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Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

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Re: Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

#31

Post by ferongr »

git-pull wrote: post #17

You have to admit, they made really good commercials for in-game content. They stayed in character, too. A few hand-picked favorites: - Imagine: Star Citizen : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJJ9TcGxhNY - Star Citizen - MISC Freelancer Commercial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO7RxsZpcKc - Star Citizen: Consolidated Outland Mustang Commercial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR07oZC0QHU - Introducing the 2944 A…

My suspension of disbelief is destroyed every time I see missiles without proximity detonators.

Re: Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

#32

Post by EpicEng »

ethbro wrote: post #23
madamelic wrote: post #3

Who could've guessed? The game designer suddenly gets $150m and rather than iterating, he goes for the dream. I looked him up and he apparently has produced AAA games before so what's the deal here? Shooting for the moon on the first go in any software development processes is a recipe for disaster.

> I looked him up I'm guessing you haven't played a little series called Wing Commander?

That's true for most of the world's population.

Re: Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

#33

Post by zamalek »

problems wrote: post #6

Seems like incredibly poor budgeting given that they had $150M and couldn't deliver even a limited version of the game. Maybe I'm underestimating the costs somehow, but you could easily pay pretty high salaries for 100+ people's time over a few years of development with that kind of money. I wonder what they did with it?

> couldn't deliver even a limited version of the game.

They have but the limitation is that the game is barely playable on populated servers. 3.0 (the next release) seems to be a push to make the game playable.

Re: Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

#34

Post by shmerl »

hackerfakenews wrote: post #18

The fact that any bank considered lending to a tiny company like this with no revenue stream is actually a positive sign. As for pledging all their "assets", that is completely standard. They have no assets to speak of - their "IP" is 100% worthless without future sales, which will never happen if the game doesn't get released. And further, because the money was raised from crowdfunding, the only equity holders that…

Who will suffer are backers who supported this project.

Re: Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

#35

Post by shadowmint »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Not very surprised, the game has been a trainwreck in the making from the beginning. Total scope was just way too overambitious, and people weren't going to plow hundreds and thousands of dollars into spaceship jpegs forever.

Care to qualify that?

I'm not following this at all, but I can't see anything particularly obvious that's a 'train wreck'.

They have a game. It's playable, if not particularly good. Some people are playing it (or something? Someone is posting gameplay videos anyway).

I have zero investment in it so I don't really get it; I see a lot of unhappy people making :( faces.

Games take time and money to make. They're making it. It's not done yet. They're keeping in touch with people and releasing regular updates.

I mean, what do you want them to do? Not make it? Make it faster? Communicate more? Communicate differently?

That's really good compared to some crowd funding people... isn't it?

...? Where's the drama?

Re: Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

#36

Post by dmix »

redm wrote: post #13

This story reminds me of ION Storm [1], John Romero's cash rich baby that failed miserably with Daikatana. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_Storm [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana

> Porter became CEO of ION Storm and the Dallas Observer said "He turned down a deal with Compaq computers that would have paid ION 75 cents to $1 for every Compaq computer sold with Dominion already installed, and would have guaranteed ION a minimum of $1.5 million."

It's funny to think that selling your game for $1/each is a standard thing these days for mobile games. They only ended up selling very few of the games in retail and obviously should have took this deal.

Thanks for the link, interesting story.

I would love an office with a 'crash room' to have power naps in. That's the main thing I miss from working at home.

Re: Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

#38

Post by strathmeyer »

shadowmint wrote: post #35
TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Not very surprised, the game has been a trainwreck in the making from the beginning. Total scope was just way too overambitious, and people weren't going to plow hundreds and thousands of dollars into spaceship jpegs forever.

Care to qualify that? I'm not following this at all, but I can't see anything particularly obvious that's a 'train wreck'. They have a game. It's playable, if not particularly good. Some people are playing it (or something? Someone is posting gameplay videos anyway). I have zero investment in it so I don't really get it; I see a lot of unhappy people making :( faces. Games take time and money to make. They're making…

The problem comes with advertising and selling products that they haven't made yet.

Re: Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

#39

Post by quakenul »

shadowmint wrote: post #35
TulliusCicero wrote: post #4

Not very surprised, the game has been a trainwreck in the making from the beginning. Total scope was just way too overambitious, and people weren't going to plow hundreds and thousands of dollars into spaceship jpegs forever.

Care to qualify that? I'm not following this at all, but I can't see anything particularly obvious that's a 'train wreck'. They have a game. It's playable, if not particularly good. Some people are playing it (or something? Someone is posting gameplay videos anyway). I have zero investment in it so I don't really get it; I see a lot of unhappy people making :( faces. Games take time and money to make. They're making…

The drama basically arises from where common people are a good source of funds but actually terrible investors, giving personal money by impulse, usually without being equipped with the industry insight to evaluate the risks, or fully accepting there are risks because they are too emotionally invested in the product.

Re: Star Citizen is likely in financial trouble

#40

Post by headmelted »

Belphemur wrote: post #20

To quote a reddit comment : I should point out that this is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it clear what the loan is for. What this tells us is that money has been loaned and secured against assets owned by CIG - this is fairly common practice in the case of commercial loans. To bank with Coutts you must have at least £1,000,000 in tangible assets and in any event they are selective about their clientele; which…

"they didn't go to a loan shark neither a shitty bank. It's the bank that manage the assets of the Queen. I don't think they give loan that easily hence the huge collaterals."

Irrelevant. Why would they care which bank the money comes from?

It would be careless to take any deal on less favourable terms than you could get elsewhere, which implies this Coutts deal was the best they could get.

It could easily be a deal on a REALLY good rate to extend their runway well into the release cycle of a finished game, but the lack of disclosure implies otherwise.

Anyone here old enough to remember the original boo.com?

That was also an emperor-has-no-clothes fiasco of epic proportions. Which is ironic, because their problem was that they couldn't sell any of the mountains of clothes they had in storage.

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