Or you could just use the definition actual game devs use, which is that it means you're feature complete, and you must now complete all of the content, and then polish all of the tech, features, and content. lmao gaming consumers are so randomly over-opinionated for people with literally almost zero basis in relevant domain expertise.
@@RosscoAWNah, you need to look at Chris Roberts' history with WC3 & 4, and Freelancer. Even Strike Commander. The man is the living embodiment of feature creep.
@@RosscoAW Did he not literally say they're on the "polish phase"? Or was that the phrasing from 2019? lol Don't play semantic games with yourself and others to cape for these guys.
I had a friend who worked as a coder for blizzard for 3 years and he didn't have anything bad to say about his job. I had multiple game tester and wow mod friends but that's not a real job xD
At some point you reach market saturation. Everyone who cares about your product has bought it. There is no such thing as infinite growth. If cig income has plateaued or climaxed already, they might be in trouble. Especially if they keep spending like drunken sailors.
@@JFrombaugh Yep, the number of new players has fallen hard in the past two years. SQ42 needs to release and be a 10 out of 10 game to try and pull new players into SC.
Honestly, I think its pretty lame that there is drama because CIG devs had to work some overtime during a crunch period. Almost every job I've worked generally has some form of required overtime. If you're in a salary role its pretty damn common to have rare event you need to burn the midnight oil.. Pretty much every IT/Tech role has required overtime. Now if this was required overtime every single week or even every single month.. that would be unreasonable .. that isnt' the case here. This is CIGs largest yearly event and they made some nice concessions for folks after the event to give them a little extra paid time off, etc. This is completely reasonable to me.
Mountains out of mole hills for a story. There’s always a Nancy that will cry but most employees can manage to kick in and help in situations like this without queefing.
Seems a lot of people dont agree with this nowadays. I agree with yo take here, it seems reasonable. I used to work in Audit and we had these periods due to time frames that had to be achieved to produce results before the deadline of released financial reports. I do not know much about the game industry but crunch is not a shocking thing. The only bad aspect would be working in crunch all the time.
Yes, I don't get all this hand wringing... we can all see how much issues they had with 3.24.2 trying to get it out before Citcon. It still ended up as a shit show that needed hotfix for a week or more after it released. It's pretty apparent that this is what a lot of their OT went. Unfortunately, these releases are hard set to events which is a bit disappointing... but ship sells is what SC is all about when looking at funding. I mean, that is what is driving the game and people keep buying... which I am thankful for because without the ship sales, you're going to not reach the finish line of the game. I personally have only invested a total of about $150 for the two years I have played. I only spend to the value I get out of the game and so far that's as much as I'm willing to chunk down regardless of any ship sales they do. However, I hope you all keep buying up ships as I want to see the end of this crazy ride of a game.
I don't get it. On one hand SQ42 enters its final polishing stage and hits the inflection point, and on the other CIG needs to crunch to get the beginning of the game out for the CitCon and then we get to hear that it's gonna be released in 2 years? Something smells bad about this whole thing.
@@ThaFiggyPuddingthey haven't lied about it because they haven't claimed that. The only claim since "answer the call 2016" was the CR post in like 2017(?) that said "lol it's not gonna take another 10 years to make sq42"...
This is a good point for a theory of mine .. SQ42 is nowhere to be ready. The only part that is "polished" and almost ready is the prologue. So the crunch was to have the prologue run as good as possible and all the rest of the work is the creation of "gameplay" videos featuring non existant features. And trying to show features that do not exist yet requires a huge amount of work.
@@vorpalrobot First official date for SQ42 was during the kickstarter and it was 2014. And from there, the 2 more years meme started. With it's latest itteration is 2026 ..
SC must release at most 1 year after SQ42. The non backers (regular gamers) will not wait for the follow up to SQ42 for more than that. This is why they are delaying SQ42 and talking about 4.0 and 1.0.
I think the 2026 release date was especially deflating because, it's not even really a date. If it was 2027 or later, that would be totally absurd and unacceptable. The idea that SQ42 will come out before then was a given. On top of that, with the way CIG has treated release dates, we know we only have a 20-30% chance of it actually release by the end of 2026 anyway. Considering all that, it's not a release date at all. It's meaningless.
And then they act like theyve done us a favour by working on fluff that we either dont care either way about, or things we actively speak against. @StudioGrimm
@@JohnDoe-wd8rs This. Like the comment below, people are going to say "This is alpha and things change!" which I would agree with if there was a legitimate balance issue, but in many cases, it's just trying to get people off the old ship to get the shiny new ship. It's even worse because the new ship isn't better than the old in a lot of cases, it's just a replacement and the old ship is nerfed to make it look better. I'd almost be better if they made the improvements to the original ship and had a 2.0 upgrade that was cheap. Wouldn't make them as much money though and that's why it doesn't happen.
Thats a VERY interesting take from you Mike. They have designed ships like the Polaris and left behind the game to support it. People at IAE will realize, they wont have lets say 5 people to crew it. Even if they would, there is no enemy to fight with this combat ship. They are at a point where they are feeding ships into an environment that they have neglected.
idk about you I have the Idris arlington missions lined up on 4 of my friends accounts for IAE patch, we are blowing up the Idris within an hour of the Polaris dropping
2 things Mike: - Having a worker-friendly environment is extremely helpful in maintaining productivity over long periods. Think of MicroTech and how they care for their workers and the workers' families. When a Company takes care of its employees, the employees will take care of the Company. -CIG will inevitably have to come to terms with the fact that in relation to SC, they can't just make the game they want to make. Their funding comes from us. When they see that the money is drying up, they will be backed into a corner with no money and have to make a choice: bend to the will of the consumer, or remain stubborn and go bankrupt, which would then lead to lawsuits for Chris to never recover from. They need to listen to the where the money comes from, or else they won't be able to finish the game in time for a commercial release. Even if that means reverting to pre-MM or only working on their backlog of concept ships that have been dusting for a decade. They adamantly refuse to do either in the hopes of building the game they want and pushing new ship sales, even in the face of us, the consumers, demanding them to digress and concede to our desires. There is no game without the players, and there is no product without demand. They are losing the demand for the product, and thus losing the players for the game. That is an unsustainable downward trend that will lead to the failure of the project, and the collapse of Chris' legacy.
Well they keep losing people because they are scamming us like on the redeemer and we are telling everyone not to buy anything with cash. Just a starter pack
It's one of the less concerns i have, some offices offers tons of small benefits like this, exactly to get people in. My last job had unlimited free soda and coffee, and a cheap meal plan, we had table soccer, pool tables and arcade machines and company sponsored LAN parties. You can't get good people and then throw them into a dark basement, they'll just go somewhere else.
@@stratvidsyou get good devs by paying for them. People don’t give a shit about their office. They work to live. Not the other way around. Sure, it’s nice to have a nice office - but if someone offers you £5k more to work in a normal office, you’re not gonna give a fuck about the office and take the deal. People want to be at home. Not the office. No matter how fancy the office is. Bottom line is that it’s a self-indulgent waste of money on frivolous things. It’s a bad use of money. And it’s just comical, polishing up an office when you’re a patently unsuccessful studio that hasn’t even released a single game yet. Money buys talent. Good management and money keeps talent.
23:00 Yes, once we give them our money, it's theirs to do with as they see fit. However, how we see them spending the money will determine if we give them any more of it.
exactly and considering how little of a game we have and how much more money it seems they need, they'd probably wanna make sure they keep the backers happy.
They still should be answering to a board and stakeholders though. If I were on that board, I would be asking, "When do we start seeing a real return on investment and when do we see a finished product?" I'd also maybe consider throwing up a vote for change of some C level execs, even if it fails, just to show the board is serious.
having a single mandatory work week is kind of crazy to cry about... Ask any factory worker during holiday season, or any factory worker that worked during COVID, a single week of mandatory overtime is literally nothing.
22:10 I don't expect them to work in an empty warehouse, but they could have a reasonable compromise of framing their own (i.e. already paid for) concept art on the walls for $100 instead of a $10,000 elevator frame. There's plenty of ways to decorate a space that don't involve hiring artisans for 5 digit figures. And later, after the game ships and sells, they can hire the artisans to celebrate their success. Ya know, once they actually have some success to celebrate.
As a player of SC i dont mind, its like Google, those awsome work spaces create a good work culture and a good product, im happy the developers can have some fun
Literally almost every well known game company has tons of outlandish shit. Be quiet, kid. If a cool themed office for its employees is something that gets you, maybe this game isn't for you. Maybe try that Jesus simulator that came out.
@@imushavem4061 They weren't let go because CIG spent money on CRE, they were let go because CIG wanted to focus their growth in development presence in UK, Germany and MTL (after Turbulent merged). Which is a common thing to happen as companies grow, merge or acquire new companies and expand their presence. You're frankly looking for something malicious where there isn't anything, and there were even offers made in good faith for people to re-locate to one of the existing studios.
"Blizzard (...) doesn't take development money and spend it on this (office spaces)". No Blizzard takes development money and give it to investors... 🤑
They take money and give it to investors, because the investors own the company. Which exists to make money… for the owners. You understand this concept right? It’s how every business on earth functions. Because guess what, if the owner isn’t getting paid, you’re not getting your coffee, because the shop closed down. Because it was unviable. I swear, gamers are embarrassingly dumb.
@@flyingpiggie979 and if customers are unhappy, the company makes no money regardless of what the investors want. If the employees are unhappy, the customers are unhappy. Both the company AND the investors go bankrupt. I swear, investors are embarrassingly dumb. Wait! CiG doesn’t have investors. It’s not publicly traded.
nothing will ever convince me jareds booze wall is anything more than backer money being pissed down the drain. every time i see jareds office i feel like he's taking the piss.
I was telling someone else that I don't care that SC has feature creep, I care that nothing ever seems to get to a near finished or game ready state. If cargo looked like it did in the ISC episode or if engineering will release like it looked in its ISC episode, I'd have been concierge when 3.24 dropped. I don't buy ships because a new patch releases, but I will not buy a ship if the gameplay isn't functional. Give me a well functioning game and I'll trip over my own two feet to buy the cool new ship that does any of the things. CIG sold ships before based on future promised gameplay. The only thing that slowed that down was the gameplay never materialized.
I love Star citizen. I am over $4,000 backed over 12 and 1/2 years. I am getting so tired of playing the game for 2-3 days not being able to mine not being able to do cargo running just to put the game down for 3-4 months. Come back again. Repeat for years now. I was having so much fun this patch until I couldn't use the goddamn elevator doors. I am feeling the burnout but I still back this dream
It’s completely about the servers. You can’t get to the lack of gameplay when you fall through a planet or wipeout in a stutter or fall to a 30k and have to start over. That makes for terrible gameplay and you log off. New players fall in pure love and can dismiss some bugs but once they log in a few weeks deep and they put on that pledge gear they just bought and call up a ship and fall through the floor losing their pledge gear , they get bent. The dream is real. There’s enough made now to keep it alive. The servers tho. Trying to run the best game ever on TRS-80 4K computers linked up with Russet potatoes has got to go.
Clicked your username because I was interested in what a 27 year backer had in their subs, but found that you and I share a love of cultivation! Growers with spaceships, unite?
I routinely spend like 15-20 minutes writing one email to much smaller audiences at work about much less important topics, so I have a hard time believing that CIG received news of the leak and subsequently drafted and sent another entire company-wide memo in just 11 minutes. That's not even long enough to check for typos. Especially for something as sensitive as this where they NEED to get it right. Important memos like that get drafted and revised and drafted and revised and proofread and revised again many times to make sure they're absolutely right before being sent out to the wider organization. I don't believe for a second it was (entirely) in reaction to the first memo being leaked, the second one must have already been in the works to have been sent out that quickly. They may have rushed it out in response to the leak, but it was likely planned to be sent out shortly anyways.
i cant see any corp, let alone cig getting something out that fast. My question is how do they know it was 11min. Realisticly at its fastest 2/3 min for it to be seen, upwards of 8-10 min for it to be reported up the chain. The request for comment was likely seen after the memo went out. Corps just dont work that fast on large scale.
@@RevenariYou guys know it’s reporting etiquette to reach out for comment prior to an articles post? Typically 24 to 48 hours otherwise deemed “no comment” or “didn’t not respond to comment”? If you have evidence for some reason this journalist did not, I would suggest reporting it to the national journalistic board on CIG’s behalf as they should be fined for that infraction, being a media organization requires a license and holds them to a higher standard under threat of fine or revocation of license (though this almost never happens) If you don’t, then chances are they had the industry standard of 24-48 hours notice even if they didn’t reply to the email. They don’t work on an 11 minute scale, but a 24-48 hour one to save a PR nightmare when all employees are already crunching? Yeah that’s reasonable and most certainly what happened unless for some reason something went extremely beyond standard practices.
@@TheFakeGooberGoblin what exactly are you on about? you need to re-read what i said. The article stated, 11 min after they sent in a request for comment that cig sent a company wide email offering the PTO. Thats what I was questioning.
CIG has been wasting backer money for years and have painted themselves into a corner where they need to keep bringing in more money to sustain their burn rate. We have been seeing a lot of new straight to flyable sales while the backlog of ships is not being touched. Now they are saying we are going to launch 1.0 with just 5 systems, though the $36 million plege stretch goal where 100 systems were promised, a Concierge starting system promised, and several other systems with details give were promised. We have raised over 20x the stretch goal. We did our part, but CIG is going back on their promises they made to the game community.
lmao what did you miss the part where star systems went from being MySQL database entries with different names and descriptions to fully physicalized planetary systems with fully physicalized planets the size of literal, real moons? Yeah, because you expecting 100 *fully physicalized star systems* is definitely a good faith interpretation of the original Kickstarter pledge... lmao
@@RosscoAW We didn't see anything but some pretty pre-rendered cutscenes in a controlled development environment. It isn't real until it is put into the game.
I'm actually fine with the system cut. Having massive solar-system sized levels with this fidelity is something that no other game comes even close to doing.
CIG drawing a line in the sand about the expectations of what SC 1.0 is going to be is a great step towards having a goal for them to work towards, and telling the community that some of the features they have talked about are going to be post 1.0. They have needed to do this and focus on creating a game for years. Would have been better several years ago, but it is nice to see them picking a lane, and going for it. Sure there is going to be more fallout in the community as that line in the sand becomes better defined, but if they tried to keep working towards all of these crazy in depth features the game would never be released. Still a lot of questions needs to be answered, but honestly them detailing what 1.0 is going to be gave me a lot more hope for the project. Now if SQ42 isn't a great game on release it's going to be nearly impossible for them to recover from that. So as someone who wants CIG to succeed I hope it is a commercial success, but only time will tell.
Problem is they invented new features with this 1.0 push... see station building and space ship crsfting. Back 2 years ago and since the beggining of the project it always was "players will never be able to build ships from scratch. You need to buy them in game, we will make enough content per system so you dont need the feel for it" And now its "oh look a blueprint, you can build it"
@@alvarg They might be able to do that, but that would take some time. The playable demos at CC were not stripped down demos from what I have been told. The full game as it stands were in those machines. A playable demo would be a way for them to push new intrest and salve a few nerves.
That is so funny, the feelings toward SC seems to have inverted since CitizenCon. Long time backers : "this sucks, I'm so tired of this..." Non-backers : "HOLY SH*** this game looks so cool, its the future of gaming !!!"
as a long time backer, its wierd to see, to me the game just got even better, im happy about it, yet, at least youtubers have decided its not a good time for that
Non-backers mostly = people who dont realise how much a clusterfuck the development of this game is, and have been wowed by a substanceless, shallow trailer with loads of famous actors. Its just the next stage of the scam to keep the money flowing. The real question is how many of those newly wowed people are going to invest in the broken (not yet an) MMO that players actually have access to (which even with a little research is very apparent how broken it is) because there is zero chance SQ42 is coming in 2026 (so it wont be bringing in money), and people just dont preorder stuff like they used to. I reckon the devs are in a really precarious position now, and the event was a desperate grasp at keeping the whole thing afloat because most people who are aware of the history of the project and arent sunk cost copium about it think its a joke.
If CIG just started the SQ42 market campaign and released the new license for sale it would probably bring in fairly good amount of new money. I know many folks who are all about SC and never cared about SQ42 until last year's CitCon and that was too late for them to purchase SQ42 as it was already taken out of the Store few months prior. Now they're just waiting for it to return.
I think part of the issue is many long time backers have spent all the money on the game they are willing to spend. They have enough store credit where they can get the new ship with store credit, even the big capital ships. You are really only getting money from new players. This last year has been hard to play with all the changes. Because of the staff burn out for Cit Con you have a buggy game for anyone who is new or came back because of the presentations. It’s catching up to them.
Those people in the live chat saying that Cyberpunk was fine on PC are full of it. The game was still in a beta state, some of the fukn talents in the talent tree didn't even work until three patches later FFS.
Why would CIG staff need 18 days to crunch time a demo of Squadron 42, when we are being told the game is done already and is getting "polished". Somebody is lying!
The moment that CIG suddenly changed their mind to sell the F8C for real money, that was the moment I think it was obvious that CIG realized it was not making enough money from selling the regular ships anymore. If there is a moment in time we needed to pick that was the start of CIG panic mode, I would pick the F8C sale moment.
Some companies do these mandatory days even if it's not super critical.. I don't know which bucket CIG falls into but the biggest company wide problem is scope-creep and the employee contributing to the problem the most is Chris.
I often see this scope-creep idea projected as a huge problem for SC. Which sure, it means the game takes a lot longer to make, but its also whats makes the game special isnt it? Without scope-creep, the game may have released within a couple years of starting development, but it would also have just been another elite dangerous at best.
Chris Roberts is out there with a yacht and living a life of luxury, and you want to say the money is drying up because the game is expensive to make? More like Chris and Sandy's life is too expensive..
"I'm going to blame a particular, individual capitalist instead of capitalism, because obviously I am also a temporarily embarrassed millionare-to-be, and I will one day own a yacht too -- but like, a small yacht, and I'll spend my millions way smarter than this one particular individual capitalist I don't like, but, y'know, other than that, I have NO PROBLEMS with capitalism." lmao aight
@@RosscoAW How tf are you going to have capitalism without capitalists lol. There is no capitalism without individual capitalists lol. Capitalists = capitalism. You can't blame "CaPiTaLiSm" without blaming the capitalist individuals. Think before you speak next time.
SC players are used to bugs, and crashes. What makes them mad, is nerffing ships. What makes them REALLY mad is nerffing the most popular ship, that people paid money for. Mission nerffing, mining nerffing, salvage nerffing... sure... angry, but not super mad. Taking 2 guns off a ship that everyone used for bounty missions... a bit too far, and now people are less likely to pay cash for another ship that will be downgraded. They are also trying to force multiplayer team play, but have not fixed the 'party' system. You still cant reliably see your friends. On top of that, they nerffed the payouts for missions, and now want you to take more people on those same missions to divide the payout. then... they increased the cost of repairs, fuel, and want to add in insurance for your ship. All this gives higher cost, lower payout. When it literally takes 30 minutes to 1 hour (more some times) to get 3 people on the same location, it is no longer a matter of just "jumping in to play for an hour." It takes an hour to prep for a mission, then everyone needs to go, as soon as the mission starts.
i don't understand why anyone is buying ships based on current specs. it's been known everything is constantly changing for one reason or another. whining about nerfs in an alpha game is just silly
@@plinyvicgames "whining about nerfs in an alpha game is just silly" This is the standard response from SC SIMPS. "It's in Alpha. Don't you know what Alpha means?" They sell ships to people marketing them with what guns, what shields, what they look like, etc. The ask people to spend real world money on something based on what they are telling them. I don't buy their garbage ships. I own a starter ship. And if any nerfs are to come out, people expect them to be light adjustments, and done in the first few months. Like with Salvage, they halved the panel output witin a few weeks. The Corsair has been around for Years. The only reason they nerffed it, was to push people to buy the Zeus and this new MISC ship they have coming out. To reduce the size of the Corsair guns, people could accept, but to force them to have yet ANOTHER gun on the sip that requires ANOTHER player is bad faith. There are already 2 manned turrets on the ship, and the co pilot controls a remote turret. So there are 3 sets of weapons the Pilot does not control, and that is reason enough to have another player on your ship. They didn't need this reduction. It was done to make corsair owners look at other ships. "Constantly changing" in order to make a better/balanced game, people get. Changing, to herd people into buying more stuff, people get angry. Like when Apple slows down your current phone just before they launch a new iPhone. People get angry. and rightfully so.
I work for a company that "gets caught" publicly, but the DO NOT change under scrutiny. It's a Fortune 100 company... So to me, CIG reacting quickly to public scrutiny, wish I worked there instead.
why is no one talking about how they long-conned everyone regarding earning citizenship. Originally, finishing SQ42 granted you your citizenship in the verse. Now, there is going to be an introductory questline you will be forced to play thru in 1.0 in order to earn that citizenship. Annnnd. another thing, maybe no one else caught it, or no one wants to admit that it was actually said, but one of the devs at citcon said something to the effect of 'since last year's demo of SQ42, we have been working very hard to get the last couple of features finished and we are NOW entering polish phase... ' meaning, everyone has been thinking this whole time that the last year has been spent on polish, but it actually hasn't. AT ALL... So 2026 makes much more sense in that context, but also, with CIG's history, 2026 is most likely wishful thinking, and 2027 is far realistic...
@@CraigPaschang I am literally looking at the progress tracker for SQ42 and every entry for SQ42 shows Polishing. Perhaps you are thinking about Star Citizen.
I..think.. not 100% sure, that you can gain citizenship through either completing SQ42, OR the 1.0 storyline ( aka big tutorial), tbh i just want to be a double citizen and see what happens :P
This is pretty much bs on their side. The ability to craft ships with blueprints, the ability to build space ships, the ability to play sq42 to get citizenship and keep some influence. The economy being 10 to 1 for npcs vs players. Where is all of that? Oh and lets not forget them admitting blades are already in game *ie ai turrets* they just dont want to put it in
and this reaction content guy is just repeating/summarizing what he is reading in less words. its a Russian nesting doll of cringe embarassment for a way to get informaiton.
@CaptWinky they removed it several months ago. That's the real answer. You were right at one point. Figured I'd be more informative than these 2 clowns that just said it isn't
I'm an October 2012 backer and I'm sick of Star Citizen. All of my favorite ships have been forgotten, nerfed, or left on the backlog indefinitely. Every update to the game makes it more tedious and there is no sign that things will improve.
The Galaxy-Shennanigans unfortunately crossed a line for me. Like "Oh, well, lets put it back in since people remember we specifically announced it and people don't like it when we silently cancel something people specifically bought the ship for. That is a degree of malice, that pulled the last straw for me. I had no issues backing them by now, even with the thought in the back of my head, that this whole project might implode. But no like this..
For me the NPC bait and switch did it this past week. From selling extra game packages and bigger ships on the promise that NPC crew will be a guaranteed game feature to 'maybe after launch'. It's one bait and switch after another with CIG.
@@RN1441 I understand you guys don't like and don't want to participate in it after those really unprofessional things they did and announced, but stop acting like everything was perfect and the project was even remotly close to what they announced 5 years ago let alone like the 2012 kickstarter. You are either plain dumb and following some imaginary goal or looking for something to throw at them justifying the fact you followed them for so long. For me now they are a bit more realistic and try to find a compromise they can deliver, and if they do what they tell it's going to be good, stfu with NPC crew thing.
@@lucasdedango I gave them money back in 2012 because of four things: 1) Spiritual successor to wing commander, with 2) drop-in drop-out coop campaign to play through with a friend on 3) Dedicated servers with mod support so it could last a very long time like Skyrim and 5) Built from the ground up for VR. They have quite literally reduced all of this scope or pushed it out to 'maybe after launch' and I'm not even sure they are going to deliver on the spiritual successor to wing commander by 2026. No, I am not looking for things to be mad at them for, they just keep baiting and switching.
The Galaxy never had a base building module to start, and it was only after designing and building it were they like, "we might add it in". They didn't. Oh well.
@@mattvmalone It was not an ambivalent "maybe". It was shown by a game director, very clearly stating what it would do, at the game's one annual convention. Either way, they have proven that everything is now speculation and you cannot trust their word unless it is on the store page (even then it will change like the Corsair's pilot guns).
It might get dicy for CIG, but they are far from being out of financial option. Selling company shares (not free traded), a 2-3 year loan, going fully publicly traded , publishing deals for SQ42, ... But in any case they have to do better and CR has to stop micromanaging unimportant stuff like clothing, because new clothing can be added at any later date if he doesn't like it.
They can't sell company shares. They are not a publicly traded company. If they did, the company would die in less than 6 months from the lawsuits alone.
I'm sorry but, they have said this update in the PU is so unstable bc it's on the 4.0 code branch. And not the old one. I'm sure they are shooting for stability for IAE.
I'm so tired of this excuse tbh, do people think that the 4.0 code is some mystical new programming language that has never been seen before? It's quite literally an ADDITION to the previous code. Stop with the ass kissing already, its so tedious in the SC community.
@@geddybear9108 that's not ass kissing. It's saying with the new tech they're implementing there's a lot of fundamental changes to the code... supposedly. To point out what is literally happening is not ass kissing or cope. I'm pissed this game isn't in a playable state. But ignoring the reality of it is immature
@@darqshark3506 except that its literally what they have said repeatedly for years. It's always because they're being so innovative. When do they actually focus on just making the features they have in place work or keep functions in place from not working. It seems like every new version breaks stuff that is working and new functions work for a while, then join the list that breaks because of said new upgrade.
CIG is giving the greatest display of "Scope Creep" & and possibly "Scope Kill" as well? They roped us all in on cinemtic features like Sqdrn 42 in the very beginning. I got sold on the 325a sales video in the beinning and all the promises of great gameplay. We still can't get out of our Habs or elevators sometimes??
They are doing the mother of all features creep. The description I heard is "We, CiG, are doing the stuff that gets a NO everywhere else." It was a vote from the backers at the time. Since you can't go back, this is exactly how it is.
It's hilarious to me that we are still talking about people whining about working hard at crunch time. This has been going on throughout the history of America if not the world. One of the things that made America great to begin with is hard work. Steve Jobs is just one of many examples of someone that wanted to surround himself with people that were willing to work incredibly hard to Make their vision a reality. To make something great requires hard work. If everyone is trying to run out of the office every day then it's really just another job. People that are willing to keep putting in the time to get it done because they believe in the project is exactly what a project like this is going to take. I regularly work 70 plus hours for my business and that's not crunch time. More and more people just don't want to much less work a single hour more than they have to.
Yep. i do think crunch is generally bad, but as other commentors said, a week of crunch for a yearly event with a subsequent paid vacation? thats literally fucking nothing
21:12 You buy real estate for your company specifically to provide a place to work, an investment and a tax break. Our company made a stupid amount of money sitting on their property for 8+ years, like 100's of millions or something like 4x the what it was worth. Then they sold it because they allowed everyone to work from home so they downsized to something pennies on the dollar. Worked out well to get a huge cash flow to buy more cash flows (eg: other companies).
Personally I think CIG will be lucky if it even reaches a 8 out of 10 for SQ42, from what they showed so far both in development and demonstrations. More likely to see a 6 or 7 as more people play the game. This of course is just my opinion.
I feel SQ42 is gonna be just something very mediocre and forgettable game, nothing GOTY stuff, and will absolutely never make the money that was wasted to it.
Im not nor was i ever interested in sq42 single player, its going to mostly be an interactive movie. I don't think the combat will be that good and thats what i play games for, good combat specifically against other players
@@vfgdfg My biggest fear is that this idea spreads to a point were people gaslight themselves to see it that way. If s42 came out of nowere we would all be admiring how nuanced the dialogue was, how it felt like a classic movie yet not cheesy or incoherent. How the gameplay looked and felt like a COD campaing but instead of smoke and mirrors its all actually there.. But since hating on SC is almost a real life profession now people might go in and treat the game like its worse than it is. Like when Infinite Warfare was anounced and from the trailer alone everyone decided it was bad, it became a trend to hate it. Now people go back to it and shout how good it actually was. If you look at s42 every aspect of it goes from pretty good to unseen levels of quality, with everything in between, yet i only see people focusing on the negatives
@@aguspuig6615 The visual quality was definitely great. But I found the gameplay seriously lacking for me. It won't be like that for everyone, but the demo gameplay was pretty average at best, even ignoring the bugs, for me. I still hope to be wrong but so far it doesn't look impressive to me, it actually looks like a backward step in regards to game like CP2077 which I also wasn't a fan of.
@@LordBattleSmurf I don't even play it for the combat. I like that there is combat but I don't centre my gameplay around it (even though it seems to be focussing more and more on that). So if they aren't pleasing the combat peeps I'm not sure who they are pleasing in the end lol.
I went looking into the layoffs and realized that's when Todd papy left because he couldn't transfer over to Manchester and if you put 2 and 2 together it's just employees that couldn't transfer over to another continent
It's called location optimisation. The UK and Germany were their main development centres and with Turbulent fully merging under CIG they wanted to focus their development Studio in North America in MTL. Yes many got offers and it definitely wasn't because they didn't have the money, it's simply they wanted to consolidate into key studios.
@@ThomasD66 They wanted to consolidate development efforts and growth to their key three studios. If people don't want to take an offer to emigrate to another of those studios then it is their choice. May be unfortunate for those impacted, but trying to paint it as malicious and that it was an offer in bad faith is just false.
@@ThomasD66 hi it's because of tod papys goodbye post saying he couldn't continue with the company because of restructuring requiring him to move to Manchester and due to family he chose to stay in the US we just didn't know that there was more than papy at the time
There have been people saying that CIG will run out of money for quite a few years now. Yet sales have been higher every year. I do agree the sales probably can't get much higher anymore and will even go down but they're not suddenly going to just run out of money. This year is a bit behind last year but I bet IAE will fix that.
So far the sales are not on track to be higher this year. And in 2023 they were only 3% higher, not some huge increase. And their overhead and operating costs have absolutely gone up. New player numbers are also way down these past two years. So they are having to squeeze the current player base extra hard to try and make up the difference.
@@senn4237 I do agree sales can't go much higher with this model. Sq42 releasing in 2026 does seem really important thing now. If the game is as good as it seems that should help for quite a while.
Looking at how much they have spent to get here, and what we now have I do not see a fantastic framework that will allow a lot of added development at a reduced cost. Frankly it seems to be more the opposite - that their aging engine is rapidly approaching the end of its functional life span. The clock is not their friend and neither is the funding level.
devs care about good pay and good management. a nice office is cool as well, but why even use an office to begin with? saves money to just go online...
@@plinyvicgames Because doing things online isn't always constructive and effective. Training people on new software takes time, and it also takes a mentor for the most part. In order to speed up training and the effectiveness of the new employee to learn those tools in an office setting.
The office and life size F7A models are WASTED backer money ... FULL STOP! You get to do those luxury things once you have shipped a successful game and have 2 years of great sales ...
Ticket sales to the event would have more than covered the F7A model and likely the entire event production cost. 4000+ attendee at 250 for a ticket, that a million right there.
I gotta agree - there definitely seems to be a shift in development this past year, and more of a focus on "game" over "tech". It almost seems like someone told Chris he needs to take a backseat on SC, and just worry about SQ42, because the devs feel like they're going "this is feasible, this is not, enough lofty dreams, we need realistic solutions".
There's a very obvious reason why CIG, who is the farthest along in the world in Server Meshing tech, requires their people to sign NDAs when they leave.
Theres a company who already delivered what the community from SC calls dynamic servermeshing already. CiG isnt doing state of the art stuff. They just dont deliver.
The majority of the community want exploration gameplay and CIG have ignored it. CIG prioritized combat hoping that could float them, but very few people are logging in daily for their combat. CIG's decisions make no sense
Tbh when it comes to making a universe, i think the Lore team are the unsung heroes right here. As a huge 40k fan that mostly just consumes lore trough youtube, i can tell you that watching Astro Historial videos and even reading the wiki increased my hype for the game by alot
6:34 Wait a minute! DIDN'T CR say in a video in 2019 that it was entering polishing faze that year! wouldn't it already be feature complete before entering this faze?
actual words from a SC player: "People hate subscriptions, but it's sustainable. If it involves server costs per user, then each user should pay for their server costs."
subscription games used to be really successful because the money was usually actually used to fund expansions and better servers. i don't think most people would be upset by that if it actively funds tangible development and content
@@plinyvicgames The two most popular MMOs by a longshot are both sub games WoW and FFXIV. I do agree though that they don't seem to be as good of a value now days, everyone wants that ez micro money.
Part of a deal for moving your company to another country is creation of jobs. This is also offset by what you spend in the local market. Having some of those things built in the office may have been part of meeting this mark set by the local government. Just like setting a quota for the number of local hires. To us it makes no sense but they signed the agreement and spent our funds to pay for it. Unless we are sitting members of the board we get no say.
I have denounced some of their moves in Spectrum and have never been censored yet, I am not saying it doesn't happen but they allow constructive criticism just fine by what I have seen.
@Mr.Constitutionalist427 I said bait and switch and those are no no words. Well then they shouldnt be baiting and switching and I wouldn't cry about it
They're going to string it out until AI gets good enough at coding to secretly rewrite the whole game for them, or fix the mess they've already created. That's my prediction because CR isn't capable and has bit off more than he can chew.
What I laugh at is I am an OTR truck driver and I regularly work 80 hours a week and am over the road away from my family for a month at a time. And only get 3 days off... I would love to have the schedule and pay of these devs for a crunch period. That would be like a vacation for me!
2:25 Star Citizen Alpha isn't just Chris' dream game. It's dream product. Because they make incredible money without having to deliver the promised product. What's more, they even rob people of what they sold them.
For the money and spending topic. When a company gets some money, the state wants some tax. You have 2 options: 1 So you can say: Oh sure here are the 100k$ tax and the company gets nothing from it. OR 2 You spend some money in the offices and you can say: Oh look we had some expenses, here the rest 5k$ tax. Think about that.
13 years ago there was concern over any designer like CR having full control of a project like this due to feature creep or due to perfectionist qualities where every aspect of the game being nitpicked to the point of it always being delay and hence delaying release indefinitely! I don't know about you guys but its starting to look a lot like this fear is now a reality! IMHO
Just some simple thoughts I don't really hear anyone talking about pertaining to SQ42 delays till 2026: Everyone needs to realize 3 super important things, IMHO. 1. SQ42 is going to bring a lot of potential new players to SC, so 4.x has to be rock solid and scaling. It's critical to ensuring a solid MMO experience, so they need the time to do that, not just the time for SQ42 itself. 2. We know that it's likely to see GTA released in 2025, so CIG needs to strategically release SQ42 so it doesn't get over shadowed by GTA. 3. They didn't say when in 2026. Everyone assumes the worst, at the EOY, but realistically if 4.x is solid, and enough time passes after GTA, then SQ42 might be early 2026, or maybe even surprised with a late 2025 release if everything aligns. Maybe saying 2026 was to ensure a proper buffer, not that they actually need another 2 years of polish. Just saying, it's not necessarily all about more time to polish. Or I'm just too much a glass half full fan boy.
Someone with a 45k pledge seems crazy big right? But that barely pays for an office door. How much more pledges for an engineer's annual salary? And then multiply that by the 6 more years to get to 1.0 out amd multiply it by a thousand for all the staff and you start to see we're in danger. 😂
Honestly after all those janky and very amateur like presentations over the last 12 years, this year was a breath of fresh air and CIG is finally becoming a real and professional gaming company in my opinion. Glad to have so much attention (negative and positive) to the project.
Lol watching the Starcitizen fanbase of people who have never worked on a team, much less a corporate environment, MUCH less a development environment gets pretty entertaining. The initial email said "you will get the time back". The follow up of supposedly "CIG reacting to journo" was 11 minutes later? You actually think that the email was received by CIG HR, read and then passed on to the relevant parties involved in a company holiday decision, who also read, decided, and then drafted and sent an email to all staff, all within 11 minutes? The odds of this are hilariously low. People jump to conclusions so easily not realizing how much they don't know or understand. Given what CIG is trying to accomplish, I find it amazing and depressing how entitled the fanbase feels on behalf of employees. Find me any startup trying to succeed anywhere near this degree who isn't putting in crazy work hours. A seven day work week for their biggest event and promo of the year? The horror!
YYYYYYep. One thing thats crazy to me is that, sure SC has alot of haters who dont play the game, but sometimes its the comunity beingthe biggest haters for no fucking reason. I normally love Mike, he has balanced takes, is a genuenly likable cool guy i watch for fun, and overall is just a good youtuber. But i fucking hate it when a crazy acusaion is thrown at CIG, like in this case the suposed vacation backpedal, and he just goes ''CLASSIC CIG'' without thinking about it twice. Like we are simultaneously shitting on CIG for having offices that are too pretty and comfy for the workers, but also acusing them of malicious crunching... What is it? are they overly cushy idealists or a cold greedy corporation? i guess it whatever looks worse at the moment for some fans that live off of hating the game
@@aguspuig6615 Yeah exactly. If you need to rage about not getting the game you're apparently entitled to have, they're super cushy idealists spending money on stupid things and goals. But if an opportunity to criticize them for being evil corpos arises you can't pass that up, so they're evil corpos who overwork their employees. Never mind having a clue what it takes to build something no company has ever built and even deploy that much capital in the first place.
If you don't run a business, every penny you spend "building" the company means you don't have to pay taxes on that money. Which is why you see $5000 toilets (Kohler) at companies.
As soon as they were releasing incomplete ships, back in 2018, and falling behind in production while mission creep exploded, I knew it was getting out of hand. Austin was a good WORK office. People in a dungeon do WORK, and get things done. Manchester is DAYCARE for adults.
bro casually asking for them to put devs on a dungeon (from those dungeons came the dryest years of the game were nothing was released and we got weekly videos explaining how someone tweaked a little code)
They need to pause Squadron 42 and put all their focus on fixing and releasing Star Citizen. SQ42 is way too ambitious and is holding back the development of Star Citizen. This vlog is proving my point.
Some people dont think CIG is spending 100M a year. They have about 1300 people * 60k a year for a salary (which is low) thats 78m only salary without employer tax, Insurance, or pension. Not talking about servers and software and a place to work.
@@Beau74 CIG UK offers employees a workplace pension with a 6% employer match, in the US it is a 401k, and elsewhere it is the government mandated systems.
As a game developer, I have worked in smaller spaces and larger spaces. If the work is great and I am being paid fairly, The decor of the office is secondary. It is fine if you want some inspirational art, etc., but they went ridiculously overboard with wasting backers' money.
These people are so weak, I can't believe it, I worked 12 hours 7 days on crunch times, and frequently I'm staying late +3,4 hours at the end of the month for deadlines and without a bonus paycheck.
@@dark1810 No it's a normal thing for ALOT of people. It's not being proud, they're pointing out that it's normal and these entitled dev's arn't anything special.
9:36 MORE stable in this last few weeks!!! I tried on Sunday and it took 35-45 mins to get 1 ship out of the hangar due to bugs (Ship would get destroyed for some reason), then after 1 hour managed to get to a bunker where enemy npc's would bounce around due to sync issues and no chevrons on friendlies ( so you have to sometimes wait till they shoot to find out ! ) Then the inventory was super glitchy and had issues with that! ITS EVEN MORE CLITCHY THAN 3.18 as there is more added stuff that can be glitchy! finally I just gave up and logged off as I was just not impressed AT All that they would actually release a build in such a poor condition after 13 FN years!
bellualar also hasnt played wow for 10 years while making those videos so salty and him have that in common. guess his wow news wasnt paying off people got tired of him so he had to expand to new games. astropub also debunked most of what he is saying 150 people is over half the people in the usa offices.
Wtf are you on about?? Bellular has played through both Dragonflight and The War Within. It's okay to dislike the guy, but you don't need to make up dumb shit.
Salty definitely plays SC somewhat regularly… Although I doubt he plays the PU though. Same with most SC creators who only play in ptu. They rarely cover issues in the live game and instead cover irrelevant things like a ship losing a construction module that was never sold or initially promised with the ship when first sold.
@@allthatishere he even admitted he hasnt played the game for a decade. he just recently started playing again. there are many xpacks he didnt play through but made videos as if he was still playing.
I worked for a major software company in the 90's. We had yearly updates. Every single year there was a crunch time before release. You could count on extended hours 6 days a week. It's not unusual at all. One year they had us work 3 days solid no sleep. The first day you were at your desk 24 hours. 2nd and 3rd day they let you go home and take a shower. So the 2nd and 3rd day were 23 hour days. So CGI doing a crunch before a major even is not news. I'm not a Star Citizen fan boi. That's just the reality of software development.
I've been gaming for 45 years. Some of us very old gamers have always believed that Chris Roberts is a perfectionist and a bit scatterbrained (keeps changing things instead of fully committing to something). From the first announcement of this game, I told many friends, quite literally, "Who is going to keep Chris Roberts in check?". Clearly (to me), no one is.
My understanding of feature complete is "chris roberts has been locked out of the planning room"
😂 there may be some truth to this.
Basically
Or you could just use the definition actual game devs use, which is that it means you're feature complete, and you must now complete all of the content, and then polish all of the tech, features, and content. lmao gaming consumers are so randomly over-opinionated for people with literally almost zero basis in relevant domain expertise.
@@RosscoAWNah, you need to look at Chris Roberts' history with WC3 & 4, and Freelancer. Even Strike Commander. The man is the living embodiment of feature creep.
@@RosscoAW Did he not literally say they're on the "polish phase"?
Or was that the phrasing from 2019? lol
Don't play semantic games with yourself and others to cape for these guys.
Best comment on the original video: "Meanwhile, Blizzard employees haven't seen their families since 2009."
*Blizzard
@Gigageorge edited.
I had a friend who worked as a coder for blizzard for 3 years and he didn't have anything bad to say about his job. I had multiple game tester and wow mod friends but that's not a real job xD
They should quit then
Haha, saw that too.
At some point you reach market saturation. Everyone who cares about your product has bought it. There is no such thing as infinite growth. If cig income has plateaued or climaxed already, they might be in trouble. Especially if they keep spending like drunken sailors.
I have a feeling this is the real reason they’re suddenly pushing hard to get SQ42 + some semblance of a space MMO across the line.
@@JFrombaugh Yep, the number of new players has fallen hard in the past two years. SQ42 needs to release and be a 10 out of 10 game to try and pull new players into SC.
Yup, this is why a lot of US tech companies focus on foreign markets.
Honestly, I think its pretty lame that there is drama because CIG devs had to work some overtime during a crunch period. Almost every job I've worked generally has some form of required overtime. If you're in a salary role its pretty damn common to have rare event you need to burn the midnight oil.. Pretty much every IT/Tech role has required overtime. Now if this was required overtime every single week or even every single month.. that would be unreasonable .. that isnt' the case here. This is CIGs largest yearly event and they made some nice concessions for folks after the event to give them a little extra paid time off, etc. This is completely reasonable to me.
Ya Idk why people are making this a big deal. Crunch happens from time to time, it's not easy to eliminate it.
This. Overtime is normal when you have to produce a good.
Mountains out of mole hills for a story. There’s always a Nancy that will cry but most employees can manage to kick in and help in situations like this without queefing.
Seems a lot of people dont agree with this nowadays. I agree with yo take here, it seems reasonable. I used to work in Audit and we had these periods due to time frames that had to be achieved to produce results before the deadline of released financial reports. I do not know much about the game industry but crunch is not a shocking thing. The only bad aspect would be working in crunch all the time.
Yes, I don't get all this hand wringing... we can all see how much issues they had with 3.24.2 trying to get it out before Citcon. It still ended up as a shit show that needed hotfix for a week or more after it released. It's pretty apparent that this is what a lot of their OT went. Unfortunately, these releases are hard set to events which is a bit disappointing... but ship sells is what SC is all about when looking at funding. I mean, that is what is driving the game and people keep buying... which I am thankful for because without the ship sales, you're going to not reach the finish line of the game. I personally have only invested a total of about $150 for the two years I have played. I only spend to the value I get out of the game and so far that's as much as I'm willing to chunk down regardless of any ship sales they do. However, I hope you all keep buying up ships as I want to see the end of this crazy ride of a game.
I don't get it. On one hand SQ42 enters its final polishing stage and hits the inflection point, and on the other CIG needs to crunch to get the beginning of the game out for the CitCon and then we get to hear that it's gonna be released in 2 years? Something smells bad about this whole thing.
@@ThaFiggyPuddingthey haven't lied about it because they haven't claimed that. The only claim since "answer the call 2016" was the CR post in like 2017(?) that said "lol it's not gonna take another 10 years to make sq42"...
This is a good point for a theory of mine .. SQ42 is nowhere to be ready. The only part that is "polished" and almost ready is the prologue. So the crunch was to have the prologue run as good as possible and all the rest of the work is the creation of "gameplay" videos featuring non existant features. And trying to show features that do not exist yet requires a huge amount of work.
@@vorpalrobot First official date for SQ42 was during the kickstarter and it was 2014. And from there, the 2 more years meme started. With it's latest itteration is 2026 ..
@@nebulajumper6216 yeah and since 2016 they never claimed any more "2 years away", that's a fan thing
SC must release at most 1 year after SQ42. The non backers (regular gamers) will not wait for the follow up to SQ42 for more than that. This is why they are delaying SQ42 and talking about 4.0 and 1.0.
I think the 2026 release date was especially deflating because, it's not even really a date. If it was 2027 or later, that would be totally absurd and unacceptable. The idea that SQ42 will come out before then was a given. On top of that, with the way CIG has treated release dates, we know we only have a 20-30% chance of it actually release by the end of 2026 anyway.
Considering all that, it's not a release date at all. It's meaningless.
With CIG release dates I 100% know it gonna be delayed. If not it would be real surprise.
With the way CIG treat release dates, there is a 0% chance the game will come out in 2026, because CIG have never delivered on a release date
As soon as we knew their target was an entire year, we also knew they were going to miss that year.
And then they act like theyve done us a favour by working on fluff that we either dont care either way about, or things we actively speak against. @StudioGrimm
"we're buying less ships" maybe because they keep removing the ability to buy them from the pledge store.
Yep, but that sounds good, and we cant have that
That's a tatic, by limiting the ability to buy the cooler ships only to special events, they create FOMO and for sure drives the sales up.
Yea, missing out on ships that will be useless when they need money… nerfing is their proven strategy to pull more money out of their community.
@@JohnDoe-wd8rs Na, people just need to realize that nothing is permanent in Alpha and buy according to that. Everything is subject to change.
@@JohnDoe-wd8rs This. Like the comment below, people are going to say "This is alpha and things change!" which I would agree with if there was a legitimate balance issue, but in many cases, it's just trying to get people off the old ship to get the shiny new ship. It's even worse because the new ship isn't better than the old in a lot of cases, it's just a replacement and the old ship is nerfed to make it look better. I'd almost be better if they made the improvements to the original ship and had a 2.0 upgrade that was cheap. Wouldn't make them as much money though and that's why it doesn't happen.
Thats a VERY interesting take from you Mike. They have designed ships like the Polaris and left behind the game to support it.
People at IAE will realize, they wont have lets say 5 people to crew it. Even if they would, there is no enemy to fight with this combat ship.
They are at a point where they are feeding ships into an environment that they have neglected.
That's why they are pushing the Save Stanton Event so hard. Slicer's Fleet mission has an Idris
They have been doing that since the beginning. Hell they had a refuling ship in it long before that was even worked on. Game is a joke
Thats not gonna cut it unless they run events like these constantly.
idk about you I have the Idris arlington missions lined up on 4 of my friends accounts for IAE patch, we are blowing up the Idris within an hour of the Polaris dropping
Lol i think it would be funny an Polaris vs Hammer even if the missiles dont hit :P
2 things Mike:
- Having a worker-friendly environment is extremely helpful in maintaining productivity over long periods. Think of MicroTech and how they care for their workers and the workers' families. When a Company takes care of its employees, the employees will take care of the Company.
-CIG will inevitably have to come to terms with the fact that in relation to SC, they can't just make the game they want to make. Their funding comes from us. When they see that the money is drying up, they will be backed into a corner with no money and have to make a choice: bend to the will of the consumer, or remain stubborn and go bankrupt, which would then lead to lawsuits for Chris to never recover from. They need to listen to the where the money comes from, or else they won't be able to finish the game in time for a commercial release. Even if that means reverting to pre-MM or only working on their backlog of concept ships that have been dusting for a decade. They adamantly refuse to do either in the hopes of building the game they want and pushing new ship sales, even in the face of us, the consumers, demanding them to digress and concede to our desires. There is no game without the players, and there is no product without demand. They are losing the demand for the product, and thus losing the players for the game. That is an unsustainable downward trend that will lead to the failure of the project, and the collapse of Chris' legacy.
the game cannot work with pre-mm style ships, too much desync, just stop.
Well they keep losing people because they are scamming us like on the redeemer and we are telling everyone not to buy anything with cash. Just a starter pack
SC and SQ42 have been 2 years away for the past decade lol
no it hasnt CIG have given 2 official realise dates for S42.
@@UnderdogSMO the community assumed its been 2 years away for a decade
@@rjlolatte1 yep, and by the comunity, its teh % that lives off of hating the game
Answer the call 2016...😂
@@UnderdogSMO2014, 2016, (2020 Beta) 2026
The only issue I see is the fact they have no released games, yet they purchased all these lavish offices.
It
It's one of the less concerns i have, some offices offers tons of small benefits like this, exactly to get people in. My last job had unlimited free soda and coffee, and a cheap meal plan, we had table soccer, pool tables and arcade machines and company sponsored LAN parties. You can't get good people and then throw them into a dark basement, they'll just go somewhere else.
Your not going to get good devs if you work out of shabby offices
@@stratvidsyou get good devs by paying for them. People don’t give a shit about their office. They work to live. Not the other way around. Sure, it’s nice to have a nice office - but if someone offers you £5k more to work in a normal office, you’re not gonna give a fuck about the office and take the deal.
People want to be at home. Not the office. No matter how fancy the office is. Bottom line is that it’s a self-indulgent waste of money on frivolous things. It’s a bad use of money. And it’s just comical, polishing up an office when you’re a patently unsuccessful studio that hasn’t even released a single game yet.
Money buys talent. Good management and money keeps talent.
Star Citizen is like fusion energy research, its 30 years away.
which one has had more funding tho?
23:00 Yes, once we give them our money, it's theirs to do with as they see fit. However, how we see them spending the money will determine if we give them any more of it.
exactly and considering how little of a game we have and how much more money it seems they need, they'd probably wanna make sure they keep the backers happy.
They still should be answering to a board and stakeholders though. If I were on that board, I would be asking, "When do we start seeing a real return on investment and when do we see a finished product?" I'd also maybe consider throwing up a vote for change of some C level execs, even if it fails, just to show the board is serious.
having a single mandatory work week is kind of crazy to cry about...
Ask any factory worker during holiday season, or any factory worker that worked during COVID, a single week of mandatory overtime is literally nothing.
Crazy that those are the people we are giving jobs
22:10 I don't expect them to work in an empty warehouse, but they could have a reasonable compromise of framing their own (i.e. already paid for) concept art on the walls for $100 instead of a $10,000 elevator frame. There's plenty of ways to decorate a space that don't involve hiring artisans for 5 digit figures. And later, after the game ships and sells, they can hire the artisans to celebrate their success. Ya know, once they actually have some success to celebrate.
As a player of SC i dont mind, its like Google, those awsome work spaces create a good work culture and a good product, im happy the developers can have some fun
@@aguspuig6615 Tell that to the former employees at Texas and LA.
Literally almost every well known game company has tons of outlandish shit. Be quiet, kid. If a cool themed office for its employees is something that gets you, maybe this game isn't for you. Maybe try that Jesus simulator that came out.
@@mattvmaloneBro those companies do that after they make money. You can't be this dense. Get help or friends please.
@@imushavem4061 They weren't let go because CIG spent money on CRE, they were let go because CIG wanted to focus their growth in development presence in UK, Germany and MTL (after Turbulent merged). Which is a common thing to happen as companies grow, merge or acquire new companies and expand their presence. You're frankly looking for something malicious where there isn't anything, and there were even offers made in good faith for people to re-locate to one of the existing studios.
"Blizzard (...) doesn't take development money and spend it on this (office spaces)". No Blizzard takes development money and give it to investors... 🤑
Yes they do. Or do you think that the statue of an orc wolf rider in front of the building isn't exactly that?
@@TheSiriusEnigma It was a joke, because, you know, making fun of their well known greed...
They take money and give it to investors, because the investors own the company. Which exists to make money… for the owners. You understand this concept right? It’s how every business on earth functions. Because guess what, if the owner isn’t getting paid, you’re not getting your coffee, because the shop closed down. Because it was unviable.
I swear, gamers are embarrassingly dumb.
@@flyingpiggie979 and if customers are unhappy, the company makes no money regardless of what the investors want. If the employees are unhappy, the customers are unhappy. Both the company AND the investors go bankrupt.
I swear, investors are embarrassingly dumb. Wait! CiG doesn’t have investors. It’s not publicly traded.
nothing will ever convince me jareds booze wall is anything more than backer money being pissed down the drain. every time i see jareds office i feel like he's taking the piss.
I was telling someone else that I don't care that SC has feature creep, I care that nothing ever seems to get to a near finished or game ready state. If cargo looked like it did in the ISC episode or if engineering will release like it looked in its ISC episode, I'd have been concierge when 3.24 dropped. I don't buy ships because a new patch releases, but I will not buy a ship if the gameplay isn't functional. Give me a well functioning game and I'll trip over my own two feet to buy the cool new ship that does any of the things. CIG sold ships before based on future promised gameplay. The only thing that slowed that down was the gameplay never materialized.
Feature creep causes nothing to ever get finished
@@Ogata123 Even worse, they keep going back over it so it ends up in a perpetual upgrade loop just to maintain functionality.
I love Star citizen. I am over $4,000 backed over 12 and 1/2 years. I am getting so tired of playing the game for 2-3 days not being able to mine not being able to do cargo running just to put the game down for 3-4 months. Come back again. Repeat for years now. I was having so much fun this patch until I couldn't use the goddamn elevator doors. I am feeling the burnout but I still back this dream
I took an 8 year brake and it was still a buggy mess when I got back.
That's what you signed up for, so.
It’s completely about the servers. You can’t get to the lack of gameplay when you fall through a planet or wipeout in a stutter or fall to a 30k and have to start over. That makes for terrible gameplay and you log off. New players fall in pure love and can dismiss some bugs but once they log in a few weeks deep and they put on that pledge gear they just bought and call up a ship and fall through the floor losing their pledge gear , they get bent. The dream is real. There’s enough made now to keep it alive. The servers tho. Trying to run the best game ever on TRS-80 4K computers linked up with Russet potatoes has got to go.
Clicked your username because I was interested in what a 27 year backer had in their subs, but found that you and I share a love of cultivation! Growers with spaceships, unite?
$4,000 ? !!! ... are you nuts?
A fool and his money are soon parted. 🤣
I routinely spend like 15-20 minutes writing one email to much smaller audiences at work about much less important topics, so I have a hard time believing that CIG received news of the leak and subsequently drafted and sent another entire company-wide memo in just 11 minutes. That's not even long enough to check for typos. Especially for something as sensitive as this where they NEED to get it right. Important memos like that get drafted and revised and drafted and revised and proofread and revised again many times to make sure they're absolutely right before being sent out to the wider organization. I don't believe for a second it was (entirely) in reaction to the first memo being leaked, the second one must have already been in the works to have been sent out that quickly. They may have rushed it out in response to the leak, but it was likely planned to be sent out shortly anyways.
i cant see any corp, let alone cig getting something out that fast. My question is how do they know it was 11min. Realisticly at its fastest 2/3 min for it to be seen, upwards of 8-10 min for it to be reported up the chain. The request for comment was likely seen after the memo went out.
Corps just dont work that fast on large scale.
@@RevenariYou guys know it’s reporting etiquette to reach out for comment prior to an articles post? Typically 24 to 48 hours otherwise deemed “no comment” or “didn’t not respond to comment”? If you have evidence for some reason this journalist did not, I would suggest reporting it to the national journalistic board on CIG’s behalf as they should be fined for that infraction, being a media organization requires a license and holds them to a higher standard under threat of fine or revocation of license (though this almost never happens) If you don’t, then chances are they had the industry standard of 24-48 hours notice even if they didn’t reply to the email.
They don’t work on an 11 minute scale, but a 24-48 hour one to save a PR nightmare when all employees are already crunching? Yeah that’s reasonable and most certainly what happened unless for some reason something went extremely beyond standard practices.
@@TheFakeGooberGoblin what exactly are you on about? you need to re-read what i said. The article stated, 11 min after they sent in a request for comment that cig sent a company wide email offering the PTO. Thats what I was questioning.
CIG has been wasting backer money for years and have painted themselves into a corner where they need to keep bringing in more money to sustain their burn rate. We have been seeing a lot of new straight to flyable sales while the backlog of ships is not being touched. Now they are saying we are going to launch 1.0 with just 5 systems, though the $36 million plege stretch goal where 100 systems were promised, a Concierge starting system promised, and several other systems with details give were promised. We have raised over 20x the stretch goal. We did our part, but CIG is going back on their promises they made to the game community.
lmao what did you miss the part where star systems went from being MySQL database entries with different names and descriptions to fully physicalized planetary systems with fully physicalized planets the size of literal, real moons? Yeah, because you expecting 100 *fully physicalized star systems* is definitely a good faith interpretation of the original Kickstarter pledge... lmao
@@RosscoAW We didn't see anything but some pretty pre-rendered cutscenes in a controlled development environment. It isn't real until it is put into the game.
@@RosscoAW Rossco, nobody likes an apologist.
Don't be an apologist.
I'm actually fine with the system cut. Having massive solar-system sized levels with this fidelity is something that no other game comes even close to doing.
@@RosscoAWand they announced it now when they have been working on planet tech for over 7 years...
CIG drawing a line in the sand about the expectations of what SC 1.0 is going to be is a great step towards having a goal for them to work towards, and telling the community that some of the features they have talked about are going to be post 1.0. They have needed to do this and focus on creating a game for years. Would have been better several years ago, but it is nice to see them picking a lane, and going for it. Sure there is going to be more fallout in the community as that line in the sand becomes better defined, but if they tried to keep working towards all of these crazy in depth features the game would never be released. Still a lot of questions needs to be answered, but honestly them detailing what 1.0 is going to be gave me a lot more hope for the project. Now if SQ42 isn't a great game on release it's going to be nearly impossible for them to recover from that. So as someone who wants CIG to succeed I hope it is a commercial success, but only time will tell.
The one expectation I have for SC 1.0 is: no more wipe.
Problem is they invented new features with this 1.0 push... see station building and space ship crsfting.
Back 2 years ago and since the beggining of the project it always was "players will never be able to build ships from scratch. You need to buy them in game, we will make enough content per system so you dont need the feel for it"
And now its "oh look a blueprint, you can build it"
the most funny thing about all this is that people actually believe its coming out in 2 years 🤣🤣 "2 MORE YEARS!!"
"Try to please everyone and you will please no one"
It's an easy slippery slope to fall down. I am getting that feeling with the debate over ai crew.
Demo SHOULD have been released as a Playable One. One thing to watch a Demo being played FOR you, quite another to PLAY FOR YOURSELF.
second this, whats so hard about giving backers a playable demo of the first mission?
@@alvarg They might be able to do that, but that would take some time. The playable demos at CC were not stripped down demos from what I have been told. The full game as it stands were in those machines. A playable demo would be a way for them to push new intrest and salve a few nerves.
Could you imagine how many times it would crash and be virtually unplayable?
To be honest SQ42 feels a lot like COD Infinite Warfare from 8 years ago in terms of gameplay.
Hopefully s42 is apreciated from the start, instead of being written off and then apreciated like 6 years later...
@@aguspuig6615 it will be an over produced mess. i bought it a decade ago and will play it out of spite. crobber is a joke.
That is so funny, the feelings toward SC seems to have inverted since CitizenCon.
Long time backers : "this sucks, I'm so tired of this..."
Non-backers : "HOLY SH*** this game looks so cool, its the future of gaming !!!"
as a long time backer, its wierd to see, to me the game just got even better, im happy about it, yet, at least youtubers have decided its not a good time for that
Non-backers mostly = people who dont realise how much a clusterfuck the development of this game is, and have been wowed by a substanceless, shallow trailer with loads of famous actors.
Its just the next stage of the scam to keep the money flowing. The real question is how many of those newly wowed people are going to invest in the broken (not yet an) MMO that players actually have access to (which even with a little research is very apparent how broken it is) because there is zero chance SQ42 is coming in 2026 (so it wont be bringing in money), and people just dont preorder stuff like they used to.
I reckon the devs are in a really precarious position now, and the event was a desperate grasp at keeping the whole thing afloat because most people who are aware of the history of the project and arent sunk cost copium about it think its a joke.
The redeemer nerf was a huge hit, there are a lot of people that bought the ship and they screwed all of us
If CIG just started the SQ42 market campaign and released the new license for sale it would probably bring in fairly good amount of new money. I know many folks who are all about SC and never cared about SQ42 until last year's CitCon and that was too late for them to purchase SQ42 as it was already taken out of the Store few months prior. Now they're just waiting for it to return.
I think part of the issue is many long time backers have spent all the money on the game they are willing to spend. They have enough store credit where they can get the new ship with store credit, even the big capital ships. You are really only getting money from new players. This last year has been hard to play with all the changes. Because of the staff burn out for Cit Con you have a buggy game for anyone who is new or came back because of the presentations. It’s catching up to them.
Yup, exactly it's that simple lol
Those people in the live chat saying that Cyberpunk was fine on PC are full of it. The game was still in a beta state, some of the fukn talents in the talent tree didn't even work until three patches later FFS.
Cyberpunk literally ran worse than Star Citizen for me at the time
Why would CIG staff need 18 days to crunch time a demo of Squadron 42, when we are being told the game is done already and is getting "polished". Somebody is lying!
the crunch was mostly for the presentations, keeping live playable during citcon days, and other stuff
well, polish basically refers to presentability. And they were presenting it.
@grifson_1065 how many bottles if baby oil you got in your closet?
@@MurkMercy ??
@@grifson_1065 lmao🤣🤣🤣🤣
The moment that CIG suddenly changed their mind to sell the F8C for real money, that was the moment I think it was obvious that CIG realized it was not making enough money from selling the regular ships anymore. If there is a moment in time we needed to pick that was the start of CIG panic mode, I would pick the F8C sale moment.
And now they are ruining our ships to try to force us to upgrade.
"Bring in new players"
No new starter package w/SQ42 and PU.
In fact, no SQ42 in the store at all. Like...they didnt even sell what they were selling?
Some companies do these mandatory days even if it's not super critical.. I don't know which bucket CIG falls into but the biggest company wide problem is scope-creep and the employee contributing to the problem the most is Chris.
I often see this scope-creep idea projected as a huge problem for SC. Which sure, it means the game takes a lot longer to make, but its also whats makes the game special isnt it? Without scope-creep, the game may have released within a couple years of starting development, but it would also have just been another elite dangerous at best.
Chris Roberts is out there with a yacht and living a life of luxury, and you want to say the money is drying up because the game is expensive to make? More like Chris and Sandy's life is too expensive..
"I'm going to blame a particular, individual capitalist instead of capitalism, because obviously I am also a temporarily embarrassed millionare-to-be, and I will one day own a yacht too -- but like, a small yacht, and I'll spend my millions way smarter than this one particular individual capitalist I don't like, but, y'know, other than that, I have NO PROBLEMS with capitalism."
lmao aight
@@RosscoAW You must be fun at parties.
@@RosscoAW How tf are you going to have capitalism without capitalists lol. There is no capitalism without individual capitalists lol. Capitalists = capitalism. You can't blame "CaPiTaLiSm" without blaming the capitalist individuals. Think before you speak next time.
@@readthescroll I think that was his entire point.
@@nocturnality1307 No they want me to "hate the game, not the player"
SC players are used to bugs, and crashes.
What makes them mad, is nerffing ships. What makes them REALLY mad is nerffing the most popular ship, that people paid money for.
Mission nerffing, mining nerffing, salvage nerffing... sure... angry, but not super mad.
Taking 2 guns off a ship that everyone used for bounty missions... a bit too far, and now people are less likely to pay cash for another ship that will be downgraded.
They are also trying to force multiplayer team play, but have not fixed the 'party' system. You still cant reliably see your friends.
On top of that, they nerffed the payouts for missions, and now want you to take more people on those same missions to divide the payout.
then... they increased the cost of repairs, fuel, and want to add in insurance for your ship.
All this gives higher cost, lower payout.
When it literally takes 30 minutes to 1 hour (more some times) to get 3 people on the same location, it is no longer a matter of just "jumping in to play for an hour." It takes an hour to prep for a mission, then everyone needs to go, as soon as the mission starts.
i don't understand why anyone is buying ships based on current specs. it's been known everything is constantly changing for one reason or another. whining about nerfs in an alpha game is just silly
@@plinyvicgames "whining about nerfs in an alpha game is just silly"
This is the standard response from SC SIMPS.
"It's in Alpha. Don't you know what Alpha means?"
They sell ships to people marketing them with what guns, what shields, what they look like, etc.
The ask people to spend real world money on something based on what they are telling them.
I don't buy their garbage ships. I own a starter ship.
And if any nerfs are to come out, people expect them to be light adjustments, and done in the first few months.
Like with Salvage, they halved the panel output witin a few weeks.
The Corsair has been around for Years. The only reason they nerffed it, was to push people to buy the Zeus and this new MISC ship they have coming out. To reduce the size of the Corsair guns, people could accept, but to force them to have yet ANOTHER gun on the sip that requires ANOTHER player is bad faith. There are already 2 manned turrets on the ship, and the co pilot controls a remote turret. So there are 3 sets of weapons the Pilot does not control, and that is reason enough to have another player on your ship. They didn't need this reduction. It was done to make corsair owners look at other ships.
"Constantly changing" in order to make a better/balanced game, people get.
Changing, to herd people into buying more stuff, people get angry.
Like when Apple slows down your current phone just before they launch a new iPhone. People get angry. and rightfully so.
I work for a company that "gets caught" publicly, but the DO NOT change under scrutiny. It's a Fortune 100 company... So to me, CIG reacting quickly to public scrutiny, wish I worked there instead.
UK has got some very strict Labor Laws and regulates issues like overtime, crunch and employee working hrs with a very keen eye.
why is no one talking about how they long-conned everyone regarding earning citizenship. Originally, finishing SQ42 granted you your citizenship in the verse. Now, there is going to be an introductory questline you will be forced to play thru in 1.0 in order to earn that citizenship. Annnnd. another thing, maybe no one else caught it, or no one wants to admit that it was actually said, but one of the devs at citcon said something to the effect of 'since last year's demo of SQ42, we have been working very hard to get the last couple of features finished and we are NOW entering polish phase... ' meaning, everyone has been thinking this whole time that the last year has been spent on polish, but it actually hasn't. AT ALL... So 2026 makes much more sense in that context, but also, with CIG's history, 2026 is most likely wishful thinking, and 2027 is far realistic...
All anyone had to do was read the monthly reports to see they weren’t in polishing phase. New content and tech every single month.
@@CraigPaschang I am literally looking at the progress tracker for SQ42 and every entry for SQ42 shows Polishing. Perhaps you are thinking about Star Citizen.
I..think.. not 100% sure, that you can gain citizenship through either completing SQ42, OR the 1.0 storyline ( aka big tutorial), tbh i just want to be a double citizen and see what happens :P
This is pretty much bs on their side. The ability to craft ships with blueprints, the ability to build space ships, the ability to play sq42 to get citizenship and keep some influence. The economy being 10 to 1 for npcs vs players. Where is all of that? Oh and lets not forget them admitting blades are already in game *ie ai turrets* they just dont want to put it in
He is literally reading the gaming insiders article.
We've been saying all this for years, you just didn't want to listen.
and this reaction content guy is just repeating/summarizing what he is reading in less words. its a Russian nesting doll of cringe embarassment for a way to get informaiton.
They aren't monetizing Squadron 42, you can't buy it.
You can buy it. It’s available on the website.
@@CaptWinky link, or it didn't happen
@@CaptWinky It absolutely isn't.
An interesting number would be how many pledge purchasers have SQ42 and how many pledges don't have it since it was removed from the store.
@CaptWinky they removed it several months ago. That's the real answer. You were right at one point. Figured I'd be more informative than these 2 clowns that just said it isn't
I'm an October 2012 backer and I'm sick of Star Citizen. All of my favorite ships have been forgotten, nerfed, or left on the backlog indefinitely.
Every update to the game makes it more tedious and there is no sign that things will improve.
The Galaxy-Shennanigans unfortunately crossed a line for me. Like "Oh, well, lets put it back in since people remember we specifically announced it and people don't like it when we silently cancel something people specifically bought the ship for. That is a degree of malice, that pulled the last straw for me. I had no issues backing them by now, even with the thought in the back of my head, that this whole project might implode. But no like this..
For me the NPC bait and switch did it this past week. From selling extra game packages and bigger ships on the promise that NPC crew will be a guaranteed game feature to 'maybe after launch'. It's one bait and switch after another with CIG.
@@RN1441 I understand you guys don't like and don't want to participate in it after those really unprofessional things they did and announced, but stop acting like everything was perfect and the project was even remotly close to what they announced 5 years ago let alone like the 2012 kickstarter.
You are either plain dumb and following some imaginary goal or looking for something to throw at them justifying the fact you followed them for so long.
For me now they are a bit more realistic and try to find a compromise they can deliver, and if they do what they tell it's going to be good, stfu with NPC crew thing.
@@lucasdedango I gave them money back in 2012 because of four things: 1) Spiritual successor to wing commander, with 2) drop-in drop-out coop campaign to play through with a friend on 3) Dedicated servers with mod support so it could last a very long time like Skyrim and 5) Built from the ground up for VR. They have quite literally reduced all of this scope or pushed it out to 'maybe after launch' and I'm not even sure they are going to deliver on the spiritual successor to wing commander by 2026. No, I am not looking for things to be mad at them for, they just keep baiting and switching.
The Galaxy never had a base building module to start, and it was only after designing and building it were they like, "we might add it in".
They didn't. Oh well.
@@mattvmalone It was not an ambivalent "maybe". It was shown by a game director, very clearly stating what it would do, at the game's one annual convention. Either way, they have proven that everything is now speculation and you cannot trust their word unless it is on the store page (even then it will change like the Corsair's pilot guns).
It might get dicy for CIG, but they are far from being out of financial option. Selling company shares (not free traded), a 2-3 year loan, going fully publicly traded , publishing deals for SQ42, ...
But in any case they have to do better and CR has to stop micromanaging unimportant stuff like clothing, because new clothing can be added at any later date if he doesn't like it.
I remember like 8 years ago he was micromanaging the ice cubes looks/ physics in a drink on the the demo for a bar
They can't sell company shares. They are not a publicly traded company. If they did, the company would die in less than 6 months from the lawsuits alone.
I'm sorry but, they have said this update in the PU is so unstable bc it's on the 4.0 code branch. And not the old one. I'm sure they are shooting for stability for IAE.
Really.... i sense doubt
I'm so tired of this excuse tbh, do people think that the 4.0 code is some mystical new programming language that has never been seen before? It's quite literally an ADDITION to the previous code.
Stop with the ass kissing already, its so tedious in the SC community.
@@geddybear9108 that's not ass kissing. It's saying with the new tech they're implementing there's a lot of fundamental changes to the code... supposedly. To point out what is literally happening is not ass kissing or cope. I'm pissed this game isn't in a playable state. But ignoring the reality of it is immature
@@darqshark3506 except that its literally what they have said repeatedly for years. It's always because they're being so innovative. When do they actually focus on just making the features they have in place work or keep functions in place from not working. It seems like every new version breaks stuff that is working and new functions work for a while, then join the list that breaks because of said new upgrade.
@ Yeah they've said that for years because server meshing has been in the works... for years.
CIG is giving the greatest display of "Scope Creep" & and possibly "Scope Kill" as well? They roped us all in on cinemtic features like Sqdrn 42 in the very beginning. I got sold on the 325a sales video in the beinning and all the promises of great gameplay. We still can't get out of our Habs or elevators sometimes??
They are doing the mother of all features creep. The description I heard is "We, CiG, are doing the stuff that gets a NO everywhere else." It was a vote from the backers at the time. Since you can't go back, this is exactly how it is.
It's hilarious to me that we are still talking about people whining about working hard at crunch time. This has been going on throughout the history of America if not the world. One of the things that made America great to begin with is hard work. Steve Jobs is just one of many examples of someone that wanted to surround himself with people that were willing to work incredibly hard to Make their vision a reality. To make something great requires hard work. If everyone is trying to run out of the office every day then it's really just another job. People that are willing to keep putting in the time to get it done because they believe in the project is exactly what a project like this is going to take. I regularly work 70 plus hours for my business and that's not crunch time. More and more people just don't want to much less work a single hour more than they have to.
Yep. i do think crunch is generally bad, but as other commentors said, a week of crunch for a yearly event with a subsequent paid vacation? thats literally fucking nothing
21:12 You buy real estate for your company specifically to provide a place to work, an investment and a tax break. Our company made a stupid amount of money sitting on their property for 8+ years, like 100's of millions or something like 4x the what it was worth. Then they sold it because they allowed everyone to work from home so they downsized to something pennies on the dollar. Worked out well to get a huge cash flow to buy more cash flows (eg: other companies).
Personally I think CIG will be lucky if it even reaches a 8 out of 10 for SQ42, from what they showed so far both in development and demonstrations. More likely to see a 6 or 7 as more people play the game. This of course is just my opinion.
I feel SQ42 is gonna be just something very mediocre and forgettable game, nothing GOTY stuff, and will absolutely never make the money that was wasted to it.
Im not nor was i ever interested in sq42 single player, its going to mostly be an interactive movie. I don't think the combat will be that good and thats what i play games for, good combat specifically against other players
@@vfgdfg My biggest fear is that this idea spreads to a point were people gaslight themselves to see it that way.
If s42 came out of nowere we would all be admiring how nuanced the dialogue was, how it felt like a classic movie yet not cheesy or incoherent.
How the gameplay looked and felt like a COD campaing but instead of smoke and mirrors its all actually there..
But since hating on SC is almost a real life profession now people might go in and treat the game like its worse than it is. Like when Infinite Warfare was anounced and from the trailer alone everyone decided it was bad, it became a trend to hate it.
Now people go back to it and shout how good it actually was.
If you look at s42 every aspect of it goes from pretty good to unseen levels of quality, with everything in between, yet i only see people focusing on the negatives
@@aguspuig6615 The visual quality was definitely great. But I found the gameplay seriously lacking for me. It won't be like that for everyone, but the demo gameplay was pretty average at best, even ignoring the bugs, for me. I still hope to be wrong but so far it doesn't look impressive to me, it actually looks like a backward step in regards to game like CP2077 which I also wasn't a fan of.
@@LordBattleSmurf I don't even play it for the combat. I like that there is combat but I don't centre my gameplay around it (even though it seems to be focussing more and more on that). So if they aren't pleasing the combat peeps I'm not sure who they are pleasing in the end lol.
I made a vow after 3.18. No more money until 4.0. Still waiting.
I went looking into the layoffs and realized that's when Todd papy left because he couldn't transfer over to Manchester and if you put 2 and 2 together it's just employees that couldn't transfer over to another continent
CIG made them an offer they could not accept. Don't think they didn't know what would happen.
It's called location optimisation. The UK and Germany were their main development centres and with Turbulent fully merging under CIG they wanted to focus their development Studio in North America in MTL. Yes many got offers and it definitely wasn't because they didn't have the money, it's simply they wanted to consolidate into key studios.
@@ThomasD66 They wanted to consolidate development efforts and growth to their key three studios. If people don't want to take an offer to emigrate to another of those studios then it is their choice. May be unfortunate for those impacted, but trying to paint it as malicious and that it was an offer in bad faith is just false.
@@Ed_Patrick You know this exactly how? Be specific and name sources otherwise it looks very very bad.
@@ThomasD66 hi it's because of tod papys goodbye post saying he couldn't continue with the company because of restructuring requiring him to move to Manchester and due to family he chose to stay in the US we just didn't know that there was more than papy at the time
High props MikE for not skipping his commercials! Respect!
Waiting for an elevator or train to never arrive, would be less irritating if CIG wasn't burning my cash on office decorations and yearly parties.
There have been people saying that CIG will run out of money for quite a few years now. Yet sales have been higher every year. I do agree the sales probably can't get much higher anymore and will even go down but they're not suddenly going to just run out of money.
This year is a bit behind last year but I bet IAE will fix that.
Costs are increasing as well though, is the increasing sales meeting the increasing costs (from multiple sources such as the dev acquisitions)?
So far the sales are not on track to be higher this year. And in 2023 they were only 3% higher, not some huge increase. And their overhead and operating costs have absolutely gone up. New player numbers are also way down these past two years. So they are having to squeeze the current player base extra hard to try and make up the difference.
@@senn4237 I do agree sales can't go much higher with this model.
Sq42 releasing in 2026 does seem really important thing now. If the game is as good as it seems that should help for quite a while.
Looking at how much they have spent to get here, and what we now have I do not see a fantastic framework that will allow a lot of added development at a reduced cost. Frankly it seems to be more the opposite - that their aging engine is rapidly approaching the end of its functional life span.
The clock is not their friend and neither is the funding level.
Who wants to work in a dusty office Mike? Well CIG did when they started out. Wasn't it like 8 people as the original dev team?
If youre really burning for something you care about 0% about how your office looks, imo.
devs care about good pay and good management. a nice office is cool as well, but why even use an office to begin with? saves money to just go online...
@@plinyvicgames Because doing things online isn't always constructive and effective. Training people on new software takes time, and it also takes a mentor for the most part. In order to speed up training and the effectiveness of the new employee to learn those tools in an office setting.
Your right! They are doing the backers dirty. What they did to the corsair ruined that ship for me... I'm so depressed now.
The office and life size F7A models are WASTED backer money ... FULL STOP! You get to do those luxury things once you have shipped a successful game and have 2 years of great sales ...
As soon as i seen the ship i almost spit my coffee. It blew my mind they wasted resources on that model... STUTHPID STUTHPID STUTHPID!
Ticket sales to the event would have more than covered the F7A model and likely the entire event production cost. 4000+ attendee at 250 for a ticket, that a million right there.
@@andrewbarber6031 If they are burning cash no reason throw it away needlessly.
The model was made of mostly wood on a metal frame, i doubt it cost millions.
@@loruth can the same be said for theme elevators / break rooms / offices ??? I think not ...
I gotta agree - there definitely seems to be a shift in development this past year, and more of a focus on "game" over "tech". It almost seems like someone told Chris he needs to take a backseat on SC, and just worry about SQ42, because the devs feel like they're going "this is feasible, this is not, enough lofty dreams, we need realistic solutions".
I am pretty sure CR has been spending almost all his time on SQ42 for the last couple of years.
You're right on Mike! Seem they're working against themselves and I am mighty sick of what they're shovelling.
Every corporations have this issue. It's the how they handle it that matters.
@@TheSiriusEnigma So?
We are getting close to "minimum viable product" time. Star Citizen has become nuclear fusion, perpetually "a couple of years away".
There's a very obvious reason why CIG, who is the farthest along in the world in Server Meshing tech, requires their people to sign NDAs when they leave.
Theres a company who already delivered what the community from SC calls dynamic servermeshing already.
CiG isnt doing state of the art stuff. They just dont deliver.
@@AndyDufresne86 what company is that?
@@grifson_1065Yea Andy, I'd like to know too.
@@AndyDufresne86 Have you found the company name yet?
I' love to know it since I am very interested in that tech.
THe kill of the game with be the insurance and warranty shit. NO ONE IS GOING TO PLAY A GAME THAT HAS A $200 entry fee.
The majority of the community want exploration gameplay and CIG have ignored it. CIG prioritized combat hoping that could float them, but very few people are logging in daily for their combat. CIG's decisions make no sense
Where you pulling this information from? Because I'm pretty sure it's not the majority.
Tbh when it comes to making a universe, i think the Lore team are the unsung heroes right here. As a huge 40k fan that mostly just consumes lore trough youtube, i can tell you that watching Astro Historial videos and even reading the wiki increased my hype for the game by alot
6:34 Wait a minute! DIDN'T CR say in a video in 2019 that it was entering polishing faze that year! wouldn't it already be feature complete before entering this faze?
craaaazy if true
@@a.j.6832 Its a 100% true.. I saw the video with my own eyes ! I am not sure if I saw it hear OR on Grumpy Eye channel! it was very recently!
If the game was going to be released in 26, the website would reflect that and it doesn’t right now
The SQ42 page has not been updated since 2018. Is that normal for a game that is feature complete since a year?
actual words from a SC player: "People hate subscriptions, but it's sustainable. If it involves server costs per user, then each user should pay for their server costs."
subscription games used to be really successful because the money was usually actually used to fund expansions and better servers. i don't think most people would be upset by that if it actively funds tangible development and content
@@plinyvicgames The two most popular MMOs by a longshot are both sub games WoW and FFXIV. I do agree though that they don't seem to be as good of a value now days, everyone wants that ez micro money.
Part of a deal for moving your company to another country is creation of jobs. This is also offset by what you spend in the local market. Having some of those things built in the office may have been part of meeting this mark set by the local government. Just like setting a quota for the number of local hires. To us it makes no sense but they signed the agreement and spent our funds to pay for it. Unless we are sitting members of the board we get no say.
CIG is deleting all comments in spectrum that say anything about bait and switch or any negative comments about what they did to the galaxy.
Because the AAA studios would flood spectrum with them if they could.
I have denounced some of their moves in Spectrum and have never been censored yet, I am not saying it doesn't happen but they allow constructive criticism just fine by what I have seen.
@@Mr.Constitutionalist427 I've had 3 comments removed they are 100% deleting comments
@primigen What did you post?
@Mr.Constitutionalist427 I said bait and switch and those are no no words. Well then they shouldnt be baiting and switching and I wouldn't cry about it
2:10 Thanks for explaining what a dream game is for us.. we were all struggling to figure it out..🙄
They're going to string it out until AI gets good enough at coding to secretly rewrite the whole game for them, or fix the mess they've already created. That's my prediction because CR isn't capable and has bit off more than he can chew.
I've been saying the AI part for years. Don't say it on Spectrum though or you'll get a ban. lol.
Galactic levels of cope
16:20 They don't have to link the new ships to releases. New ships don't have any new feature. I don't know why they are doing that.
You also know that your name was quoted on the angry Joe show today right? They spoke about the galaxy controversy
What I laugh at is I am an OTR truck driver and I regularly work 80 hours a week and am over the road away from my family for a month at a time. And only get 3 days off... I would love to have the schedule and pay of these devs for a crunch period. That would be like a vacation for me!
2:25 Star Citizen Alpha isn't just Chris' dream game. It's dream product. Because they make incredible money without having to deliver the promised product.
What's more, they even rob people of what they sold them.
Their ships are sold as a manly Joe Rogan version, then you get a Pelosi/ Harris nerfed lame duck salad bowl version when they get released.
For the money and spending topic. When a company gets some money, the state wants some tax. You have 2 options: 1 So you can say: Oh sure here are the 100k$ tax and the company gets nothing from it. OR 2 You spend some money in the offices and you can say: Oh look we had some expenses, here the rest 5k$ tax. Think about that.
13 years ago there was concern over any designer like CR having full control of a project like this due to feature creep or due to perfectionist qualities where every aspect of the game being nitpicked to the point of it always being delay and hence delaying release indefinitely!
I don't know about you guys but its starting to look a lot like this fear is now a reality! IMHO
Let's hope CIG devs leak more stuff from now on, for their own good...
If I remember right my first reaction to the original vid was "what a nothing burger" excited to see your reaction.
And a reheated one at that
Just some simple thoughts I don't really hear anyone talking about pertaining to SQ42 delays till 2026:
Everyone needs to realize 3 super important things, IMHO.
1. SQ42 is going to bring a lot of potential new players to SC, so 4.x has to be rock solid and scaling. It's critical to ensuring a solid MMO experience, so they need the time to do that, not just the time for SQ42 itself.
2. We know that it's likely to see GTA released in 2025, so CIG needs to strategically release SQ42 so it doesn't get over shadowed by GTA.
3. They didn't say when in 2026. Everyone assumes the worst, at the EOY, but realistically if 4.x is solid, and enough time passes after GTA, then SQ42 might be early 2026, or maybe even surprised with a late 2025 release if everything aligns. Maybe saying 2026 was to ensure a proper buffer, not that they actually need another 2 years of polish.
Just saying, it's not necessarily all about more time to polish.
Or I'm just too much a glass half full fan boy.
Someone with a 45k pledge seems crazy big right? But that barely pays for an office door. How much more pledges for an engineer's annual salary? And then multiply that by the 6 more years to get to 1.0 out amd multiply it by a thousand for all the staff and you start to see we're in danger. 😂
A video game that launches with no bugs is a mystical unicorn that will never exist.
90 Days Tops
Honestly after all those janky and very amateur like presentations over the last 12 years, this year was a breath of fresh air and CIG is finally becoming a real and professional gaming company in my opinion. Glad to have so much attention (negative and positive) to the project.
keep telling yourself that, crhis.
Lol watching the Starcitizen fanbase of people who have never worked on a team, much less a corporate environment, MUCH less a development environment gets pretty entertaining.
The initial email said "you will get the time back".
The follow up of supposedly "CIG reacting to journo" was 11 minutes later? You actually think that the email was received by CIG HR, read and then passed on to the relevant parties involved in a company holiday decision, who also read, decided, and then drafted and sent an email to all staff, all within 11 minutes? The odds of this are hilariously low.
People jump to conclusions so easily not realizing how much they don't know or understand.
Given what CIG is trying to accomplish, I find it amazing and depressing how entitled the fanbase feels on behalf of employees. Find me any startup trying to succeed anywhere near this degree who isn't putting in crazy work hours.
A seven day work week for their biggest event and promo of the year? The horror!
YYYYYYep.
One thing thats crazy to me is that, sure SC has alot of haters who dont play the game, but sometimes its the comunity beingthe biggest haters for no fucking reason. I normally love Mike, he has balanced takes, is a genuenly likable cool guy i watch for fun, and overall is just a good youtuber. But i fucking hate it when a crazy acusaion is thrown at CIG, like in this case the suposed vacation backpedal, and he just goes ''CLASSIC CIG'' without thinking about it twice.
Like we are simultaneously shitting on CIG for having offices that are too pretty and comfy for the workers, but also acusing them of malicious crunching... What is it? are they overly cushy idealists or a cold greedy corporation? i guess it whatever looks worse at the moment for some fans that live off of hating the game
@@aguspuig6615 Yeah exactly. If you need to rage about not getting the game you're apparently entitled to have, they're super cushy idealists spending money on stupid things and goals.
But if an opportunity to criticize them for being evil corpos arises you can't pass that up, so they're evil corpos who overwork their employees.
Never mind having a clue what it takes to build something no company has ever built and even deploy that much capital in the first place.
If you don't run a business, every penny you spend "building" the company means you don't have to pay taxes on that money. Which is why you see $5000 toilets (Kohler) at companies.
As soon as they were releasing incomplete ships, back in 2018, and falling behind in production while mission creep exploded, I knew it was getting out of hand.
Austin was a good WORK office. People in a dungeon do WORK, and get things done. Manchester is DAYCARE for adults.
bro casually asking for them to put devs on a dungeon (from those dungeons came the dryest years of the game were nothing was released and we got weekly videos explaining how someone tweaked a little code)
They need to pause Squadron 42 and put all their focus on fixing and releasing Star Citizen. SQ42 is way too ambitious and is holding back the development of Star Citizen. This vlog is proving my point.
Some people dont think CIG is spending 100M a year. They have about 1300 people * 60k a year for a salary (which is low) thats 78m only salary without employer tax, Insurance, or pension. Not talking about servers and software and a place to work.
Pensions? Are you serious? LOL
Ptoly not a pension, but they do have a matching 401k
@@Beau74 CIG UK offers employees a workplace pension with a 6% employer match, in the US it is a 401k, and elsewhere it is the government mandated systems.
@@ThomasD66 Pensions are absurd if being tied to a "Game".
60k a year isnt low outside the US bro, its reaching president level salary
What about the stupid castles magic and wizards game they secretly been working...that was the last straw for me...
Oh good, I saw this keep popping up b ut now I can just watch this instead. Belluar is good and all but meh.
bellular says everything that matters in the first minute and then repeats himself until he runs out of steam.
As a game developer, I have worked in smaller spaces and larger spaces. If the work is great and I am being paid fairly, The decor of the office is secondary. It is fine if you want some inspirational art, etc., but they went ridiculously overboard with wasting backers' money.
Why do I not care at all about CIGs work schedule... a have a ruffer schedule than that everyday... give me a break...
These people are so weak, I can't believe it, I worked 12 hours 7 days on crunch times, and frequently I'm staying late +3,4 hours at the end of the month for deadlines and without a bonus paycheck.
@@morganlefay-k4c thats not a flex or desirable being proud of yourself being exploited or ran into the ground is so weird
@@dark1810 No it's a normal thing for ALOT of people. It's not being proud, they're pointing out that it's normal and these entitled dev's arn't anything special.
@@snokonesWorking 12 hours a day for 7 days straight isn't the norm for your average worker, at least not here in the US.
@@allthatishere It's more common than you think it is, especially during a release crunch.
9:36 MORE stable in this last few weeks!!! I tried on Sunday and it took 35-45 mins to get 1 ship out of the hangar due to bugs (Ship would get destroyed for some reason), then after 1 hour managed to get to a bunker where enemy npc's would bounce around due to sync issues and no chevrons on friendlies ( so you have to sometimes wait till they shoot to find out ! ) Then the inventory was super glitchy and had issues with that! ITS EVEN MORE CLITCHY THAN 3.18 as there is more added stuff that can be glitchy! finally I just gave up and logged off as I was just not impressed AT All that they would actually release a build in such a poor condition after 13 FN years!
The new HUD looks like its from Nintendo 64
The new HUD is designed by a nitwit that has never flown anything.
The new HUD was designed by a smooth brain that has never flown anything.
Release date 2015
bellualar also hasnt played wow for 10 years while making those videos so salty and him have that in common. guess his wow news wasnt paying off people got tired of him so he had to expand to new games. astropub also debunked most of what he is saying 150 people is over half the people in the usa offices.
Wtf are you on about?? Bellular has played through both Dragonflight and The War Within.
It's okay to dislike the guy, but you don't need to make up dumb shit.
Just curious, but do you have a link to Astro Pub's comments on the Bellualar video?
Salty definitely plays SC somewhat regularly… Although I doubt he plays the PU though. Same with most SC creators who only play in ptu. They rarely cover issues in the live game and instead cover irrelevant things like a ship losing a construction module that was never sold or initially promised with the ship when first sold.
@@allthatishere he even admitted he hasnt played the game for a decade. he just recently started playing again. there are many xpacks he didnt play through but made videos as if he was still playing.
Ayo a snufkin pfp @@Mootkins
I worked for a major software company in the 90's. We had yearly updates. Every single year there was a crunch time before release. You could count on extended hours 6 days a week. It's not unusual at all. One year they had us work 3 days solid no sleep. The first day you were at your desk 24 hours. 2nd and 3rd day they let you go home and take a shower. So the 2nd and 3rd day were 23 hour days. So CGI doing a crunch before a major even is not news. I'm not a Star Citizen fan boi. That's just the reality of software development.
I've been gaming for 45 years. Some of us very old gamers have always believed that Chris Roberts is a perfectionist and a bit scatterbrained (keeps changing things instead of fully committing to something). From the first announcement of this game, I told many friends, quite literally, "Who is going to keep Chris Roberts in check?". Clearly (to me), no one is.
In the state of Texas a NDA or anything that could prevent you from new employment (noncompete) is not legal / eligible for lawsuit