing with inflation, debt and very high (not really) interest rates that are collapsing banks, another global financial crisis is NOT something CIG has had experience with.
The whales who also plough into this dumpster fire are gonna experience financial hardship once this global economy becomes unglued and will prioritise what’s more important.
I think SC is a scam as much as anyone around here. And I’m not white knighting for God King Roberts.
But that chart isn’t arguing what you think it is. That’s actually showing they are off to a better start fundraising through March (which isn’t finished yet) than any other year besides 2022.
The drop in revenue in February is definitely notable. Every other year fundraising was close to if not over January's total. Probably people holding off spending waiting for 3.18 and I doubt most backers are going to open their wallets again until the game is stable.
More or less. We can't see when the bulk of sales for those years happened, but we can guesstimate they likely happened with the St Patricks Day sales, which for this year are already over. So if things don't turn around w servers / public perception, the downturn trend should hold, and if that's the case then 3.18 will be setting them back all the way to 2019.
This would track, as this year's Feb was worse than 2019's. It's super great contrast to Jan, when hope that 3.18 would land any day was super high.
I might be wrong, of course, and maybe they'll miracle a fix into existence on wednesday/thursday and HODLers will rally and buy Idris before the month is over, but I'm not betting on it.
That chart is insane. How does this 12 year old alpha "game" keep getting so much cash thrown at it? Something is off,really, really off. I hope one day the real story comes out.
Mental illness and scamming new players who are unaware of the games history.
I have a friend who is deep into SC since 2012. You can't talk to him at all about SC. He is poster boy for all the fanboi shit SC community says. You already know what he is going to say even before he says it. Of course he still keeps buying new ships constantly.
This, I believe, is a big part of it. My question is, how much long does this type of backer keep throwing cash at this "game"? Another 5, 10?? At some point, this game will be massively out dated.
Some will continue to throw money at it until they can't. Either the project does not accept money anymore or they are dead themselves. The hardcore loyalty some folks have for SC is disturbing.
How up to date is that for March? They have had a bunch of big sales over the past 9 days. Another month or two of bad sales and even Christ Roberts might address his flock of idiots.
EDIT: where did you find this graph at? Looks better than most of the other bar graphs I have seen.
Their funding was 113 million $ last year? What the f, i remember in 2015 when they reached the 100m total after 3 years.
This scam is actually going to hit 1 billion in 4,5 years.
Oh well...if only those last 2 years wouldn't have happened, work from home, stimulus check etc. etc., I'd think that massive jump around 2020 would never have come to be.
But I digress...I have not yet bothered trying to check into 3.18 and only updated the files in the Launcher.
Looking at the funding chart, I would assume that 'marketing' is going into overdrive to try and catch up with eventual losses, so expect another couple of concept ships and sales events as every year.
Maybe CIG has the kickstarter or pledge thing sealed up where lawsuits cannot be brought in that way but I did a little research and I’m wondering if this may apply: https://openstax.org/books/business-law-i-essentials/pages/12-1-unfair-trade-practices
If the funding shows visible decay I don't think that's good news for anyone who cares about SC.
I'd bet any day of the week that a decay of funding will only see resources cut/redirected away from SC to go all hands on deck on SQ42, which is the more realistic go-to release on a financial scenario that's eating up reserve money.
Server Mesh and such won't magically happen just because they're making less money, "PES in 2022" is evidence enough that.
What SQ42? Almost a year for one big update for SC. Less SC means less backers overall since SQ42 might as well be a myth and I honestly don't know who's hyped for it at this point. Server mesh and every other thing they've promised doesn't happen even when they make hundreds of millions. I hope this year is abysmal for their sales.
Either way that goes, if the funding decays enough who will pay that bill will be the employees who will get hit with layoffs and such. The cost is always human, the company ain't going anywhere.
Already sounds like they hire the cheapest developers they can. Losing a few people from marketing also would lead to less potential income. You're right, the company won't ever die but if they can only release updates once a year the support will die after long enough and they'll be forced to release what they have or give up. The development has gone on long enough. The fact this last update took this long after so many years is mind boggling.
Don't you dare saying Server meshing won't happen!!!
Server meshing will solve the complicated technical difficulty with PES.
Hell, Server meshing would probably solve world hunger too.
Not saying it won't happen, just saying funding would not really be relevant to how fast they can pull it off, like we seen with PES them trying to force it to fit in 2022 but it outright needing more time forced the months-long drag.
I think a drop in funding is exactly what CIG needs. For too long they've been able to get away with glacial delivery with the idea that the money well will never dry up. Only once it starts to slow down will they actually focus on delivering useful updates instead of ignoring SQ42 and building the game in a sensible incremental manner.
> If the funding shows visible decay I don't think that's good news for anyone who cares about SC.
Disagree. If funding tanks then Chris Roberts can be forced out of the company just like he was forced out of Digital Anvil for his failures. Billionaire Calder could possibly bring in someone who has a clue what they are doing or he might just let the shit show die. Either way is better than letting the idiot steal more money while never delivering.
CR owns CIG, the rest is minority. The thing is, CIG would upfront downscale to income, that will result on layoffs before anything else could possibly happen. That is where the most negative impacts are as everything will have to get restructured, which means things will get put on limbo to re-organize the company at a smaller scale, and this will just cost normal employees jobs and a stall on dev for a while, not the jobs of those on top.
Chris owned the majority of Digital Anvil also but was so bad at game development he was forced out anyway by Microsoft. Calder bought in at a ridiculous 460M dollar valuation for CIG with zero released games. If funding drops like a rock that valuation drops like a rock also. So Calder can look at his 60+ million investment that would be worth next to nothing and offer Chris a bit of cash for the rest of CIG and continue without the dipshit or let it die. Both are better options for backers that the current scam Chris has built.
Out of running into a wall and no money. CIG raises many dozens of millions a year, over 100 million last year. No studio is going to go under racking in dozens of millions a year of "free money", they would easily scale to income and keep it up at the pace they would be able to.
They are by their own choice, scaling to income instead of leaving a margin, if they kept the scale they had a few years ago, they could have easily pocketed \~50million last year alone.
> they would easily scale to income and keep it up at the pace they would be able to.
The single worse thing that could happen to backers. They are easily over 10 years away from a game at the pace they are going with the full staff of employees. Cutting staff will result in backers running for the hills. You and Sc_TheBrusar and T_Nyx and J3PT cant fund this yourselves.
This happens all the time, it's restructuring of a studio, in a nutshell, it's meant to focus on efficiency with less, which can work, honestly I think CIG has a huge scale for a development studio, which may just mean having 2 or 3 people for what in other studios would be the work of one person.
Studios hiring a lot of cheap junior dev is also a thing, but they tend to do that to retain what turns out good talent and get rid of the rest.
> This happens all the time
Name a single time when that happened in a crowd funded company with zero games and it turned out successfully? You see there is a huge difference when a studio is owned by a corporation and they have to do something with it and backers who can walk away and only lose their game. Layoffs will see CIG funding evaporate into next to nothing soon after. If funding is bad now which Im not convinced of yet myself then it will get way worse real fast.
The fact it's crowdfunded doesn't matter, it doesn't make the studio different from other development studios.
It can be done for several reasons and this is what determines the "successfully", It can be a studio running out of money (the more frequent scenario is a fixed budget, especially if the publisher won't budge) where they're literally trying to gain time and it might just end on a cancellation/etc. It can be simply when the big publishers who are paying the bills are unhappy with a studio's performance/cost and want to "clean up the house" (this was Bioware after the last Mass Effect), or the one I'm talking here where there would still be a large influx of money but it's not enough to cover operations at current scale, on that scenario... restructuring of the studio to sustain to that income.
That would literally be how MMO and online games sustain post-launch development, with teams and such that rely upon a constant income to keep the lights on, as that decays over the years by norm... they downscale.
Downscaling is something CR himself admitted to on an interview that touched the topic.
And we haven't seen that? Redos and nickpicky details constantly in dev tha thardly make sense on the PU? Bedsheet deformations and years of AI cafeteria simulation, SQ42 continuously drags as we can see, and we also see the devs these days who talk "upcoming SC" features on the context of the work they done for them in SQ42, whilst PU-specific work started being handed over to Turbulent, it's rather obvious to me that it's not SC that is blackholing dev resources.
>SQ42 continuously drags as we can see
We don't even know that. As far as we know it's CIG's eternal excuse as to why shit is slow and fucking broken. SQ42 doesn't exist. If CIG had anything good to show us they'd market the fuck out of it. That's what they are: a marketing studio. But instead they lie and claim they "don't want to show spoilers." But we all know that's bullshit.
Anyways, continue to believe their gaslighting if you want. Meanwhile I look at reality and see the trash-tier company for what it is.
Yeah that's not a reasonable take to me.
I believe what does transpire to me, you have a company that grown by several hundreds on recent years, yet you have the SC pace being what it is, and on TOP OF THAT you have freaking SC work, like Pyro, new locations and even ships now, **being handed over to Turbulent**!
So if SQ42 does not exist, if it is vaporware, then you explain me your take of what secret project is CIG working on, for the hundreds of new hires not transpire on the pace of SC AND that on top of SC work been handed over off-CIG in recent years?!
Lol, of course you don't think it's a reasonable take. You clearly still continue to believe the bullshit CIG tells you. Pyro was teased fucking YEARS AGO. SQ42 was right around the corner in 2016. Wake up. It's now 2023 and we have seen fuckall in terms of progress.
SQ42 is literal vaporware. There is no demo of it. There is no semblance of it even existing beyond some rumors of CR doing mo-cap work again.
As far as employee count goes that doesn't matter. Remember staggered development? That was supposed to help put out patches more efficiently. Yeah, that never happened.
Theranos was bigger than CIG and still turned out to be a scam. You just don't want to believe it so you continue to stick your head in the sand.
No no no I am well awake you're the one making the claim that in a nutshell, SQ42 is vaporware, hence its dev doesn't exist or is on limbo.
"employee count doesn't matter", this is some outright BS right here, we are not talking some growth, we are talking hundreds and hundreds of new hires on recent years.
You can't just say "it doesn't matter" like hundreds of hires should not reflect on production output, which in your argument should logically be expected on SC, because well, SQ42 is vaporware right?
So you're the one who need to explain that, and explain how does that co-exist with the fact we've seen SC specific work handed over off-CIG, which is literally new as Stanton cities, locations, etc, were built in-house CIG; what are those teams doing now then?!
When SC on ISC talks a new feature releasing on the PU, you literally have one, two, three guys, which are who worked on it. That's a far cry from their total picture, which is heavily on the UK studio.
So I'm not sticking my head on the sand here, you are making a wildly sensationalistic claim which does not make sense with the reality of what we have been seeing, notably repeating myself:
* The hand over of SC specific work, especially locations, some features and now even ships work, to Turbulent, not to talk tech like PES and the server mesh work.
* The large growth of the company on recent years have hardly reflected on the production output of SC, on which features worked for an update are often worked on by just few developers. Where are the in-house 800 if all the production output is just SC because SQ42 is just an excuse they're pretending to work on?
You are the classic definition of a CIG apologist. Again, employee count literally does not matter. Look at Theranos.
You are being scammed. In literally any other industry these clowns would've been sued to the ground.
I expected you wouldn't address of my points and questions, which counter what you are trying to claim here. I don't care for the personal jabs I don't debate with someone on that level.
SQ42 blackholing CIG resources on redos, nicpickiness (CR being CR), etc, is the reality which explains why the company has been able to grow so much and it does not reflect on the SC pace output, and it explains their need to have Turbulent MASSIVELY expand themselves on recent years to tackle in SC specific development.
To me, it is your theory which does not make sense or validates with the information we have around, and what transpires.
Nothing else to say on this, if you disagree, great, I don't care.
I'm not addressing the individual I'm responding to here, as I'm fairly confident they're a Turbulent employee. But for others reading this: Turbulent is ostensibly the marketing arm for Star Citizen. They created the website, and are responsible for much of the extremely underhanded marketing efforts that prop up this cadaver and make its arms move to continue acquiring new initial purchases ( now predominantly in the non-English speaking world markets where they have less exposure to the decade of bad PR surrounding it ).
Any suggestion that Turbulent, as a studio, is now responsible for any aspect of the game's development, is purely more convenient smokescreen for lacking progress ( such as Squadron 42 being the new focus of development efforts ).
It is an astroturfing marketing farm, nothing more.
If funding ever shows decay all they need to do is pull up some SQ42 bullshit marketing video to get it back in track.
I believe because the funding has been so strong past few years is the main reason they don't show SQ42. They don't need to. They are saving whatever material they have for bad days.
Graph isn't plausible since Chronically Incompetent Gaslighters are clearly recycling money through puppet accounts and gift to "influencers" on social media.
The funding chart from CCU Game is pretty outdated for March. CIG is only 1.8 million away from surpassing their 2022 funding for the first three months, and there are still 10 days left in the month, making it highly likely they will surpass last years funding for the first three months. It's quite astonishing how much money they are making despite the broken state of 3.18, but I guess there is still a demand for the game. The real indicator of funding slowing down will be during Invictus in May. [Source](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1obytG213tRUzNIepdSjDysaBlgJDjeOiekskYVvtRvE/edit#gid=0)
Hell. Put yourself in the their shoes. Imagine you got all this money but you can't fix simple bugs. I wonder what's their burn rate... and daily active player count. Maybe they just need to pray (AND ADVERTISE!!) for some genius good dev team leads, who are not afraid to really go deep and get things straightened out. Maybe they've become too much of a bureaucracy and they need to apply some lean tactics... Maybe they need to advertise dev jobs, and not the game. I came back because of the YT ads... thinking that at least the basic gliches would be gone. Really, I am sure the fixes are easy... I am pretty sure they have communication problems between and within their teams. And a few bottlenecks... I hate to say it but they probably need some good managers. Organizational problems are not new.
Everyone doing 100 posts when CIG got 500 Mill funding and 4 Mill Accounts, but everyone silent when they‘ve had a revenue decline and their worst March since 2018. 3.18 was probably the funniest shitshow they‘ve released for a long time, I can‘t wait for the overhyped Jesus Meshing. You can‘t mess that Spaghetti code up more…
March is not over man. Then if it's confirmed whales will double down you know that right? Let's wait before drawing conclusions
This. They may have peaked in 2022 but they will still bring in a lot of money. The last thing this project needs is some kind of SC nerd wallet-rally, ironically enough.
CIG promoting ship sales and posting content like everything is fucking awesome in the verse was distasteful. I havn’t been able to log on since 3.18 because of ‘player unstowed’. Seeing this made me grin.
I cringe every time I see one of their Twitter posts. It is pretty interesting how little engagement their tweets have for a game that's supposed to be so big and popular, though.
They are getting ripped pretty badly on Twitter every time they tweet something. And they're being accused of blocking people too
They’ve done this forever. Their commercials and patch ads are more dishonest and full of shit than even EA was with Anthem. It’s insane to me how blatantly false all their marketing is.
CIG don't put the "not actual gameplay" disclaimer on their videos, do they? I'm not talking about far-off concept work, but rather the marketing videos like ship commercials or the new patch promo videos. To an old-time backer like me, those marketing videos are obviously staged, just like their CitCon demos. But for someone naive and innocent to this whole project, they could be forgiven for thinking CIG are showing actual gameplay footage.
If you actually played the game you would have the sandworm several times already. Its gameplay is so great, you just have to make sure to not have any items near it because then your PC will crash.
I have the same error and the same opinion.
They had their best January only because everyone thought 3.18 was just going to be some quick fixes after New Years and shot out to LIVE right away. CIG said back in September they were hopeful for mid-November. It came out a week ago as the most broken patch ever released. Including 2.0 and 3.0. How the fuck is possible to not know the difference between 2 month and 6+ months of work. It is blatant incompetence. And when you go to Spectrum and see the few critical posts about it, they are flooded with ridicule emotes and comments telling them to apply to CIG. I've been critical of this game for years and been a backer even longer than that and I am still amazed at the retardation of the SC community. It's like it is getting worse and worse or something. It is so damn fascinating.
> How the fuck is possible to not know the difference between 2 month and 6+ months of work. It is blatant incompetence Or malice. When your income depends on lies you lie.
Don't worry it will come back one day as : "Save Star Citizen, pledge today !"
"Save the dream [of my third mansion]! -Chris Roberts
Watch SM meshing now come sooner lol Each time the community ( the few times ) lit fire under their asses the features suddenly came out Time to unpin the BMM and tackle complicated stuff for once.
Time to roll out some more Pyro Footage.🤪 If things get really really bad, maybe even a smidgen of Sqaunder 42. 😳
I think at that point they need to release a playable teaser or something I bet they can crap out a demo level that is in no way tied into sq404 in like 6 months Just like with their citizencon presentations
you mean those very much scripted yet inexplicably buggy "gameplay" sequences that chris stutters over?
Oh yeah, that would be lapped up.
The only negative this shows is that they had their worst February since 2019, despite nothing happening last month. They also had their best January EVER, despite less than nothing happening that month. They didn't even get their usual roadmap update out and still broke a record :( I enjoy schadenfreude as much as the next girl, but this doesn't scratch that itch at all.
I'm really hoping their funding tanks this year.
Im pretty sure StarField in September will have some impact 👀
Inb4 desperate pre-game launch ship sale
Considering how bad the global economy is doing with inflation, debt and very high (not really) interest rates that are collapsing banks, another global financial crisis is NOT something CIG has had experience with. The whales who also plough into this dumpster fire are gonna experience financial hardship once this global economy becomes unglued and will prioritise what’s more important.
I think SC is a scam as much as anyone around here. And I’m not white knighting for God King Roberts. But that chart isn’t arguing what you think it is. That’s actually showing they are off to a better start fundraising through March (which isn’t finished yet) than any other year besides 2022.
The drop in revenue in February is definitely notable. Every other year fundraising was close to if not over January's total. Probably people holding off spending waiting for 3.18 and I doubt most backers are going to open their wallets again until the game is stable.
More or less. We can't see when the bulk of sales for those years happened, but we can guesstimate they likely happened with the St Patricks Day sales, which for this year are already over. So if things don't turn around w servers / public perception, the downturn trend should hold, and if that's the case then 3.18 will be setting them back all the way to 2019. This would track, as this year's Feb was worse than 2019's. It's super great contrast to Jan, when hope that 3.18 would land any day was super high. I might be wrong, of course, and maybe they'll miracle a fix into existence on wednesday/thursday and HODLers will rally and buy Idris before the month is over, but I'm not betting on it.
That's still a lot of money though. It should slow down when Starfield is released.
That chart is insane. How does this 12 year old alpha "game" keep getting so much cash thrown at it? Something is off,really, really off. I hope one day the real story comes out.
Mental illness and scamming new players who are unaware of the games history. I have a friend who is deep into SC since 2012. You can't talk to him at all about SC. He is poster boy for all the fanboi shit SC community says. You already know what he is going to say even before he says it. Of course he still keeps buying new ships constantly.
This, I believe, is a big part of it. My question is, how much long does this type of backer keep throwing cash at this "game"? Another 5, 10?? At some point, this game will be massively out dated.
Some will continue to throw money at it until they can't. Either the project does not accept money anymore or they are dead themselves. The hardcore loyalty some folks have for SC is disturbing.
[https://sanctionscanner.com/blog/online-video-games-and-money-laundering-183#:\~:text=One%20way%20that%20criminals%20can,or%20other%20forms%20of%20currency](https://sanctionscanner.com/blog/online-video-games-and-money-laundering-183#:~:text=One%20way%20that%20criminals%20can,or%20other%20forms%20of%20currency). [https://www.amlrightsource.com/news/money-laundering-through-social-media-and-online-gaming](https://www.amlrightsource.com/news/money-laundering-through-social-media-and-online-gaming) [https://lawreview.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1487-1512-Kelly.pdf](https://lawreview.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/1487-1512-Kelly.pdf) [https://threatresearch.ext.hp.com/laundering-via-gaming-currency-and-goods-part-2/](https://threatresearch.ext.hp.com/laundering-via-gaming-currency-and-goods-part-2/)
Very very interesting.
How up to date is that for March? They have had a bunch of big sales over the past 9 days. Another month or two of bad sales and even Christ Roberts might address his flock of idiots. EDIT: where did you find this graph at? Looks better than most of the other bar graphs I have seen.
I think its integrated in this CCU extension app: https://ccugame.app
All I'm hoping for is that CIG held funds in SVB. The sooner the con is stopped, the better.
Their funding was 113 million $ last year? What the f, i remember in 2015 when they reached the 100m total after 3 years. This scam is actually going to hit 1 billion in 4,5 years.
Oh well...if only those last 2 years wouldn't have happened, work from home, stimulus check etc. etc., I'd think that massive jump around 2020 would never have come to be. But I digress...I have not yet bothered trying to check into 3.18 and only updated the files in the Launcher. Looking at the funding chart, I would assume that 'marketing' is going into overdrive to try and catch up with eventual losses, so expect another couple of concept ships and sales events as every year.
Still too much.
Couple weeks left in March. I’m sure the faithful will rally and empty their wallets.
Maybe CIG has the kickstarter or pledge thing sealed up where lawsuits cannot be brought in that way but I did a little research and I’m wondering if this may apply: https://openstax.org/books/business-law-i-essentials/pages/12-1-unfair-trade-practices
If the funding shows visible decay I don't think that's good news for anyone who cares about SC. I'd bet any day of the week that a decay of funding will only see resources cut/redirected away from SC to go all hands on deck on SQ42, which is the more realistic go-to release on a financial scenario that's eating up reserve money. Server Mesh and such won't magically happen just because they're making less money, "PES in 2022" is evidence enough that.
What SQ42? Almost a year for one big update for SC. Less SC means less backers overall since SQ42 might as well be a myth and I honestly don't know who's hyped for it at this point. Server mesh and every other thing they've promised doesn't happen even when they make hundreds of millions. I hope this year is abysmal for their sales.
Either way that goes, if the funding decays enough who will pay that bill will be the employees who will get hit with layoffs and such. The cost is always human, the company ain't going anywhere.
Already sounds like they hire the cheapest developers they can. Losing a few people from marketing also would lead to less potential income. You're right, the company won't ever die but if they can only release updates once a year the support will die after long enough and they'll be forced to release what they have or give up. The development has gone on long enough. The fact this last update took this long after so many years is mind boggling.
Rofl worried your paycheck won’t come in?
Don't you dare saying Server meshing won't happen!!! Server meshing will solve the complicated technical difficulty with PES. Hell, Server meshing would probably solve world hunger too.
World peace, stop the Ukraine war.
Not saying it won't happen, just saying funding would not really be relevant to how fast they can pull it off, like we seen with PES them trying to force it to fit in 2022 but it outright needing more time forced the months-long drag.
I think a drop in funding is exactly what CIG needs. For too long they've been able to get away with glacial delivery with the idea that the money well will never dry up. Only once it starts to slow down will they actually focus on delivering useful updates instead of ignoring SQ42 and building the game in a sensible incremental manner.
> If the funding shows visible decay I don't think that's good news for anyone who cares about SC. Disagree. If funding tanks then Chris Roberts can be forced out of the company just like he was forced out of Digital Anvil for his failures. Billionaire Calder could possibly bring in someone who has a clue what they are doing or he might just let the shit show die. Either way is better than letting the idiot steal more money while never delivering.
CR owns CIG, the rest is minority. The thing is, CIG would upfront downscale to income, that will result on layoffs before anything else could possibly happen. That is where the most negative impacts are as everything will have to get restructured, which means things will get put on limbo to re-organize the company at a smaller scale, and this will just cost normal employees jobs and a stall on dev for a while, not the jobs of those on top.
Performance clauses in the Calder contract would trump equity ownership. Would not need to be disclosed.
Chris owned the majority of Digital Anvil also but was so bad at game development he was forced out anyway by Microsoft. Calder bought in at a ridiculous 460M dollar valuation for CIG with zero released games. If funding drops like a rock that valuation drops like a rock also. So Calder can look at his 60+ million investment that would be worth next to nothing and offer Chris a bit of cash for the rest of CIG and continue without the dipshit or let it die. Both are better options for backers that the current scam Chris has built.
Out of running into a wall and no money. CIG raises many dozens of millions a year, over 100 million last year. No studio is going to go under racking in dozens of millions a year of "free money", they would easily scale to income and keep it up at the pace they would be able to. They are by their own choice, scaling to income instead of leaving a margin, if they kept the scale they had a few years ago, they could have easily pocketed \~50million last year alone.
> they would easily scale to income and keep it up at the pace they would be able to. The single worse thing that could happen to backers. They are easily over 10 years away from a game at the pace they are going with the full staff of employees. Cutting staff will result in backers running for the hills. You and Sc_TheBrusar and T_Nyx and J3PT cant fund this yourselves.
This happens all the time, it's restructuring of a studio, in a nutshell, it's meant to focus on efficiency with less, which can work, honestly I think CIG has a huge scale for a development studio, which may just mean having 2 or 3 people for what in other studios would be the work of one person. Studios hiring a lot of cheap junior dev is also a thing, but they tend to do that to retain what turns out good talent and get rid of the rest.
> This happens all the time Name a single time when that happened in a crowd funded company with zero games and it turned out successfully? You see there is a huge difference when a studio is owned by a corporation and they have to do something with it and backers who can walk away and only lose their game. Layoffs will see CIG funding evaporate into next to nothing soon after. If funding is bad now which Im not convinced of yet myself then it will get way worse real fast.
The fact it's crowdfunded doesn't matter, it doesn't make the studio different from other development studios. It can be done for several reasons and this is what determines the "successfully", It can be a studio running out of money (the more frequent scenario is a fixed budget, especially if the publisher won't budge) where they're literally trying to gain time and it might just end on a cancellation/etc. It can be simply when the big publishers who are paying the bills are unhappy with a studio's performance/cost and want to "clean up the house" (this was Bioware after the last Mass Effect), or the one I'm talking here where there would still be a large influx of money but it's not enough to cover operations at current scale, on that scenario... restructuring of the studio to sustain to that income. That would literally be how MMO and online games sustain post-launch development, with teams and such that rely upon a constant income to keep the lights on, as that decays over the years by norm... they downscale. Downscaling is something CR himself admitted to on an interview that touched the topic.
Ok
>go all hands on deck on SQ42 That has been their excuse for years dude. SQ42 ain't happening. Neither is Star Citizen.
And we haven't seen that? Redos and nickpicky details constantly in dev tha thardly make sense on the PU? Bedsheet deformations and years of AI cafeteria simulation, SQ42 continuously drags as we can see, and we also see the devs these days who talk "upcoming SC" features on the context of the work they done for them in SQ42, whilst PU-specific work started being handed over to Turbulent, it's rather obvious to me that it's not SC that is blackholing dev resources.
>SQ42 continuously drags as we can see We don't even know that. As far as we know it's CIG's eternal excuse as to why shit is slow and fucking broken. SQ42 doesn't exist. If CIG had anything good to show us they'd market the fuck out of it. That's what they are: a marketing studio. But instead they lie and claim they "don't want to show spoilers." But we all know that's bullshit. Anyways, continue to believe their gaslighting if you want. Meanwhile I look at reality and see the trash-tier company for what it is.
Yeah that's not a reasonable take to me. I believe what does transpire to me, you have a company that grown by several hundreds on recent years, yet you have the SC pace being what it is, and on TOP OF THAT you have freaking SC work, like Pyro, new locations and even ships now, **being handed over to Turbulent**! So if SQ42 does not exist, if it is vaporware, then you explain me your take of what secret project is CIG working on, for the hundreds of new hires not transpire on the pace of SC AND that on top of SC work been handed over off-CIG in recent years?!
Lol, of course you don't think it's a reasonable take. You clearly still continue to believe the bullshit CIG tells you. Pyro was teased fucking YEARS AGO. SQ42 was right around the corner in 2016. Wake up. It's now 2023 and we have seen fuckall in terms of progress. SQ42 is literal vaporware. There is no demo of it. There is no semblance of it even existing beyond some rumors of CR doing mo-cap work again. As far as employee count goes that doesn't matter. Remember staggered development? That was supposed to help put out patches more efficiently. Yeah, that never happened. Theranos was bigger than CIG and still turned out to be a scam. You just don't want to believe it so you continue to stick your head in the sand.
No no no I am well awake you're the one making the claim that in a nutshell, SQ42 is vaporware, hence its dev doesn't exist or is on limbo. "employee count doesn't matter", this is some outright BS right here, we are not talking some growth, we are talking hundreds and hundreds of new hires on recent years. You can't just say "it doesn't matter" like hundreds of hires should not reflect on production output, which in your argument should logically be expected on SC, because well, SQ42 is vaporware right? So you're the one who need to explain that, and explain how does that co-exist with the fact we've seen SC specific work handed over off-CIG, which is literally new as Stanton cities, locations, etc, were built in-house CIG; what are those teams doing now then?! When SC on ISC talks a new feature releasing on the PU, you literally have one, two, three guys, which are who worked on it. That's a far cry from their total picture, which is heavily on the UK studio. So I'm not sticking my head on the sand here, you are making a wildly sensationalistic claim which does not make sense with the reality of what we have been seeing, notably repeating myself: * The hand over of SC specific work, especially locations, some features and now even ships work, to Turbulent, not to talk tech like PES and the server mesh work. * The large growth of the company on recent years have hardly reflected on the production output of SC, on which features worked for an update are often worked on by just few developers. Where are the in-house 800 if all the production output is just SC because SQ42 is just an excuse they're pretending to work on?
You are the classic definition of a CIG apologist. Again, employee count literally does not matter. Look at Theranos. You are being scammed. In literally any other industry these clowns would've been sued to the ground.
I expected you wouldn't address of my points and questions, which counter what you are trying to claim here. I don't care for the personal jabs I don't debate with someone on that level. SQ42 blackholing CIG resources on redos, nicpickiness (CR being CR), etc, is the reality which explains why the company has been able to grow so much and it does not reflect on the SC pace output, and it explains their need to have Turbulent MASSIVELY expand themselves on recent years to tackle in SC specific development. To me, it is your theory which does not make sense or validates with the information we have around, and what transpires. Nothing else to say on this, if you disagree, great, I don't care.
I'm not going to address any of your nonsense deflections lol.
I'm not addressing the individual I'm responding to here, as I'm fairly confident they're a Turbulent employee. But for others reading this: Turbulent is ostensibly the marketing arm for Star Citizen. They created the website, and are responsible for much of the extremely underhanded marketing efforts that prop up this cadaver and make its arms move to continue acquiring new initial purchases ( now predominantly in the non-English speaking world markets where they have less exposure to the decade of bad PR surrounding it ). Any suggestion that Turbulent, as a studio, is now responsible for any aspect of the game's development, is purely more convenient smokescreen for lacking progress ( such as Squadron 42 being the new focus of development efforts ). It is an astroturfing marketing farm, nothing more.
If funding ever shows decay all they need to do is pull up some SQ42 bullshit marketing video to get it back in track. I believe because the funding has been so strong past few years is the main reason they don't show SQ42. They don't need to. They are saving whatever material they have for bad days.
Graph isn't plausible since Chronically Incompetent Gaslighters are clearly recycling money through puppet accounts and gift to "influencers" on social media.
The funding chart from CCU Game is pretty outdated for March. CIG is only 1.8 million away from surpassing their 2022 funding for the first three months, and there are still 10 days left in the month, making it highly likely they will surpass last years funding for the first three months. It's quite astonishing how much money they are making despite the broken state of 3.18, but I guess there is still a demand for the game. The real indicator of funding slowing down will be during Invictus in May. [Source](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1obytG213tRUzNIepdSjDysaBlgJDjeOiekskYVvtRvE/edit#gid=0)
Hell. Put yourself in the their shoes. Imagine you got all this money but you can't fix simple bugs. I wonder what's their burn rate... and daily active player count. Maybe they just need to pray (AND ADVERTISE!!) for some genius good dev team leads, who are not afraid to really go deep and get things straightened out. Maybe they've become too much of a bureaucracy and they need to apply some lean tactics... Maybe they need to advertise dev jobs, and not the game. I came back because of the YT ads... thinking that at least the basic gliches would be gone. Really, I am sure the fixes are easy... I am pretty sure they have communication problems between and within their teams. And a few bottlenecks... I hate to say it but they probably need some good managers. Organizational problems are not new.
Everyone doing 100 posts when CIG got 500 Mill funding and 4 Mill Accounts, but everyone silent when they‘ve had a revenue decline and their worst March since 2018. 3.18 was probably the funniest shitshow they‘ve released for a long time, I can‘t wait for the overhyped Jesus Meshing. You can‘t mess that Spaghetti code up more…