Smart Community
Games => Star Citizen => Topic started by: dsmart on January 16, 2017, 07:22:11 AM
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We have a Goon, boviscopophobic, who has done an amazing job these past months running analytics on Star Citizen using data mined from the game's public facing data (the same place where the funding numbers (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/htmlview#) come from). If you see a chart in any of my blogs or missives (e.g. my latest (http://dereksmart.com/forums/topic/star-citizen-musings/#post-5198)), chances are, he did it. Below is his latest masterpiece.
JAN 2017 RSI DEMOGRAPHICS UPDATE
About 6 months and $25M have elapsed since the previous demographic snapshot of the RSI forum population. Updated funding-related statistics are summarized below. The methodology is mostly the same as in my previous post, so you can refer to that for details as well as an explanation of the meaning of each graph.
First off, the forum account vs RSI account rate discrepancy has stabilized at about 3.5, meaning that 3.5 RSI accounts are currently being created for every forum account. This ratio obviously spikes during free fly events.
(http://i.imgur.com/olMNvoj.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/UfzR4Hb.png)
For the funding-related graphs, the basic funding assumptions remain the same as last time, but there are three updates to the methodology. The first relates to closed accounts. Thanks to the wave of refunds post-Streetroller, I learned that is possible to determine with reasonable confidence if an RSI account has been closed, which generally indicates revocation due to refunds or possibly other misbehavior such as hacking. This latest set of summary graphs includes only accounts that were "alive" at the time of the snapshot. The previous set of graphs included a certain number of "dead" accounts, which affected the accuracy of the title counts.
The second change is that I've aggregated all titles not associated with a funding level into an "OTHER" title, except for a small set of user titles that I deemed to be CIG-related. These titles, namely "Staff", "Developer", "Creator", "QA", and "Game Master", are assigned the aggregate title of "CIG". Some other user titles that are arguably CIG-related, but which I did NOT include in the CIG set, are "Bug Moderator" and "Moderator". Note that some developer accounts may mark themselves as such as such only by their account name; these would not be included in the CIG count.
Finally, to counteract title churn from people changing their title, I look at each account's titles over a number of forum snapshots and use the one that implies the highest funding level. Since user titles can be "understated" but not "overstated", so to speak, this should be a reasonable procedure if user funding levels are non-decreasing. Thankfully, since CIG almost never grants partial refunds, an assumption of non-decreasing funding levels should not introduce too much additional error. (Note: if no funding-related titles are available, then CIG-related titles are prioritized over "OTHER" titles.)
(http://i.imgur.com/44R4KoA.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/Xaxz42A.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/DbmlyMn.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/gznDZwx.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/ZjtbTRN.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/iMx6YqM.png)
The contribution of concierge-level backers (High Admiral and up) has slightly increased -- 56.4% under the mid funding scenario, versus 53.6% last time. If we compare the graph of estimated average user spending by quarter of enlistment with the previous version, we get the following average per-user increases:
(http://i.imgur.com/xjCJTsU.png)
This indicates that accounts of all "ages" are continuing to put money into Star Citizen, possibly more so for pre-2014 accounts. However, note that an increase of $10-15 or so is a small fraction of the likely average transaction amount -- recall that this period includes Gamescom, Citizencon, the anniversary livestream, and the holiday sale, which featured pricy concept ships, cash-only sales, capital ship sales, etc. Depending on what you think the average transaction amount is (which I have not attempted to estimate), you could translate this into an estimate of the size of the current paying backer population.
Another longitudinal view of the backer population can be obtained by constructing contingency tables at various time snapshots. For example, the following is a comparison of highest user titles achieved through early August 2016, versus early January 2017. Because of how highest titles are computed, this table contains some unknown fraction of users "leveling up" through spending, and some users simply adjusting previously understated titles upward. I believe that the dominant contribution is leveling up, especially when looking at movement between the higher tiers, but I have not attempted to quantify this.
(http://i.imgur.com/px8fOza.png)
Note that we have two new pseudo-titles: "DEAD", indicating that the account died off (refunds etc.) between Aug 2016 and Jan 2017, and "UNBORN", indicating that the account was made between Aug 2016 and Jan 2017. So for instance, we can see that of 92 completionists as of Aug 2016, 1 of those accounts got a refund. Of 193 wing commanders as of Aug 2016, 31 were promoted to completionist and 2 got a refund, etc. Notably, 22 CIG accounts "got a refund", which most likely means they left the company.
As a rough measure of the propensity of backer subpopulations to level up, we can construct a matrix of outflow percentages. In this table, the number in a particular row/column indicates the percentage of the population with that row's title that advanced to get the corresponding column's title. So for instance, 16.06% of all Wing Commanders in August became Completionists by January. Similarly, 0.37% of Civilians became Freelancers/Colonels, etc. The hottest cells consist of concierge backers (High Admiral and up) moving up one or two levels, and CIG accounts moving to the exits.
(http://i.imgur.com/gCuTpTY.png)
If we are interested in inferring refunds specifically, then we need to look at pairs of snapshots that are closer together in time. Otherwise we can miss salient developments -- for instance, if a Civilian in August became a Wing Commander in November then got a refund in December, it would only show up as a Civilian refund in the above table. Using a set of several snapshots I derived the following counts for account deaths per highest title. I also noticed a large number of newly established Civilian accounts showing up as dead. To exclude possible low-effort banhammered trolls from the refund counts, I only counted Civilian accounts if they were confirmed as being alive for at least 45 days in at least one historical snapshot.
- Completionist: 5
- Wing Commander: 4
- Space Marshal/Lieutenant Commander: 19
- Grand Admiral: 27
- High Admiral: 70
- Vice Admiral: 47
- Rear Admiral: 58
- Freelancer/Colonel: 116
- Bounty Hunter: 67
- Mercenary: 61
- Scout: 32
- Civilian: 448
- CIG: 26
- OTHER: 74
Since this is a small and very much non-random sample, the likely accuracy of the funding scenario assumptions (already not that good) is probably far worse for refunded accounts. On the one hand, Civilians are assumed to have a low average contribution partly due to the proliferation of free accounts; however, a refunded account would obviously not be a free account. On the other, high-value accounts may not be refunded for anywhere near their nominal value, due to grey market transactions.
If we go ahead and apply the min/mid/max funding assumptions anyway, we get refund totals of $407,420, $674,587.50, and $941,755, respectively. For another estimate, also problematic, we can consider the self-reported refund amounts from /r/starcitizen_refunds. From reading through the posts that stated actual refund amounts, I arrived at an average per-user refund of $1366.10. Applying this to the 1028 non-CIG refundees, we would get a total of $1,404,350.80. These estimates are of course only for the refunded forum population. The multiplier to get the total amount of refunds in the entire RSI population would likely be well less than 2.5, which is the ratio of all RSI accounts to all forum accounts.
CONCLUSIONS
All previous caveats about the accuracy of these estimates still apply. In addition, there are particular problems with trying to estimate refund amounts. Nevertheless, I think we can conclude that the refund outflows, while CIG certainly would find them annoying, are probably small enough in total that they can be easily compensated for with an extra concept sale (if we don't account for increases in engineering debt).
There are indications that funding is leaning even more heavily on concierge-level backers; this might be a good topic for follow-up analyses. Account age does not appear to play a large role in incremental spending.
Previously I speculated about a soft per-user average spending ceiling around $200. This now seems to be more of an artifact of the bounded time window the backer populations have had to spend their money in. As that time window lengthens, fresh spending continues apace and it remains to be seen when there will be a large-scale change in backer purchasing behavior.
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The longitudinal comparison showed an increment in average spending for accounts of all ages, so I now think the correct interpretation of that graph is a combination of a large initial outlay from the earliest purchasers (2013 and prior), combined with a steady increase in spending for accounts of all ages as more time/sales go by. So newer accounts have lower values mostly because they haven't had as much time to spend money.
As for new whales, the "UNBORN" line in a contingency table provides an imperfect estimate of new backer dollars:
(http://i.imgur.com/jNFvjVM.png)
So for instance, out of 103,589 accounts established between June 2016 and January 2017, 4 of them are now Wing Commanders, 19 are Space Marshals, etc. This works out to something like $1-5 million worth of funding from new accounts, depending on your assumptions. The new accounts are about 90% Civilians whereas the overall population is about 75% Civilians, so that may indicate something about the number of free accounts.
The question of how many whales there actually are, and just how much they are in for, is still not satisfactorily answered, but it was my main motivation for starting to look at this stuff in the first place.
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New analytics, courtesy of our numbers Goon, boviscopophobic
Funding so far in 2017 is lackluster compared to the previous two years, but the comparison is arguably unfair because we have yet to see any major sales events this year.
(https://i.imgur.com/8cTWOub.png)
However, new account signups are slowing even compared to early 2015, which may not be a good sign. The huge influx in 2016 was due to the announcement of the SQ42 package split.
(https://i.imgur.com/UKRJyAW.png)
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Have some new Valentines Day sales metrics too. As I wrote in my missive (http://dereksmart.com/forums/topic/star-citizen-musings/#post-5222) earlier, once lies catch up, it's only downhill from here.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4q1blfWcAEVoA1.jpg)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4q1blrXUAAheBc.jpg)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C4q1bllWQAESTjQ.jpg)
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Our numbers Goon, boviscopophobic, has his latest analysis from the funding chart (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals) numbers.
The Valentine's Day sale is pretty sad so far. However, I doubt CIG was counting on it to bring in all that much cash compared to a typical concept sale.
(https://i.imgur.com/c92xeL9.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/EwR457i.png)
The total take so far is about $113K.
Thanks to the "stock limits" on some of the items (Aurora starter package, Mustang starter package, Starfarer Gemini, Starfarer Gemini two-pack), we can see how well individual SKUs are selling as well as get an upper bound on the amount of fresh cash spent on those items. The starter packages ($35 each) are warbond editions and thus cash-only; the Starfarer packages can be bought with store credit if I understand correctly. I only started checking stocks a while after the sale began, so the time axis in this plot does not start at 0.
(https://i.imgur.com/IgareJ2.png)
The trends are fairly linear over the sampled period, with the Aurora selling at about 10.7 units/hour, Mustang at 13.4 units/hour, Starfarer Gemini at 2.9 units/hour, and the Starfarer Gemini two-pack at 0 units/hour. The enticing 8.8% discount on a two-pack (which I believe has limitations placed on it with regard to individual melting and such) hasn't brought backer wallets out, and so the number of two-packs sold has been firmly stuck at... 2.
The total amount of cash accounted for by these four SKUs is at most $29,575 if no store credit was used. Is it believable that roughly $83K, minus maybe $15K-ish of usual daily revenue, was spent on the unlimited SKUs? I leave that to you to decide.
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Night of Feb 21st, 2 backers gave CIG $30K by buying 2 completionist packs (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/Combos/The-Completionist-Digital) (don't contain all the ships btw).
I kid you not.
Let's wait and see if they later put in for refunds; as that may be a clear sign of money laundering.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5R-ZIRWAAISwVn.jpg:large)
And as someone pointed out, a 3rd of the income came from those two purchases
(https://i.imgur.com/3p8fHEQ.png)
UPDATE: Apparently one of the Completionists is this dude (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=9.msg1143#msg1143)
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(http://i.imgur.com/imlV3GQ.jpg)
Since the Hurricane went on sale, the funding ticker now clocks at over $144M. :cripes:
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Latest Hurricane sales track compared to previous comparable JPEGS
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5mTwBsWYAYsHHu.jpg)
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(http://i.imgur.com/imlV3GQ.jpg)
Since the Hurricane went on sale, the funding ticker now clocks at over $144M. :cripes:
This means either they are forging this data or or either the whales are even more blind than anticipated!! :laugh: :laugh:
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Latest sales analytics
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5xuieHWQAAuPKl.jpg:large)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5xuieMWMAAOaj0.jpg:large)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5xuieJWYAAFrbL.jpg:large)
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Absolutely no way in hell that 5 whales (or a combination of same) each dropped $15K on a Completionist package (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/Combos/The-Completionist-Digital) at this stage. They've got to be cooking the books. There's no other explanation. Either that, or someone is actively engaged in money laundering.
Five Completionist packs purchased in the past week, well done CIG! Game is good now, and there are 10 more Hartwell Music Sentinel 88G's in the 'Verse!
That's most likely more Completionist packs purchased in 7 days than were purchased in Feb-Dec 2016. (I don't have records for Jan 2016.)
(https://i.imgur.com/8i0A9kB.png)
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Our resident Goon data analyst, boviscopophobic, came up with some interesting (and startling) stats.
For comparison, I went back and looked at the stats for patch 2.6 as well. I am assuming patch 2.6 ran from 2016/12/23 23:04:58 through 2017/2/18 02:27:15, or about 1347 hours.
Star Marine:
122,711 users played a total of 115,781 hours across the two game types. However, there were likely many free fly players contributing low playtimes.
Half the total playtime was contributed by just 7178 players.
The top 170 players (0.14% of all SM players, or 0.01% of all citizens) contributed 10% of the total playtime.
The bottom half of the playerbase accounted for less than 10% of the total game time.
The average concurrent leaderboard-enabled player count was 86 over the course of the season.
The max time logged was 248.3 hours.
The playtime Gini coefficient was 0.685.
Arena Commander:
34,482 users played a total of 91,801 hours.
The mean playtime was 161 minutes while the third quartile was 146 minutes. I didn't bother to calculate any further but this also suggests a considerably top-heavy distribution.
The max time logged was 175.5 hours.
Murray Cup (racing):
10,089 users played a total of 3,285 hours, meaning that less than 2.5 people on average were racing at any given moment. One dedicated racer (pgabz?) spent 63.4 hours in this game mode.
Thus far since release, only 2039 people have played 2.6.1 Star Marine for more than 83 minutes, and together they contributed half the total playtime of SM
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/166260954412089344/289986563159621633/unknown.png)
Nothing to worry about though, the other rumored 1+ million backers are just waiting for the game to finish.
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(https://i.imgur.com/ImFKVOa.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/NBhNCJt.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/4jUGBqk.jpg)
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Today (29.Mar) at 1am GMT another Completionist Pack has been sold :) (hourly tracker was over $16k)
Well I can understand this in kickstarter projects with nice perks but these are simple promises of ships from a company that keeps breaking their word.
The people who could afford them are basically the people who won't buy them - Wealthy people aren't wealthy because they spend thousands on dreams ...
My best guess is that a streamer or someone got it directly for free from CIG as a gratification - but this would lead to legal problems in many countries (decieving customers that there is cash flow)
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Today (29.Mar) at 1am GMT another Completionist Pack has been sold :) (hourly tracker was over $16k)
Well I can understand this in kickstarter projects with nice perks but these are simple promises of ships from a company that keeps breaking their word.
The people who could afford them are basically the people who won't buy them - Wealthy people aren't wealthy because they spend thousands on dreams ...
My best guess is that a streamer or someone got it directly for free from CIG as a gratification - but this would lead to legal problems in many countries (decieving customers that there is cash flow)
That's the thing; we simply don't know. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that someone would - today - be buying $15K packs.
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There's that Completionist
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/166260954412089344/296802201924534283/unknown.png)
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Derek, I think you have done a tremendous awareness work on this project.
But if they are still selling completionists packages, after all you guys been warning the public, after all the media articles that warn current and new users about being careful...Well... I really dont know what can we do or say anymore.
People part ways with their money however they like, but this is absurd, specially with so many broken promises and missed deadlines.
Also, did they release an API to track the funding or someone is using a bot to track it all?
Man, the amount of popcorn we gonna need for when this shit show collapse is gonna be epic! :laugh:
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Derek, I think you have done a tremendous awareness work on this project.
But if they are still selling completionists packages, after all you guys been warning the public, after all the media articles that warn current and new users about being careful...Well... I really dont know what can we do or say anymore.
People part ways with their money however they like, but this is absurd, specially with so many broken promises and missed deadlines.
Also, did they release an API to track the funding or someone is using a bot to track it all?
Man, the amount of popcorn we gonna need for when this shit show collapse is gonna be epic! :laugh:
That's the thing, there is ZERO evidence to support the theory that these are legit sales.
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Derek, I think you have done a tremendous awareness work on this project.
But if they are still selling completionists packages, after all you guys been warning the public, after all the media articles that warn current and new users about being careful...Well... I really dont know what can we do or say anymore.
People part ways with their money however they like, but this is absurd, specially with so many broken promises and missed deadlines.
Also, did they release an API to track the funding or someone is using a bot to track it all?
Man, the amount of popcorn we gonna need for when this shit show collapse is gonna be epic! :laugh:
That's the thing, there is ZERO evidence to support the theory that these are legit sales.
Would not surprise me one bit if they are faking it.
Boosting sales to show healthy growth and support and indirectly tell prospective buyers that the project is on-going and instil them the feeling of "Well, all these thousands of backers can't be wrong, huh? So I think I am safe too.... *opens wallet*"
So yeah, come to think of it and given CIG's past deviant tactics, I am pretty sure there is something very dodgy with their "financial openness".
I think at this point theres nothing that can be said anymore to warn people. It is a matter of time and I do hope when the time comes, you do write that book because this is so very worthy of one! ;)
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145 million usd achieved in total. The refunds, the monthly ships CIG get their employees to buy, grey market sales. Don't add up in my mind. I've also noticed the forums are dead as well as the reddit pages. Very few people are actually using the forums, and even fewer use the reddit page.
The excuse is "most people who pledge just pledge and leave" i don't think thats the only explanationan at all here.
It would be interesting to get some statistics on the amount of traffic on their site for per day.
Not to mention how the community lives in denial, and everytime Derek is wrong about something he said about the game. They take it as a victory... Wat?
Most of us don't even own the game. Or have gotten a refund, we are the ones who have zero usd spend on the game. We can buy it for 60$ if they manage to create it or we can start dissecting the corpse if it fails.
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Traffic to both their sites and Reddit are way down. It's hilarious to think that at one point /r/StarCitizen_Refunds/ got more traffic than /r/StarCitizen. And it poignant that /r/DerekSmart - their hate sub - helps amplify the noise that those ass-clowns are most toxic.
The project is dead. We're just waiting for the funeral arrangements to be announced now.
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Q1 is in the books! Quarterly funding is down $1,752,326.31 (26%) compared to 2016, and down $3,806,451.93 (43%) compared to 2015.
(https://i.imgur.com/28LGM2q.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/UW9MXgC.png)
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With funding at an all-time low, as if by magic, there's a new sale (results are mediocre atm). It's as if they actually need the money to continue operations.
(http://i.imgur.com/eP6DVoW.png)
(https://media.giphy.com/media/z9BW7ApDO6hTq/giphy.gif)
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About that Drake
(http://i.imgur.com/CoPos3O.png)
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Following the release of the controversial 3.0 release which I wrote about (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=9.msg1373#msg1373), they rolled out a Spring sale and free fly event until 18th.
(https://i.imgur.com/rKu66eQ.png)
First day of a new sale and free fly, following CIG's mic drop with the 3.0 schedule!
... what a damp squib.
If you go look at what's on offer for this sale, it's profoundly unexciting. The good stuff would probably still sell like hotcakes, but that trick won't work indefinitely -- even Citizens will eventually realize that they can't actually use 5 personal Javelins. So CIG has to keep that stuff in reserve and trot out these warmed-over leavings, but they're not even getting enough purchases to push them to the ~$100K daily breakeven point, on the first day of a heavily front-loaded sale, having had to incur huge amounts of technical/engineering debt (via the just-published production schedule) even to get to this point.
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Two (!) completionist purchases have come in today. And there is still time for more! That makes nine completionist pack purchases so far this year. I think all of last year I detected one, or maybe two.
70 minutes apart. Also note what could be Javelin add-ons after the $15k spikes.
completionist 1, javelin 1, 70 minutes later repeat
(http://i.imgur.com/wEUdA28.png)
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9nvswrXkAEmhZ8.jpg)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9nvswWXgAA6Ryw.jpg)
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C98vXWUXUAAsFyR.jpg)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C98vXWVWAAAjdep.jpg)
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Banu Defender ship sale is in full swing. This is a JPEG btw
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-BVVUhWsAAQR4x.jpg)
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New Star Citizen analytics. Referral drive, so far a dud (about 12K new signups). So far about 100 whales bought the new Banu Defender JPEG yielding about $500K
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-Qe1gGXcAAkX7V.jpg)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-Qe1gIXoAEwitp.jpg)
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-Qe1gFXUAABd5y.jpg)
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New analytics from our Goon numbers guy
(http://i.imgur.com/eKl5INc.png)
Oh, and since there was some FUD over fleet counts earlier:
(http://i.imgur.com/y1ARSIG.png)
It's interesting that the funding during the warbond-only presale significantly exceeds the number of units sold times the unit price. Under usual circumstances I've ascribed this to melting, but why would people melt for a cash-only sale? Perhaps it is non-pre-sale plebs melting their stuff in anticipation of the non-warbond SKUs becoming available.
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With the upcoming 3.0, and news that the Nox was going to be playable, it makes sense that shortly after PC Gamer confirmed it, that the Nox quickly passed the Cyclone
(http://imgur.com/857lAbH.png)
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(http://imgur.com/RReJXaQ.jpg)
(http://imgur.com/inpDu8A.jpg)
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Our Goon bovine over on SA has new analytics
An update on the leaderboard stats for the previous week... Overall average player counts have remained fairly steady:
Star Marine: 24.4
Arena Commander: 25.8
Racing: 3.4
A total of 84,315 distinct users have played one or more of these game modes in the current season, i.e. since the 2.6.3 patch somewhere around April 1.
73,292 users have played a total of 349849 matches of Star Marine. 85% of these users have played between 1 and 5 matches. 34398 of those (47% of the total) were one and done. The highest total time logged by a single player is 343.4 hours.
32,257 users have played a total of 308576 games of Arena Commander. 73% of these users have played between 1 and 5 matches. 12262 of those (38% of the total) were one and done. The highest total time logged by a single player is 261.7 hours.
15,715 users have played a total of 203345 races. 61% of these users have played between 1 and 5 races. 5078 of those (32% of the total) were one and done. The highest total time logged by a single player is 87.5 hours.
The highest individual playtime in all modes combined is 350.2 hours.
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(https://i.imgur.com/tQ3VyZt.png)
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We already knew that Spectrum was a failure, but...
Write-up and survey results from last weeks pre-3.0 survey. [Wall of text + statistics warning] (https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/6s7ihh/writeup_and_survey_results_from_last_weeks_pre30/)
(http://i.imgur.com/WAaY9Ou.png)
(http://i.imgur.com/9c9CJfh.png)
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We know the funding chart is part-fiction, but here are current trends
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIKSddnXoAE1xZY.jpg)
Citcon 2016
Citcon 2014
Gamescom 2017
Citcon 2015
Nox
Gamescom 2016
The 600i and other ships are on sale.
Out to 200hrs
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIKUwk_XYAEuhrZ.jpg)
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIUest_XYAA8vMt.jpg)
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Latest GC2017 metrics. GC2016 (where they lied the most brazenly) is on track to surpass GC2017 in the next 48hrs
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIUvxU0WAAE0l_q.jpg)
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Uhm, is it me or am I missing lines here and there? E.g. the legenda shows 6 but I see only 5 lines. One more than 1 graphic btw. And I prefer, if possible, not only different colours but also extra markers like - - - and = = = = and _ _ _ and such. Some colours are very similar and hard to follow
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Uhm, is it me or am I missing lines here and there? E.g. the legenda shows 6 but I see only 5 lines. One more than 1 graphic btw. And I prefer, if possible, not only different colours but also extra markers like - - - and = = = = and _ _ _ and such. Some colours are very similar and hard to follow
It's there. The Purple lines for GC2017 are pretty low (look on the lower-left)
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Ah. Almost on top of the golden one :thumbsup:
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIac35SVwAEw4lr.jpg)
Latest funding financials (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/htmlview#)
Latest Star Citizen funding chart (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals) (it's bullshit)
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Even the fake funding chart is already on it's way down. Hard. So it would seem that the chart somehow is connected to actual sales and that it is going down hard seems logical after that shit presentation. Only a White Knight would still pull his wallet.
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIac35SVwAEw4lr.jpg)
Latest funding financials (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/htmlview#)
Latest Star Citizen funding chart (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals) (it's bullshit)
I don't think this chart works any more as half the sale is still missing. They have split their sales into a pre-sale and release sale over the past few months. The pre-sale targets new citizens, streamers that horde and big ship buyers. The release sale has a price increase and targets LTI hoarders who will only upgrade. Two charts would be very telling and then a total chart somehow. This chart just represents the pre-sale which will probably pale in comparison to the 3.0 release sale.
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boviscopophobic has a new chart up.
Current time-aligned sales chart. I've seen some complaints about chart readability and I agree with those criticisms, but fixing it would take more hand tweaking than I feel like bothering with for a one-off forum post. Gamescom 2017 has now fallen behind Gamescom 2016 and I expect the gap to widen further over the coming days.
(http://i.imgur.com/YEJtYP0.png)
The big success of Gamescom 2016 was in bringing in new accounts and presumably gaining a healthy chunk of new paying citizens in the process. Gamescom 2017 is barely producing a bump in signups versus any other random concept sale, such as the Nox sale which I've included for comparison.
(http://i.imgur.com/O7RyzOf.png)
Direct comparison of Gamescom 2017 versus Gamescom 2016...
(http://i.imgur.com/EemnsLs.png)
Yearly revenue. 2017 revenue is about to fall below 2016 revenue year on year, which of course means CIG will need even bigger Citcon/anniversary/holiday sales if they want to make up the difference.
(http://i.imgur.com/vbtFAJN.png)
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Posting now because this latest Australian tax sale cash grab will probably mess up tomorrow's numbers.
(http://i.imgur.com/uBGAyYm.png)
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So, the month of August now has passed. Including Gamescom and the special Aussie sale. What strikes me on the funding tracker is that sales for August are the same as for May. One wonders... I'd love to see the latest analysis.
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So, the month of August now has passed. Including Gamescom and the special Aussie sale. What strikes me on the funding tracker is that sales for August are the same as for May. One wonders... I'd love to see the latest analysis.
The tracking is rubbish. We just don't know to what extent - yet.
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I think it's all rubbish: funding data, employee numbers, backer numbers, monthly reports, development schedule etc. There is no data published by CIG which is audited and can be trusted.
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I think it's all rubbish: funding data, employee numbers, backer numbers, monthly reports, development schedule etc. There is no data published by CIG which is audited and can be trusted.
Agreed.
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Australian tax dodge cash grab kept today from being a bloodbath. Some kind of Australian sales tax on digital goods is going up September 1st, so as a "favor" to Australian backers, CIG will allow them to purchase certain jpegs, which would otherwise only be offered at the anniversary sale, before the tax increase goes into effect.
(http://i.imgur.com/9As21HY.png)
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One might cynically surmise that the current subscriber flash sale (which is not the same as yesterday's Australian tax dodge sale) was introduced to push the eventual Gamescom 2017 total above the $2M mark.
(https://i.imgur.com/LwcVo3s.png)
However, it still can't compete with Gamescom 2016.
(https://i.imgur.com/yTgbqhI.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/L3MOkvd.png)
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Three overlapping sales is the charm, it looks like they will be able to break $2M during the Gamescom sale period.
(https://i.imgur.com/GJusPsN.png)
GC2016 currently holds an $800K lead over GC2017
(https://i.imgur.com/sdGGUtY.png)
What's that little upward jog at the end of the curve there? Could it be... yes, it's another probable completionist possibly followed by a Javelin! It's been a few months since we saw this type of activity.
(https://i.imgur.com/Mj8QYnV.png)
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Been following your site for a loooong time now, finally posting after I decided to send you an email Derek based off my findings comparing the increase in new citizens to the funding tracker that CIG updates themselves. Basically showing they earn virtually nothing through ship sales, and if their citizens tracker is known to be BS then they earned roughly 38-45%ish of what they actually claimed, probably less. I also found an interesting correlation between the total amount earned and the increases in citizens based on a simple line chart analysis and comparing the slopes, identical. I don't know how to post my findings on here so that's why I sent them to Derek, also so he can tell me if what I was looking at is BS. All data comes directly off their tracker
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Been following your site for a loooong time now, finally posting after I decided to send you an email Derek based off my findings comparing the increase in new citizens to the funding tracker that CIG updates themselves. Basically showing they earn virtually nothing through ship sales, and if their citizens tracker is known to be BS then they earned roughly 38-45%ish of what they actually claimed, probably less. I also found an interesting correlation between the total amount earned and the increases in citizens based on a simple line chart analysis and comparing the slopes, identical. I don't know how to post my findings on here so that's why I sent them to Derek, also so he can tell me if what I was looking at is BS. All data comes directly off their tracker
Hi. I received both emails. Will review and respond in a bit.
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Yeah, totally not suspicious. Like, at all.
(https://imgur.com/BceaxJS.jpg)
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The $160M game, with over 500K citizens, that nobody is playing. Don't worry though, the 20 mins of gameplay that the upcoming 3.0 "Baby Jesus Patch" promises, will fix everything.
The interval covered by this report was Aug 14 to Aug 23
The average usage of the 2.6.3 EA modules is now struggling to stay above 40 concurrent players.
Star Marine: 16.9
Arena Commander: 20.2
Murray Cup: 3.0
Total: 40.1
The interval covered by this report was Sep 13 through Sep 24
Star Marine: 16.5
Arena Commander: 23.4
Murray Cup: 3.0
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The average usage of the 2.6.3 EA modules is now struggling to stay above 40 concurrent players.
So that "MMO" can house all players within the current limits of the engine in the same instance. Great!
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Where is this consistent money coming from? It can't be subscriptions surely. Even in the most optimistic scenario nobody is consistently buying that many ships anymore either. :catstare:
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Where is this consistent money coming from? It can't be subscriptions surely. Even in the most optimistic scenario nobody is consistently buying that many ships anymore either. :catstare:
It's all bullshit designed to show health and interest in the project.
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So it looks like the latest X1 concept sale is a bust. I guess not every backer whale bought a horrid space bike JPEG for a game mechanic that doesn't exist in a game that's nowhere near complete. $35 bux. LOL!!
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/16139-The-New-Definition-Of-Performance
(https://i.imgur.com/q0IYVxK.png)
Also, 2017 funding has dipped below 2014 levels
(https://i.imgur.com/o853OIq.png)
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How much can these even be believed though? Do you feel they are padded so possibly performing even worse than reported, or just completely fake in which case why would they post false poor data lol.
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How much can these even be believed though? Do you feel they are padded so possibly performing even worse than reported, or just completely fake in which case why would they post false poor data lol.
We're using the fake data because it's what we have access to based on their data. And even fake data can show trends, regardless of how fake they are.
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I can't believe people are still giving this train wreck $30k a day.
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Yup, that's another flop. I guess the whales aren't spite pledging enough. Hey guyz!! Please go show your support and buy the 3-pack X1!!
(https://i.imgur.com/cVJfwA5.png)
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Yeah, that's not looking good, is it?
(https://i.imgur.com/efrP6Rw.png)
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Our analytical Goon, bovis, has his new stats
Total EA module usage drops below 40!
Star Marine: 14.9
Arena Commander: 20.3
Murray Cup: 2.4
Total: 37.5
The interval covered by this report was Sep 25 through October 2.
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Oh, but you just wait and see when 3.0 is released. Then they'll all be racing for hours and hours on the moon like it's
Super Mario Kart a space sim.
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Oh, but you just wait and see when 3.0 is released. Then they'll all be racing for hours and hours on the moon like it's Super Mario Kart a space sim.
Yeah, it's going to be hilarious when they glitch through the terrain and end up in the void.
To be honest, 3.0 can't come soon enough.
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I agree. I'm betting on CIG not showing up at Gamescom 2018 so the sooner 3.0 hits the streets, the better for me :D
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Did anybody notice, the fake funding tracker went up yesterday. In celebration with the first 3.0 build going out there of course. Boy, did they miss the actual sentiment upon receiving there :lol:
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They already hid the whale packages. When are they going to hide the fake fund tracker?
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Oh, I don't think they actually dare to do that. That would be a very clear and open sign that there is/was something wrong with it - why else remove it? - and that would bring up the obvious follow up question how much was actually true of it all those years. No, that part of the scam most likely will continu "as normal". Even showing real decline in funding could (will) be interpreted as a sign that things are amiss. No, Chris will go on the same old happy merry way. Nothing wrong here folks, carry on...
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The 2016 filings are in, and explained in this post (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=2548)
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So, people are talking about the latest financials and now The Agent said this: (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=2551)
things are falling apart and have been since the middle of last year. I've had six people ask me to go on record or reveal sources lately (I've declined). I'm sure they've talked to Bootcha and Beer and outside contractors and current/former employees and god knows who else.
I know you'd like to imagine that somehow, Chris and Sandi and Ben and Jared and Tony and Erin are really, really nice people, who care about the backers that gave them millions.
Here's the thing, and I'm trying not to be mean, just as real as possible: they don't give a gently caress about anything but money. The product that you'll get delivered in 3 weeks is an absolute travesty and that's going to be it. They'll continue the Live support for the game, promising additional content and increased player counts, but this is it; 3.0, in the state at which is arrives, is going to be Star Citizen. That's it.
When that happens, when the dreams are no longer just accessible in the mind but available to be played on the keyboard, that's when things are going to go into an absolute loving frenzy. Chris Roberts and everyone else in his little tower understand this. They 100% understand.
I'm sorry your dream space game is going to be an absolutely janky piece of poo poo with almost no content but what the players create for themselves. I really am. As a backer, I'd liked to have played a fun PC space game, too.
But this is it. This is what you're going to get. And it's just, it's just awful. It's really, really loving bad.
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So, people are talking about the latest financials and now The Agent said this: (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=2551)
things are falling apart and have been since the middle of last year. I've had six people ask me to go on record or reveal sources lately (I've declined). I'm sure they've talked to Bootcha and Beer and outside contractors and current/former employees and god knows who else.
I know you'd like to imagine that somehow, Chris and Sandi and Ben and Jared and Tony and Erin are really, really nice people, who care about the backers that gave them millions.
Here's the thing, and I'm trying not to be mean, just as real as possible: they don't give a gently caress about anything but money. The product that you'll get delivered in 3 weeks is an absolute travesty and that's going to be it. They'll continue the Live support for the game, promising additional content and increased player counts, but this is it; 3.0, in the state at which is arrives, is going to be Star Citizen. That's it.
When that happens, when the dreams are no longer just accessible in the mind but available to be played on the keyboard, that's when things are going to go into an absolute loving frenzy. Chris Roberts and everyone else in his little tower understand this. They 100% understand.
I'm sorry your dream space game is going to be an absolutely janky piece of poo poo with almost no content but what the players create for themselves. I really am. As a backer, I'd liked to have played a fun PC space game, too.
But this is it. This is what you're going to get. And it's just, it's just awful. It's really, really loving bad.
If 3.0 is going to be 1.0 Final, it would explain the move to no more refunds. (Aside from CiG is broke.) And possibly the removal of certain packages (because they know they can't deliver).
At least there's ED.
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I'm wondering where the 3 weeks is coming from in "The product that you'll get delivered in 3 weeks is an absolute travesty and that's going to be it.". What's up in 3 weeks? What does he know :supaburn:
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I'm wondering where the 3 weeks is coming from in "The product that you'll get delivered in 3 weeks is an absolute travesty and that's going to be it.". What's up in 3 weeks? What does he know :supaburn:
Either A) Loans are coming due and they don't have the money. or B) CiG failed to meet certain milestones (The Agent mentioned these in June in ELE) which means investor funding goes away.
Or the investor cash is already gone (backer cash is long gone) and loans and bills are coming due.
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The 2016 filings are in, and explained in this post (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=2548)
Yeah. I am writing a blog about it. I have been busy with some stuff this week.
Twitter storm with my quick thoughts: https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/923510084046598145
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Citcon 2017 (pre-sale) starts out at a record-setting pace, then there's some weird $139,115 dip in the tracker -- which is not a temporary glitch because there is no compensating positive spike later. Things are now settling back to Citcon 2016 pre-sale levels.
(https://i.imgur.com/JRlM5gB.png)
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Citcon 2017 (pre-sale) starts out at a record-setting pace, then there's some weird $139,115 dip in the tracker -- which is not a temporary glitch because there is no compensating positive spike later. Things are now settling back to Citcon 2016 pre-sale levels.
(https://i.imgur.com/JRlM5gB.png)
Is this finally proof we need to show that the funding tracker is fake, or at least heavily padded?
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Is this finally proof we need to show that the funding tracker is fake, or at least heavily padded?
Inconclusive. But it's already known that it's inaccurate. Whether they are intentionally faking it or not, is not yet proven and is only information based on sources, with no way yet to verify it. We DO know that it doesn't take into account refunds; and that it does take into account monthly subs (which is why the daily is never $0).
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Citcon 2016 got two big surges from the RSI Polaris pre-sale followed by the general sale. Citcon 2017 has already seen the opening of the general sale but is not performing as well. It looks more likely to track around Citcon 2015's performance, so maybe $2.5M or so. That would leave CIG down about $1.5M-$2M year on year versus 2016.
(https://i.imgur.com/C1bv9C8.png)
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(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNaexoGXkAAI-WP.jpg)
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Adding to our metrics analytics, a UK accounting Goon (shrach) is also in the mix. This from the latest accounting filing which I wrote about here.
I'm going to point out one error/mistake in the CIG accounts per day.
1.) Geography
In a consolidated set of accounts for a group of companies you eliminate intra-group transactions. This makes sense, because if you sell goods and services between two companies in a group you would just have matching revenue in one company and cost in the other. So in the CIG UK group, you can ignore the revenue in F42, this has an equal expense in CIG UK that you also ignore. You can then ignore the revenue in CIG UK, since this has an equal expense in RSI UK that you also ignore. Essentially you will just be left with the development costs in F42 and the revenue in RSI UK.
RSI UK has one customer. This is Roberts Space Industries, Corp based in the USA. We know that RSI UK invoices in dollars, because they have exchange losses/gains. We know they don't charge VAT, because they are issuing invoices in dollars to an American company and there is no VAT timing liability on the balance sheet. So we know that the CIG UK group has 100% of its turnover generated in the United States. The accounts however claim that 100% of turnover is attributable to the UK.
(https://i.imgur.com/selUvkp.jpg)
These disclosures are typically generated like this by default in an accounting package and it would be up to the accountant to make a manual adjustment to ensure it is correct. It only really affects the overall image of the company rather than any financial implications. If a UK group has 100% turnover in the UK it doesn't really merit any further thought. If a UK group has 100% turnover in the USA it would make it more obvious that delving deeper showed the entire corporation had one customer and that it was a related party with an almost identical name to one of the UK companies.
If you're curious why the 2015 comparative figures don't match, that will be a future error/mistake.
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(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/376195971878748161/unknown.png)
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I'm sorry your dream space game is going to be an absolutely janky piece of poo poo with almost no content but what the players create for themselves. I really am. As a backer, I'd liked to have played a fun PC space game, too.
But this is it. This is what you're going to get. And it's just, it's just awful. It's really, really loving bad. [/i]
If 3.0 is going to be 1.0 Final, it would explain the move to no more refunds. (Aside from CiG is broke.) And possibly the removal of certain packages (because they know they can't deliver).
At least there's ED.
I do hope it's over soon and that most will be done with SC 3.0 after 1 to 4 hours or whatever mvp it turns out to be into final obscurity. (but I would still welcome an "American Greed" episode reporting on the > 100 million wasted or siphoned RSI scandal) So those trolls on the ED forums who keep saying the release of 3.0 will snag "80%" of the playerbase away from ED killing it, can finally be proven wrong and go back to their holes.
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Update
Today's accounting error/mistake.
2.) Balance(s) brought forward.
Here I present extracts from three sets of accounts. Roberts Space Industries International 2015 and 2016 and also the Cloud Imperium Games UK Ltd 2016 (consolidated).
All three sets of accounts break down the balance due to Roberts Space Industries Corporation as at 31 December 2015. They all agree that the balance was £4,120,206 due and that costs charged in the period were £15,310,157. All three differ however in the amounts that were settled and that were brought forward from 2014.
At first glance, this would seem to be of little importance. The CIG 2016 group accounts are actually the same as the RSI 2016. While RSI show a bfwd balance of zero, the CIG set are a consolidated amount of zero and of negative £239,987. Ordinarily when preparing the 2016 accounts the 2015 comparatives would be generated automatically from the previous year. This would suggest that the RSI 2015 is the correct breakdown and both sets of 2016 accounts are wrong.
(https://i.imgur.com/yYv5TE8.jpg)
These related party transaction disclosures are usually edited manually, which to me suggests the accountant here is...perhaps not as attention to detail oriented as they could be. My personal opinion is that if you are charging a client some ~£48,000 for two years of accounts, you don't make basic errors like this. All the client gets to show for your work is 20 sheets of paper, stapled together. So you should always make sure all the sheets are stacked perfectly before and after stapling. You should take a similar level of scrutiny to what is actually printed on the paper.
There is actually a more serious reason this discrepancy and ones like it are annoying and there is a huge "mistake" that is "hidden" here, but I'll revisit this later.
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Today's accounting error/mistake
3.) Debits and Credits.
Knowing your debits from your credits may be hard for your first week but this should become pretty ingrained as part of the core of double-entry bookkeeping.
It's pretty simple. A credit in the profit and loss account is a "good" thing, it increases profit. The corresponding debit in your balance sheet is a "good" thing, it will represent an asset. So a debit value in your profit and loss account will be a "bad" thing that reduces your profit and the corresponding credit in your balance sheet is a "bad" thing that will represent a liability.
So if you make a foreign currency exchange gain, it should be apparent that it will be a "good" thing in your profit and loss account that increases your profit. Thus a credit balance.
So here, you can see the wording is correct in the 2015 RSI accounts. In 2016 someone just had to add "(gains)/." to the line where it says, "Exchange losses". Instead they added brackets around the word losses and then added in the gains/ without brackets. This is painful to see because of both how basic the error is and how they had to go out of their way to make the error. I included the line from the CIG UK Ltd 2016 (group) accounts just to show it is possible to get this correct.
(https://i.imgur.com/j93lDOq.jpg)
This has no real numerical impact but this is building on the narrative about the quality of the preparation of the 2016 RSI accounts, which is some foreshadowing.
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See my original article (http://dereksmart.com/forums/reply/5973/), as well as PT 1 (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg5332#msg5332), 2 (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg5346#msg5346), 3 (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg5363#msg5363) of this financial analysis by our UK accounting Goon.
Today's accounting error/mistake is the final one. It builds on the ones that were previously highlighted but this is actually more a series of deliberate decisions. I'm struggling to find a generously innocuous word that conveys making deliberate decisions that are possibly not correct.
4.) Prior year adjustments.
At some point a set of accounts will be filed that are incorrect. Humans can make mistakes. I'll give an example. Say in 2015 a client paid you in cash for £1000 and you accidentally lost the sales receipt and accidentally banked the money in your personal bank account instead of the company bank account. Later on in 2016, the client asks for a receipt and this helps you remember this event. You're now faced with three options.
(i) You could file an amended set of accounts for 2015 that makes corrections. This seems intuitive and I'm sure textbooks and "experts" online will tell you this is the right thing to do. No one ever files amended accounts. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why, but it doesn't happen.
(ii) You can "do nothing". This doesn't really mean you do nothing. It means when you file the 2016 accounts, you add on those £1000 sales that were really in 2015 and you pay the company back the cash from your personal account. So now the company is declaring that missing income, albeit in the wrong period.
(iii) You make a prior year adjustment to the 2015 figures in the comparative when you compile the 2016 accounts. You disclose all of these items and you can file an amended tax return, without adjusting the 2015 accounts themselves.
The UK CIG group were faced with such a situation. Here is the disclosure in the Foundry 42 Ltd accounts that explains the decision:
(https://i.imgur.com/bcQpog0.jpg)
So the original turnover amount was £15,169,773 and it was adjusted to be £12,737,713. A reduction in turnover of £2,432,060. This means they also had to add £2,432,060 to the balance sheet, as a liability. Since they now owed Cloud Imperium Games UK Ltd that amount. You can see they did all this correct (since they were owed £83,979 separately, this is netted off against this amount due to CIG UK).
(https://i.imgur.com/xftCNIc.jpg)
(https://i.imgur.com/qoGhAUK.jpg)
So far this is all correct from an accounting angle. However, the UK group of companies are all irrevocably linked. Because of the way the accounts were filed, we have access to the individual filings for 2015 but not the group accounts. In 2016 we have the accounts for Foundry 42, RSI and the group accounts (but not the individual accounts for the CIG company). We can pretty much recreate the missing sets of accounts.
Here is a summary of the 2015 accounts, as they were originally filed. It should be noted that the linked green items, do not appear in the group accounts. These inter-company transactions cancel each other.
(https://i.imgur.com/9cS7QXS.jpg)
Here is an extract from the 2016 consolidated group accounts. Note the profit for the year 2015 shown as £1,088,498.
(https://i.imgur.com/NSp9yOr.jpg)
So the group profit in my summary differs from the 2015 group profit that is disclosed in the 2016 accounts by £2,432,060. Now we know what that is, it's that prior year adjustment. But nowhere in the 2016 group accounts is any prior-year adjustment disclosed. What is disclosed is that the CIG company profit was the same as filed in 2015 at £265,299 profit.
(https://i.imgur.com/GBEVJL3.jpg)
So now we have a big problem. How can we adjust the summary of the 2015 accounts to correct for this prior-year adjustment. Remember all the linked boxes in my summary that can't be changed individually? If we are reducing Foundry 42s turnover figure by £2,432,060 we also have to reduce CIGs cost of sales by £2,432,060 since that is where the turnover came from. We know that CIG (the company) profit stayed the same though, so we know we have to reduce CIGs turnover, also by £2,432,060. So now we also need to reduce RSIs cost of sales by £2,432,060. All good so far. We know that that RSIs profit remains zero also, because we know the groups profit so we also have to reduce their turnover by £2,432,060 however this goes outside the UK group because this is a refund to Roberts Space Industries Corporation, in the USA. So this is going to be an amount in dollars, so it may not match exactly and we have to rely on the accountants to get this right.
We arrive at a new summary, something like this. Bolded numbers are the figures that have been adjusted:
(https://i.imgur.com/fo8EO1R.jpg)
For some reason, they changed the cost of sales in RSI by adding £239,986 to the costs. I've noted it down as a suspense amount because we have no idea why they did this. So to maintain a zero profit, we need to counter this by adding £239,986 to their revenue. This seems like a leap of faith but our summary now matches the group accounts exactly.
So now the group accounts match our summary there are some implications to this. The UK group derives all its income from RSI International Ltd, which derives all its income from the USA company RSI Corporation. Now we can solve why the 2015 turnover figures don't match and the 2016 ones do match. Note the figure does match our summary for RSI, that we have recreated with our own turnover figure by deduction from the group accounts.
(https://i.imgur.com/UOmanxT.jpg)
We sort of have to now conclude that there must be two different sets of RSI accounts for them to get this "correct" in the group accounts. The RSI accounts that were filed were never corrected for any prior-year adjustment and yet, there must exist a set of RSI accounts that have been corrected in order to get a set of group accounts that is accurate.
The implications here are decidedly tricky. Back in 2015 the US companies would have presumably filed accounts and tax returns to US authories that claimed a dollar amount of expenses equal to £15.3m. Any audits done at this time, would have confirmation letters and invoices for these amounts. As far as audit trails for this £2.4m refund that would have gone back to the United States, well I hope I have demonstrated that this trail is really unclear for anyone that might investigate it. If it were accidentally paid to the wrong entity and then never declared, there would not be any trail.
So the corrections were handled appropriately in the Foundry 42 Ltd accounts. Adjustments were made and disclosures for those adjustments. They used option (iii) from my opening statement. The CIG accounts are slightly trickier, since we have the company accounts for 2015 and the group accounts for 2016 but we can safely say that some adjustments were made but absolutely no disclosures at all. That is sort of an incorrectly implented option (iii) from my opening statement. The RSI accounts have not had any adjustments made and therefore no disclosures and we have some pretty firm suspicions that there may in fact be two different sets of RSI accounts and they are certainly aware that the filed RSI accounts do not match the RSI accounts used for the consolidation of the group accounts that were filed. So it turns out that there was a hidden fourth option that you will not find in any text books and Chris Roberts has developed new solutions to problems and a way to make money apparently disappear.
I can only imagine the state of the dozen or so American companies that are open to zero public scrutiny.
Unrelated hypothetical paragraph
Imagine your company is sitting on £2.4m in the bank that it should not have, that should be refunded to another company in another country. However, in that country, that company does not know it's due any money from years ago. It was all audited and balances confirmed at that time and it's not asking or expecting any money. However, this company with the money in the bank has to get rid of it to make its books balance, it sure should go to the right place and I'm sure anyone would make certain that the right people get this £2.4m.
So as a disclaimer I should stress that I am in no way suggesting that anything unlawful was actually done here. I guess this highlights the "perils" of having multiple shell companies with regard to nice clean audit trails.
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This series of 4 posts is actually making accounting sound like fun! Like solving a mystery story (or creating one)!
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This series of 4 posts is actually making accounting sound like fun! Like solving a mystery story (or creating one)!
Yeah. But being a numbers guy myself, I'm biased to the beauty of numerical data. :smuggo:
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Spreadsheets FTW :D
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More confirmation (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=2685#post478178423) that there are really only a few whales still propping up this train wreck.
So it seems these are the numbers of pioneers sold in the end
around 4000-4500 out of 5000 made available.
Concierge warbonds: 2000 of 2000 sold.
Normal warbonds: ~800 of 1000 sold.
Normal credit: 1000 of 1000 sold.
GamesCom CitizenCon reserved: 200-700 of 1000 sold.
Which means that, as this thread has often guessed, the number of whales is around 2000-3000.
(https://i.imgur.com/ziIEsQW.png)
Even at $500 dollars a month per whale they're going to need a quite a bit more to make ends meet. I wonder if they'll dip into the Javelin piggy bank this month.
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No it will be the ultimate lazy jpeg. The double super Hornet. THey will attach two Hornets together wingtip to wingtip with only a gain in speed and firepower to show for it. It will be like the F82 Mustang. http://militaryhistorynow.com/2015/08/04/double-trouble-the-strange-history-of-the-p-82-twin-mustang/
Oh, wait... That would require Robbers to have some knowledge about actual military aviation development and since he lives in fantasy land it could only happen if jammed under his nose as something he could sell this weekend with a little photoshop editing.
Silly as this may sound it is something that I could easily see him doing for a quick million in "limited LTI War bond" sales.
Extended range more than double the missiles.
The Pay to kill ship.
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The agent posted some numbers (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=2705):
well October ended at almost 40% below last years funding
October 2017 funding: $3,251,843 (actual - estimated at $3,275,000 on October 30th)
October 2016 funding: $5,215,403
Difference: -$1,963,560
Percentage: -37.7%
Novembers estimate puts them even below that
November 2017 funding: $3,750,000 (estimated)
November 2016 funding: $7,776,767
Difference: -$4,026,767
Percentage: -51.8%
that would be a huge fucking difference and will make everyone shit their pants
as I've said before, the only thing I could see saving them is a bug free, stable and content rich 3.0 out the door like right motherfuckin now
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Yeah, you can map the actual amounts from the spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/htmlview#).
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Completionist pack #12 for the year showed up yesterday, with the usual Javelin followup.
(https://i.imgur.com/a39iLYC.png)
Totally not dodgy. At all.
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Well, keep crunching those numbers away, 'cause the next Sale is coming up. With supposedly 2 new ships (probably just variations on a theme)
This years anniversary sale will begin on the 24th of November and run for till the 4th of December. Like last year, it's planned to be a daily event kicked off by an intro video, and then a themed sale for 24h. Unlike 3 or 6 month insurance, an “Anniversary Standalone ship or “anniversary game package, come with a longer period of insurance. This year, being the fifth year, we should expect 60 Month insurance.
Last chance to give them your money before they go bust! Save CIG, buy something that does not exist yet for a game that never will see the light of day!
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They're absolutely despicable. The gall of them to full court press the ship sales at this point.
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October 2017: $3,251,843 (estimated at $3,275,000 - actual funding was below estimated target)
October 2016: $5,215,403 (-$1,940,403 vs 2017 estimate / -37.3% difference)
October 2015: $4,248,793 (-$973,793 vs 2017 estimate / -23.3% difference)
October 2014: $3,903,722 (-$628.722 vs 2017 estimate / -16.2% difference)
October 2013: $5,132,756 (-$1,857,756 vs 2017 estimate / -36.2% difference)
October 2012: $2,543,656 (+731,344 vs 2017 estimate / +32.4% difference)
November 2017 Current to 11/22/2016: $1,135,753
November 2016 Total to 11/22/2016: $3,656,780 (sale started on the 19th of 2016)
November 2016 Total pre-sale value: $851,407
November 2017: $5,100,000 (high estimate -- funding estimation by Nehkara puts it around $3,950,000 total for November)
November 2016: $7,776,767 (-$2,676,767 vs 2017 estimate / -34.4% difference)
November 2015: $5,358,817 (-$258,817 vs 2017 estimate / -5.1% difference)
November 2014: $6,101,678 (-$1,001,678.00 vs 2017 estimate / -16.4% difference)
November 2013: $7,871,634 (-$2,771,643 vs 2017 estimate / -35.2% difference)
November 2012: $4,367,877 (+$732,123 vs 2017 estimate / +16.8% difference)
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First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2017: $434,735
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2016: $1,302,326
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2015: $633,883
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2014: $665,676
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2013: $242,069
For all you playing at home, the funding tracker for the 24th is complete at $434,735. That's an $867,591 decrease from last year or a 66.6% decline in first day sales, making it the worst opening anniversary sale day since 2013
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First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2017: $434,735
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2016: $1,302,326
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2015: $633,883
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2014: $665,676
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2013: $242,069
For all you playing at home, the funding tracker for the 24th is complete at $434,735. That's an $867,591 decrease from last year or a 66.6% decline in first day sales, making it the worst opening anniversary sale day since 2013
It's still unbelievable that there are enough fools to give them this much money. Bonkers !!
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First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2017: $434,735
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2016: $1,302,326
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2015: $633,883
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2014: $665,676
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2013: $242,069
For all you playing at home, the funding tracker for the 24th is complete at $434,735. That's an $867,591 decrease from last year or a 66.6% decline in first day sales, making it the worst opening anniversary sale day since 2013
It's still unbelievable that there are enough fools to give them this much money. Bonkers !!
That's what I was thinking. I think the delusional backers at this point have taken to an all out fake information campaign about SC to get their friends and others to back, showing only the best game play clips, cinematics, and likely just blatantly lying about the state of the game. No one would honest back SC as a newcomer if they had done any research into the current state of affairs.
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First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2017: $434,735
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2016: $1,302,326
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2015: $633,883
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2014: $665,676
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2013: $242,069
For all you playing at home, the funding tracker for the 24th is complete at $434,735. That's an $867,591 decrease from last year or a 66.6% decline in first day sales, making it the worst opening anniversary sale day since 2013
It's still unbelievable that there are enough fools to give them this much money. Bonkers !!
That's what I was thinking. I think the delusional backers at this point have taken to an all out fake information campaign about SC to get their friends and others to back, showing only the best game play clips, cinematics, and likely just blatantly lying about the state of the game. No one would honest back SC as a newcomer if they had done any research into the current state of affairs.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
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https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/edit#gid=1694467207
(https://i.imgur.com/HAr5SyX.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/GsPgh8P.png)
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Fucking idiots. They deserve to lose every single penny.
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The scaring thing is, from a PR point of view, CIG is focusing their narrative on the total amount of money that people have "given" during the past 6 years, the same way a charity operation will do. Also when I read morons "celebrating" each million as a milestone is .... disgusting.
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Fucking idiots. They deserve to lose every single penny.
Oh they will. They most definitely will. Just wait.
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The scaring thing is, from a PR point of view, CIG is focusing their narrative on the total amount of money that people have "given" during the past 6 years, the same way a charity operation will do. Also when I read morons "celebrating" each million as a milestone is .... disgusting.
That's because those people are no longer funding a game. They're either funding a dream, or money laundering.
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But will Chris walk away rich and live happily ever after?
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But will Chris walk away rich and live happily ever after?
In some alternate universe where he really was a genius he would have hired a small crew to build a game while shoving 90% of the crowdfunded money into Bitcoin in 2013.
(Hell, I wish I had done that with my pocket change back then.)
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Here's the thousand dollar question; How much of the new money is coming from CiG themselves? It's become a well known tactic of crowd-funded projects for some devs to "invest" the money themselves to "get the ball rolling".
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Unless Chris gave them the money to "invest back" into the game, I don't think anybody working at CIG right now would be dumb enough to spend even 1 penny on the company they work for. Those currently working there are either complete morons or just don't have an alternative (yet) to feed their families. If you can walk away from CIG, you do it. Instantly.
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Unless Chris gave them the money to "invest back" into the game, I don't think anybody working at CIG right now would be dumb enough to spend even 1 penny on the company they work for. Those currently working there are either complete morons or just don't have an alternative (yet) to feed their families. If you can walk away from CIG, you do it. Instantly.
I don't mean the employees. I mean the higher ups; CRoberts and those immediately under him.
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(https://i.imgur.com/miwk92S.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/h3uifOg.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/MwqK0SX.png)
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A slightly different take on the visualization of the quarterly data.
(https://i.imgur.com/b7RmDtq.jpg)
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Here's the thousand dollar question; How much of the new money is coming from CiG themselves? It's become a well known tactic of crowd-funded projects for some devs to "invest" the money themselves to "get the ball rolling".
This would be fraud.
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It would be a lot easier to just "adjust" the funding tracker. Nobody from the inner circle will be putting money back into CIG. They know that they will never see it back if they do.
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(https://i.imgur.com/8tR8VPb.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/0lFD8Lb.png)
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The last desperate cash grab is underway. They extended the sale to Dec 11th
2013 Anniversary Sale Day Count: 10 Days (11-18 through 11-27)
2014 Anniversary Sale Day Count: 11 Days (11-22 through 12-02)
2015 Anniversary Sale Day Count: 12 Days (11-20 through 12-01)
2016 Anniversary Sale Day Count: 12 Days (11-19 through 11-30)
2017 Anniversary Sale Day Count: 18 Days (11-24 through 12-11)
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2017: $434,735
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2016: $1,302,326
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2015: $633,883
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2014: $665,676
First Day Star Citizen Anniversary Sale Funding 2013: $242,069
For all you playing at home, the funding tracker for the 24th is complete at $434,735. That's an $867,591 decrease from last year or a 66.6% decline in first day sales, making it the worst opening anniversary sale day since 2013
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Day 1 was bad, but look at the chart. Objectively you have to say this year's sale has been a rousing success for CIG.
I just can't understand why, at this point, people are still throwing millions at CIG. It defies logic. The whales' funds aren't unlimited and their credit lines have to be approaching max. Where is all of this recent money coming from?
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From nowhere. Having a very bad sale doesn't improve the success feeling amongst the backers. So to keep up appearances and to show the world that the 3.0 release actually lifted the spirits, they are faking the funding tracker. Hoping the false positive will have an effect on the market. Were they to show the real numbers, that would have had a very bad impact on morale.
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(https://i.imgur.com/E3rPwEX.png)
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3 million dollars in 4 days? No fucking way.
The heydays were back in '13 and '14 when the hype was in overdrive. They were pulling in 3M a month then. You cannot tell me they surpassed those Glory Days in 4 fucking days when the outlook is at an all-time low amongst backers.
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I agree it all seems EXTREMELY fishy to me. We have reasons to doubt the funding tracker, simple fact they don't deduct refunds being one of them, but this makes me question any of it even if it is "padded".
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Does anyone have a public source for estimates of CIG's annual expenses? I remember seeing some estimates floating around the web based on the public data on their FTEs.
I would like to build out an expenses vs. revenue forecast to try and estimate when they will go broke.
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Does anyone have a public source for estimates of CIG's annual expenses? I remember seeing some estimates floating around the web based on the public data on their FTEs.
I would like to build out an expenses vs. revenue forecast to try and estimate when they will go broke.
These were already linked here before. Do a search for gamasutra
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MattBrady/20170817/303892/Star_Citizen_Has_a_Huge_Development_Cost_Problem.php
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MattBrady/20170901/304964/Star_Citizen_A_Close_Look_at_the_Cash.php
Also, from the financial analysis of the F42-UK, the largest studio, some info can also be extrapolated.
http://dereksmart.com/forums/reply/5973/
http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg5384#msg5384
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Does anyone have a public source for estimates of CIG's annual expenses? I remember seeing some estimates floating around the web based on the public data on their FTEs.
I would like to build out an expenses vs. revenue forecast to try and estimate when they will go broke.
These were already linked here before. Do a search for gamasutra
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MattBrady/20170817/303892/Star_Citizen_Has_a_Huge_Development_Cost_Problem.php
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MattBrady/20170901/304964/Star_Citizen_A_Close_Look_at_the_Cash.php
Also, from the financial analysis of the F42-UK, the largest studio, some info can also be extrapolated.
http://dereksmart.com/forums/reply/5973/
http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=53.msg5384#msg5384
and the way the Shitizens tie themselves in knots to try and explain it all away when all that is need is to ask yourself if Croberts is a lying incompetent who should have published his accounts.
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and the way the Shitizens tie themselves in knots to try and explain it all away when all that is need is to ask yourself if Croberts is a lying incompetent who should have published his accounts.
Remember, these are the same guys who didn't blink when CIG removed that requirement (to show accounts) from the June 2016 TOS.
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Look at this bullshit. If nothing else, in desperation, they've tipped their hand and given the most credible evidence to date, that the funding chart is pure bullshit.
(https://i.imgur.com/uUQLm85.png)
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Coincidentally, the 30th matches the 3rd as well as the 1st matching the 2nd. Then it falls off a cliff. Total BS.
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Coincidentally, the 30th matches the 3rd as well as the 1st matching the 2nd. Then it falls off a cliff. Total BS.
That's not quite accurate. It's just that the chart doesn't have enough resolution to show extremely minor differences.
The y coordinate for the 2nd is the highest at 5. The y coordinate for the 1st is actually 5.1310282.... which ends up being less than a pixel of difference when rendered. If we do some math, the view for today ends up being that each difference of 1 in the y coordinate equals $5,693 (at the time of writing). So technically the difference between the 1st and the 2nd is $746 which might as well be zero.
The difference between the 30th and the 3rd is $10,991. That's at least plausible I suppose.
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Coincidentally, the 30th matches the 3rd as well as the 1st matching the 2nd. Then it falls off a cliff. Total BS.
That's not quite accurate. It's just that the chart doesn't have enough resolution to show extremely minor differences.
The y coordinate for the 2nd is the highest at 5. The y coordinate for the 1st is actually 5.1310282.... which ends up being less than a pixel of difference when rendered. If we do some math, the view for today ends up being that each difference of 1 in the y coordinate equals $5,693 (at the time of writing). So technically the difference between the 1st and the 2nd is $746 which might as well be zero.
The difference between the 30th and the 3rd is $10,991. That's at least plausible I suppose.
The amounts are negligible, hence the lack of resolution in the chart
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/htmlview#
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(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/388739887677046784/RzBwaGq.png)
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(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/388739887677046784/RzBwaGq.png)
Latest info has CIG up to 457 employees.
I'd be interested to know how many were devs and artists, how many sales and support
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Latest info has CIG up to 457 employees.
I'd be interested to know how many were devs and artists, how many sales and support
Good Lord, did they just keep hiring thinking that if they get enough people then a game was going to get made?
I seem to remember reading (probably the Gamasutra articles) that the monthly cost per person for the industry was about £10,000 (overheads aswell as salaries) meaning that their monthly burn rate would be in the region of $4,500,000. They must need get rid of staff desperately by now. I'm guessing that they need to get 3.0 to live before they announce layoffs in the hope that everyone will be too distracted by the 3.0 release (? & holiday live stream) to notice - just a theory.
What's your source for that number anyway?
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All those numbers came from CIG over the years.
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(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/388739887677046784/RzBwaGq.png)
This chart proves that game development didn't really start before 2015, and anyone who repeats that "7 years" stuff is just being a troll. Everything before 2015 was just opening offices, setting up, unpacking boxes, putting the team together and viewing online programming tutorials (the homework assignments of which were subsequently released with names such as "Hangar Module Launch", "Arena Commander Launch" etc., instead of the more common "My First 'Hello World' Script Launch").
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This chart proves that game development didn't really start before 2015, and anyone who repeats that "7 years" stuff is just being a troll. Everything before 2015 was just opening offices, setting up, unpacking boxes, putting the team together and viewing online programming tutorials (the homework assignments of which were subsequently released with names such as "Hangar Module Launch", "Arena Commander Launch" etc., instead of the more common "My First 'Hello World' Script Launch").
I agree. :smuggo:
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Good Lord, did they just keep hiring thinking that if they get enough people then a game was going to get made?
I seem to remember reading (probably the Gamasutra articles) that the monthly cost per person for the industry was about £10,000 (overheads aswell as salaries) meaning that their monthly burn rate would be in the region of $4,500,000. They must need get rid of staff desperately by now. I'm guessing that they need to get 3.0 to live before they announce layoffs in the hope that everyone will be too distracted by the 3.0 release (? & holiday live stream) to notice - just a theory.
What's your source for that number anyway?
CIG did an interview a few weeks back. The figure of 457 employees came up.
Now...as for monthly cost, the typical rule of thumb is about $13.5k per employee per month. That isn't entirely accurate but it should...and does....give a ROUGH ballpark figure of the total cost of a project.
As in...50 employees for 12 months should require a rough budget of $685 k
Now...as for CIG.
Not all of that 457 figure will be devs. Or even artists. It would include support staff...mods, PR and marketing for example. We can also posit that $10k per man month...accounting for tax breaks and swapping prestige for decent pay and conditions is indeed reasonable, giving CIG the benefit of the doubt.
That $4.5 million however probably represents a fair estimate of the upper range of their average monthly costs but it is likely too high for most months. I'd put the lower bounds at about $2.5 million, with $3 million a month being a plausible rough guide but depending on a number of factors we don't know, the real figures may be higher or lower.
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CIG did an interview a few weeks back. The figure of 457 employees came up.
Was also in a newsletter which I wrote about here (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=9.msg1487#msg1487)
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CIG did an interview a few weeks back. The figure of 457 employees came up.
Was also in a newsletter which I wrote about here (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=9.msg1487#msg1487)
Derek, I hope you've considered that Chris Roberts owes you directly for sending him at least $50 million of his windfall so far. Had you not become involved and invoked as the evil "other" to overcome with pledging, Star Citizen would have faded into oblivion as the irrelevant brain-fart of a failed ex-developer over a year ago. Instead, it soldiers on, money-furnace kept stoked with anti-Derek cash.
You should offer your services to new Kickstarters. Offer to publicly bash their games during the fundraising period for a percentage of the cash generated by the hype.
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CIG did an interview a few weeks back. The figure of 457 employees came up.
Was also in a newsletter which I wrote about here (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=9.msg1487#msg1487)
Derek, I hope you've considered that Chris Roberts owes you directly for sending him at least $50 million of his windfall so far.
Hey, what about us forum members here who help to keep the hype alive with our salty posts? We deserve at least $45 base salary per user account, plus $15 if the user criticized Squadron42 or its delays, plus $10 for posts regarding 3.0 PTU, plus an extra $100 for each JPEG uploaded!
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CIG did an interview a few weeks back. The figure of 457 employees came up.
Was also in a newsletter which I wrote about here (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=9.msg1487#msg1487)
Hmm...maybe it was just 428. I can't recall now...I thought the interview I saw said 457, but I'm not motivated enough to go dig out the interview.
I did see the Clive Johnson interview where he states that there are 60 engineers, and just 6 network engineers - with 3 network coders working on the backend in Austin, and another 3 working on the netcode stuff in Manchester.
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Good Lord, did they just keep hiring thinking that if they get enough people then a game was going to get made?
I seem to remember reading (probably the Gamasutra articles) that the monthly cost per person for the industry was about £10,000 (overheads aswell as salaries) meaning that their monthly burn rate would be in the region of $4,500,000. They must need get rid of staff desperately by now. I'm guessing that they need to get 3.0 to live before they announce layoffs in the hope that everyone will be too distracted by the 3.0 release (? & holiday live stream) to notice - just a theory.
What's your source for that number anyway?
CIG did an interview a few weeks back. The figure of 457 employees came up.
Now...as for monthly cost, the typical rule of thumb is about $13.5k per employee per month. That isn't entirely accurate but it should...and does....give a ROUGH ballpark figure of the total cost of a project.
As in...50 employees for 12 months should require a rough budget of $685 k
Now...as for CIG.
Not all of that 457 figure will be devs. Or even artists. It would include support staff...mods, PR and marketing for example. We can also posit that $10k per man month...accounting for tax breaks and swapping prestige for decent pay and conditions is indeed reasonable, giving CIG the benefit of the doubt.
That $4.5 million however probably represents a fair estimate of the upper range of their average monthly costs but it is likely too high for most months. I'd put the lower bounds at about $2.5 million, with $3 million a month being a plausible rough guide but depending on a number of factors we don't know, the real figures may be higher or lower.
Don't forget to factor in the "executive" salaries of CRoberts and Friends & Family. That alone could have eaten up nearly half of the backer cashpile, and, at the very least, a third of it. Thanks to them for not being transparent with their fiscals (which is contrary to one the their original promises), we'll never know for sure how much they've been paying themselves until the whole thing implodes.
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It's time for a 2.6.3 leaderboard update, Skadden edition! Here we compare the leaderboards between December 13 ~17:30 and December 16 ~06:30 (both times UTC). Usually I like to use a longer baseline for comparison, but oh well. Another caveat is that more of the hardcore users are probably playing 3.0 PTU, which doesn't show up on the 2.6.3 leaderboards. With that said...
Average concurrent player count...
...for Star Marine: 7.5
...for Arena Commander: 12.6
...for racing: 2.2
...for all EA modules (does not include the PU): 22.2
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Our neighborhood Goon numbers guy, is at it again.
ANALYSIS OF SMALL TRACKER MOVES
In view of the Crytek lawsuit and the possible imminent demise of the funding tracker, I'm presenting an analysis that I put off for quite a while. This post is the third in the (very infrequently updated) Theoretical Cetology series. Previous entries are here (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3782316&pagenumber=1&perpage=40#post461792007) and here (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&pagenumber=420&perpage=40#post468390706). I know many people believe the tracker is faked, but irrespective of that issue, one can still try to figure out what the tracker is actually telling us.
My initial motivation in looking at the funding tracker was to try to tie together the three F's (Fleet, Fans, and Funds) to get a better sense of who was buying what. The hourly scraped data (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrDW3OaLO4zgBA1RSYoQOQoNSI/edit?usp=sharing) maintained by Nehkara on Google Docs is not well suited to this, because so many transactions get lumped together per hour that it's difficult or impossible to tease out the individual contributions. Therefore I used scraped data with a 5 minute update rate, which strikes a balance between high update rate and not being rude. As it turned out, the three F's are updated on different schedules and possibly with differing time lags, so it remains impractical to do the dreamed-of joint analysis.
However, it turns out that the Funds data (i.e. the money counter) is updated in real time, or close enough to real time from the perspective of a 5-minute scrape. This tells us how much cash is going into the tracker at each 5 minute interval.
An excerpt from a typical day is shown below. The table shows the size of each tracker move in dollars, and the number of times a move of that size was observed.
(https://i.imgur.com/YRXY1kj.png)
A few interesting facts immediately jump out:
- Many moves are even multiples of $5.
- Some moves are not whole numbers. I am not sure how this happens; more on this later.
- There are a decent number of very small moves, like $5 or $10.
- $45 and $60 are by far the most common move size, probably due to their being starter packages. We also see spikes at combinations of $45 and $60, such as $90 and $105.
As the example of $105 illustrates, a tracker move may be composed of multiple smaller transactions. As long as the typical 5-minute interval does not contain "too many" transactions, we may be able to infer the individual transaction sizes, at least in a probabilistic sense.
The frequent $5 moves are particularly interesting because they are not likely to be composed of smaller transactions and because there isn't anything exciting on the store that costs $5. I believe that they are probably mostly CCU activity, possibly related to the grey market, but I welcome better explanations.
My assumption is that the tracker is honest in the sense that applied store credit is not shown as additional revenue. This would allow us to see transactions of all sizes (due to varying amounts of store credit being applied) even if the store has no item at a particular price.
SELECTING THE DATA SET
To keep from having too many transactions thus making the data too hard to analyze, I used a crude proxy for non-sale days by taking all days with daily funding total < $60K. This gives a total of 116,111 data points from "quiet" or "typical" days.
The method I will apply below relies heavily on the assumption that tracker moves are round numbers, i.e., multiples of $5. Thus, data points that do not fit this assumption must be excluded, leaving 108,621 data points remaining (which represents a loss of 6.5% of the data). Interestingly, non-round tracker moves tend to arrive bunched together. The below plot shows the percentage of non-round moves in a rolling temporal window, restricted to data points from quiet days.
(https://i.imgur.com/4er0ilK.png)
Part of the cause may be temporally limited availability of items, such as the Squadron 42 Military Cap, that aren't multiples of $5. As for the fractional dollar amounts, the only hypothesis I can come up with is if an amount of store credit is somehow acquired untaxed but then has VAT taken out of it later. Partially defraying the cost of an item with the resulting store credit could give rise to strange transaction sizes.
ESTIMATING TRANSACTION RATES
To account for the effect of multiple transactions, I formulated a probability model for the data as a price-weighted sum of independent Poisson random variables. Going to the store and clicking on "Extras" shows CCUs valued at every multiple of $5 up to about $300, so I set the maximum allowable transaction size to $300. I then estimated the parameters of the model using maximum likelihood. The round transactions assumption is required to make the fitting process tractable; we can apply a crude correction for the exclusion of the non-round transactions afterward.
Below we show the raw histogram of tracker moves.
(https://i.imgur.com/WW6YEDq.png)
The result of the fitting process is an average transaction rate for each transaction size, i.e., the average number of transactions of each size, per hour.
(https://i.imgur.com/uzqNHuC.png)
The dominant effect is the spikes at $45 and $60, reaching 4.2 and 5.0 transactions/hour, respectively. If we assume that every one of these sales is a starter game package, and that every game package is sold to a new customer, this means 9.2 commandos are buying into Star Citizen per hour outside of special events, or about 80,000 commandos per year. By contrast, the "fans" number has increased by 237,325 so far in 2017, with no major recruiting events to speak of.
There is about 1 transaction per hour for every "small" transaction size below $45. Unless this is CCU activity, I'm not sure what it could represent. Are people buying $5 skins and UEC chits?
The estimated average daily revenue from starter packages is $11,700, versus an average daily revenue (for the quiet days used in this analysis) of roughly $39,500. Similarly, the average daily revenue from small transactions of $40 or less is $4000. The majority of funding, about $20K, comes from transactions that are $65 or larger.
The average daily total implied by our model is about $37K. Using a crude 7% correction for the excluded data points gives an average daily total of $39,800 which is fairly close to the true average of $39,500.
How literally should we interpret the fitted parameters? I think the inferred rate of starter packages, as well as the small transactions, is roughly accurate. As price increases from there, we should expect a general decline in the frequency of transactions, but not as steep a decline as the model implies. You can see an artifact of this where the model has boosted the rates of transactions near $300 to try to match the heavier tails of the actual data.
IS THE TRACKER TOO STABLE?
There are reasons to expect this model to underestimate the frequency of very large transactions, meaning that it will underestimate daily variability. That being said, the daily standard deviation of funding implied by the fitted model is $2,040, which implies that we would expect to see successive daily totals to be within about $5800 of each other 95% of the time.
A quick eyeballing suggests that the real data is indeed more variable than the model estimate. This is unsurprising both because there are dynamic influences on the store activity that we do not model, and because we would expect overdispersion even in the absence of such effects.
A better answer would involve looking at autocorrelation, but :effort:
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All off-topic posts have been deleted. This thread is only for the discussion of these analytics. Thanks for understanding. :eng99:
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(https://i.imgur.com/X1FBVBo.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/LRgkY4y.png)
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Hello Derek,
I had few questions concerning the chart you post above and the link for the UK fillings, I had sometime today and was trying to determine:
1. Total Reserves
2. Spending more than they take in?
Hate to make assumptions so wanted verify
1. 2017 Figure $5,323,149 is that reserves?
2. 2017 Figure 34,195,426 wonder if that figure represents books, mugs, or just backers / in game purchases?
3. To be upfront I have not looked over financials like this so some of it is unclear.
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08703814/filing-history
Page 9 shows more debt than assets:
Line 7 cash on hand is only 171,845
Line 8 Seems to be they owe a creditor: 1,047,587
Line 9 Assets: 4,192,777 - This must be offices or equipment, not cash?
PDF: 07 Jul 2016 Total exemption small company accounts made up to 31 December 2015
Page 20 Shows 9,815,120 - I can only assume this figure represents UK and not all locations?
I'm really interested in trying to figure whats really going on with financials how much are they taking in, how much is left and what are they spending.
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Hello Derek,
I had few questions concerning the chart you post above and the link for the UK fillings, I had sometime today and was trying to determine:
http://dereksmart.com/forums/reply/5973/
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Thank you for the link, I read through that and all the additional links. The accounting reports did not make any sense and I contributed that to what I though was my lack of understanding. The articles you wrote certainly point to what I suspected and its a very dark picture of what's really going on. I've read that some say he really did not begin to secure resources and talent till 2015 and I kept asking myself it that is true how did they show having so little money in 2016? If they had 170mill and they are now taking out loans in 2016 means something has gone completely awry.
http://dereksmart.com/forums/reply/5973/
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Total in 2013: $28,446,117
Total in 2014: $32,933,205 (14% bump from previous year)
Total in 2015: $35,961,202 (8.5% bump from previous year)
Total in 2016: $36,100,538 (.4% bump from previous year)
Total in 2017 (three days of funding remain): $34,592,496 (4.2% drop from previous year)
this will be the first year star citizen hasn't grown in funding
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Not only that, but they threw everything they had at it this year too. And then some.
Multiple new concept ships, limited editions, the referral contest, the demo at Gamescom, the SQ 42 VS, the land beacon, the tonks, the everything is back on sale - for weeks and weeks - including all the "limited" stuff ever produced, the SSD deal, the FOIP shite. You name it, they have tried it. And even after clearly rigging the funding tracker, they're still not up to par. As if constant funding of 35 million every year without actually producing anything worthwhile was realistic in the first place.
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And that's precisely why I selfishly want the CryTek lawsuit to go forward, as they are the only one who would be able to gain access to the financials.
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And that's precisely why I selfishly want the CryTek lawsuit to go forward, as they are the only one who would be able to gain access to the financials.
I think that if this en-devour is successful, it will spill out into the normal media on nearly a Bernie Madoff level of corruption, greed, and jaw-dropping incompetence.
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Not only that, but they threw everything they had at it this year too. And then some.
Multiple new concept ships, limited editions, the referral contest, the demo at Gamescom, the SQ 42 VS, the land beacon, the tonks, the everything is back on sale - for weeks and weeks - including all the "limited" stuff ever produced, the SSD deal, the FOIP shite. You name it, they have tried it. And even after clearly rigging the funding tracker, they're still not up to par. As if constant funding of 35 million every year without actually producing anything worthwhile was realistic in the first place.
Yes.. the SQ42 slice is probably as good as it gets.
Then there are these share offerings that might be on the table...probably a bit late..
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2017 is officially in the books, by UTC time anyway! Here are the yearly funding totals:
2014: $32,933,409.17
2015: $35,966,958.00
2016: $36,099,259.42
2017: $34,913,002.15
(https://i.imgur.com/gVTfFxV.png)
As the graph shows, they were really in the hole before the land/anniversary sale, which at least pulled them ahead of 2014.
Speaking of the anniversary sale, it has become a greater and greater percentage of their yearly take over the years. A quick estimate is below. (I don't have precise sale ending times, and sale lengths are getting murkier with pre-sale sales and so forth, so I just assumed all sales lasted 12 days.)
2014: Anniversary sale provided 12.8% of annual revenue.
2015: Anniversary sale provided 14.2% of annual revenue.
2016: Anniversary sale provided 19.2% of annual revenue.
2017: Anniversary sale provided 23.4% of annual revenue.
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via Gorf
Maybe the Coutts loan got put to the best use possible — fuel injected demand to keep confidence afloat. The deflation is perceptible externally yet negated via the internally controlled authority of the tracker.
I’m also increasingly convinced that the year-end livestream was constructed with a new 3rd party audience primarily in mind: either the British Tax authority or Coutts (though it could be both.) The entire non-game segments were remedial, introductory, and at times conspicuously false.
Now it’s possible that the hope for it was to educate the general gaming public about Squadron 42 and stoke opt-in demand for their mailing list. Yet we can intuitively discern invisible machinery at work here; we don’t need to see the gears turning and pistons firing to sense the directed movement. It’s in the miracle correction in the tracker and in that year-end video..
I made note recently of a conspicuous moment of falsehood (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&pagenumber=3303&perpage=40#post479707028) in the year-end livestream. It may seem a minor thing, Chambers claim that everyone under Hannes is solely dedicated to Squadron 42. Yet we know this hasn’t ever been historically true and “The Road to CitizenCon” is but one of many CIG transmissions that invalidates his claim.
Who is the audience that needs to believe the Director of Cinematics is leading a team solely dedicated to Squadron? It’s not the mega-whales; by and large such news would be bad news because they’re invested in Star Citizen ships. Yet the specificity of the claim would render it extraneous to the prospective Squadron tire-kickers. So who are really talking to, CIG? And a wee bit falsely?
It wouldn’t be the first time Chambers hit a false note for the team. He was one of those offering the “we can’t show any of Squadron because [spoiler]spoilers!”[/spoiler] excuse that CIG cooked up in the months after supposedly pulling their hour long Squadron vertical slice at the last minute. It was bogus and the year-end demo makes that plainly clear.
Their year ends in a highly atypical fashion. Prior year-end livestreams traditionally served a real-time comedy of unforced errors aimed at and forgiven by the core faithful. The carelessness and clumsiness was always a selling feature. The stakes were always high, as the year-end fundraising drive was the topping off of the cash tank maneuver that needed to fuel them throughout the slow season, yet you’d never have guessed it from CIG’s bumbling. They never even bothered with technical redundancy or rehearsals. Chris and Sandi didn’t care if they looked stupid or unprepared. Ill-advised though it always was, it conveyed confidence of self.
This year was different, very different. Nothing left to chance. A message aimed at a different audience about a game that is not now nor ever has been a meaningful revenue contributor. Why? Why when release is so far away and pre-sales a harder sell with a much lower, fixed per unit yield?
What changed, CIG? What’s really behind all these weird deviations from script. It’s hard to fully make sense of what’s afoot but it’s clear something’s different and it looks a lot like fear.
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via bovis our Goon numbers guy
(https://i.imgur.com/zsvZ6Ag.png)
This is the number of "citizens", which CIG likes to imply is the same as the number of paying customers (it is not). There is no recent public information on the number of customers; Turbulent gave a statement a while ago that implied the ratio of UEE Citizens to backers was in the neighborhood of 2:1. I would surmise that the ratio is somewhat more skewed than that now. There is also reason to believe that most of the project's publicly stated funding, if the picture of reality implied by the tracker is anywhere close to accurate, comes from a very small core of mega-whales.
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These numbers don't matter at all, because accounts doesn't mean people, regardless if stated by Turbulent or CIG.
My estimation based on Twitch and YouTube views (compared to other games and their sale numbers) is that Star Citizen still has a five digits total number of players/backers, means substantially less than 100k. These people created dozens if not hundreds of accounts on various occasions. Also the number of really actively funding backers should be far less then 10k.
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These numbers don't matter at all, because accounts doesn't mean people, regardless if stated by Turbulent or CIG.
My estimation based on Twitch and YouTube views (compared to other games and their sale numbers) is that Star Citizen still has a five digits total number of players/backers, means substantially less than 100k. These people created dozens if not hundreds of accounts on various occasions. Also the number of really actively funding backers should be far less then 10k.
It's difficult to say.
There are two million accounts....but I would agree that there are gar fewer people.
I would surmise many of those accounts are from free play weekends, or duplicate accounts set up to take advantage of the free in cash bonus.
OTOH...duplicate accounts are still paid accounts and can still be used to work around certain limits.
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From Bovis
I wonder if the leaderboards are bugged somehow, because the latest usage numbers are disastrous.
Star Marine average concurrent users: 9.8
Arena Commander average concurrent users: 7.8
Murray Cup average concurrent users: 2.5
Total for all EA modes: 20.0
That is lower than the end of 2.6.3 while 3.0 was in PTU, and represents a roughly 50% drop from the numbers at the start of 3.0 live.
This report covers the 6 days from Jan 13 to Jan 19.
Yeah, game's totally dead.
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I think this may be somewhat expected though as I would have guessed that more people would transition to mainly trying out the PU instead of these other mods (which are frankly even more garbage than the 'main' game)
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I think this may be somewhat expected though as I would have guessed that more people would transition to mainly trying out the PU instead of these other mods (which are frankly even more garbage than the 'main' game)
Yeah, but the PU has been there since Dec 2015. And the current PU is shit. So. :shrug:
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Star Marine and Arena Commander were dead before. But 3.0 totally put the nail in the coffin, the dropped out at sea.
(https://i.imgur.com/3fQM2Kk.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/PiZz2YZ.png)
- First spike is 2.6.3 release, second spike is 3.0 live
- Red/Blue are the Last Stand/Elimination game modes
- 3.0 killed the Arena Commander player numbers
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SM/AC is not working for many players. you spawn without gear/ship. so it is broken.
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They have waited so long with releasing (anything decent from) the game that the hype is gone. Even the momentum has passed. Star Citizen as a game is already dead. No matter what they deliver, it won't match the expectations that have been created, build up and hyped over the years. There just isn't a game to be played. And there won't be.
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The numbers certainly go in hand with what I see on happening on reddit activity as well.
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The thing is that I wouldn't even call it 'killing' those modes. They never had anything to start with. Even Star Marine was peaking at 40 concurrent players, it's more like gently putting those game modes to sleep.
I just went to take a look at a fantastic game that I used to play called Soldat (www.soldat.pl). At the time of this post it had 61 concurrent players.
This game is a niche side-scrolling arcade shooter RELEASED IN 2002! That's kind of embarrassing isn't it?
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I'm gonna wait on the first one who makes the comparison to the number of concurrent players of Derek's games :laugh:
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Lets be honest here - PU is only and main mode for majority of SC players.
So only PU numbers are relevant for SC...and those probably are not great for "Best game ever", too...
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I'm gonna wait on the first one who makes the comparison to the number of concurrent players of Derek's games :laugh:
But first somebody needs to give Derek 170m and 7 years of dev time... ;)
To be honest after I watched last Derek's LOD stream I saw how similar it's to SC...
LOD basically is SC without BIG money and "CR movie immersion"...
After they introduced planetary combat - Tonks :lol: = its even more looks like LOD, so CR are stealing ideas again :D
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But first somebody needs to give Derek 170m and 7 years of dev time... ;)
To be honest after I watched last Derek's LOD stream I saw how similar it's to SC...
LOD basically is SC without BIG money and "CR movie immersion"...
After they introduced planetary combat - Tonks :lol: = its even more looks like LOD, so CR are stealing ideas again :D
Yeah well, back in July 2015, I did write a whole blog telling them why they were doomed to fail, seeing as I've been down that road before. And the performance issues they are having, when they don't even have 20% of the game finished, are precisely why over the years I had to balance gameplay vs visuals, while opting for gameplay over visuals.
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Bovis has some new data. Apparently 3.0.1 failed; just like 3.0 before it.
the player count increase from 3.0.1 has already worn off
I expect a new record low when I do the next update in a few days
1.18 average players...
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/340495618868772875/413913795086516236/unknown.png)
4.78 in AC
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/340495618868772875/413914005879521291/unknown.png)
5.14 in SM
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/340495618868772875/413914202126942219/unknown.png)
349.6 total unique players per day
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/340495618868772875/413914667988156416/unknown.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/FtEqrHm.png)
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The numbers are abysmal and the spectrum is rife with irritated players over the interdiction testing. I spent years testing my own development work but I do not understand the extreme interdiction numbers as a means of supposed testing. There is so much more that at the core that needs to addressed. I'm always trying to fathom CR's mindset, does he believe if he builds it they will come? Looking at the numbers he should be needing max strength sleeping pills every night.
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I don't think they care anymore. They are just going to be milking whales until the final curtain.
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Bovis has analytics of the latest sale
Since CIG was kind enough to space out the concierge-only Aegis Vulcan LTI Warbond VIP Early Bird Sale from the general plebeian Vulcan sale, we can get a rough idea of how much revenue is driven by harder-core whales versus, well, plebes.
(https://i.imgur.com/B6zXRJO.png)
The VulcanPre curve is respectable but a bit lackluster, coming in barely above the Origin X1. The VulcanGen curve is currently failing to match the Genesis Starliner, which was probably the worst-performing concept sale ever. Interestingly, the difference is a lot less when you look at the fleet numbers, so it may be that the difference in revenue is due to use of store credit. If so, it really reinforces why CIG is pushing the Warbond sales so hard.
(https://i.imgur.com/UwsvPru.png)
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After a small bump with the release of 3.0.1, the SC leaderboard statistics are once again setting record lows.
Average concurrent players by EA module:
- Star Marine - 3.0
- Arena Commander - 4.7
- Murray Cup - 1.0
- Combined - 8.7
Average daily unique players by EA module:
- Star Marine - 158.9
- Arena Commander - 112.9
- Murray Cup - 50.7
- Combined - 279.4
In fact, the utilization of the Old Vanderval race track is so low that anybody dropping off the leaderboard (due to opting out of leaderboards or account closure) causes the total playtime for the reporting period to go below 0. Eventually I will fix my script to account for this; however, it is necessary to track accounts through renames to do the correction properly. Detecting renames has been difficult ever since the transition to Spectrum.
(https://i.imgur.com/qxxZwgM.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/WSouSSy.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/LH5wxuU.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/wH3aB1K.png)
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Now for something different. Quavers over at SA (https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3800238&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=3812#post481640468) ran through some metrics for the Star Citizen streamers. The results are horrifying.
During the past 30 days, streams of Star Citizen have seen average viewers drop off by almost 50%:
(https://i.imgur.com/XGNfxOH.png) (https://sullygnome.com/game/Star_Citizen/30)
The top 10 SC streamers during the past 30 days:
(https://i.imgur.com/2K5qlPc.png) (https://sullygnome.com/game/Star_Citizen/30/watched)
WTFOSaurus::
(https://i.imgur.com/vHVY0G4.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/LgIUMf6.png) (https://sullygnome.com/channel/wtfosaurus/30)
Max viewers down 39%, avg viewers down 46%
(https://i.imgur.com/Qdhf7aF.png) (https://sullygnome.com/channel/wtfosaurus/180)
Huge drop-off since Christmas.
Captain_Richard:
(https://i.imgur.com/GgT7XTI.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/fMS7jjt.png) (https://sullygnome.com/channel/captain_richard/30)
Max viewers down 21%, avg viewers down 17%
(https://i.imgur.com/gBoNfNV.png) (https://sullygnome.com/channel/captain_richard/180)
Similar huge drop-off since Christmas.
BadNewsBaron streamed Star Citizen almost constantly once 3.0 PTU left Evocati. Disco Lando and other CIG staff were regularly on his stream chatting with BNB and viewers.
Now?
(https://i.imgur.com/tju0326.png) (https://sullygnome.com/channel/badnewsbaron/30)
1hr 30min during the past month, out of 110 streamed-hours :negativeman-55f:
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For the reporting period ending March 13:
Star Marine: 3.2 concurrent, 157.0 uniques/day
Arena Commander: 2.6 concurrent, 72.5 uniques/day
Murray Cup: 0.8 concurrent, 34.5 uniques/day
Total: 6.6 concurrent, 233.7 uniques/day
The Squadron Battle leaderboard last updated on March 10 after about a week of not updating. The total number of unique players registered in this weeklong period was 7, for an average of 1 per day. These 7 players, on average, logged 10 minutes each in Squadron Battle that week.
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(https://i.imgur.com/QwwF9g8.png)
No we know why they're having yet another sale which they've been pushing hard in their recent shows.
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Ship sales tracking
(https://s9.postimg.org/7xfz4uprj/newcalendarbase2.jpg)
2018 - RED
Jan--15
Feb--7
Mar--24
TOTAL : 46
2017 - YELLOW
Jan--0
Feb--15
Mar--21
TOTAL: 36
2016 - GREEN
Jan-- 7
Feb--0
Mar--14
TOTAL: 21
2015 - BLUE
Jan--10
Feb--9
Mar--15
TOTAL:34
2014 and 2013 did not have any sales during the first quarter.
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Ship sales tracking
(https://s9.postimg.org/7xfz4uprj/newcalendarbase2.jpg)
2018 - RED
Jan--15
Feb--7
Mar--24
TOTAL : 46
2017 - YELLOW
Jan--0
Feb--15
Mar--21
TOTAL: 36
2016 - GREEN
Jan--7
Feb--0
Mar--14
TOTAL: 21
2015 - BLUE
Jan--10
Feb--9
Mar--15
TOTAL:34
2014 and 2013 did not have any sales during the first quarter.
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For the reporting period ending March 27:
Star Marine: 3.3 concurrent, 205.3 uniques/day [!]
Arena Commander: 1.4 concurrent, 55.7 uniques/day
Murray Cup: 0.5 concurrent, 29.5 uniques/day
Total: 5.2 concurrent, 265.3 uniques/day
The space shooty fighty part of this space shooty fighty game is not looking very healthy
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Latest EA numbers for the reporting period ending March 31 -- yes, we would expect the statistics to be depressed due to Evocati and/or the PTU, but they are still :laffo: just the same.
Star Marine: 1.3 average concurrent players, 99.9 uniques/day
Arena Commander*: 1.0 average concurrent players, 27.9 uniques/day
Murray Cup: 0.3 average concurrent players, 18.7 uniques/day
All modes combined: 2.6 average concurrent players, 139.5 uniques/day
*) Squadron Battle leaderboards once again did not update, possibly due to no games having been played.
(https://i.imgur.com/FEAKgmg.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/ZrbobC3.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/LuqW8Du.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/c3B8xnt.png)
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(https://i.redd.it/o375qgo3onr01.png)
So there are 63 base ships and vehicles. Of which 30 are not in the game, 7 are scheduled for 2018 release, and 3 are scheduled for revision in 2018.
Basically, in year 7, they don't even have 50% of all the ships completed, working, and in-game.
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Derek - supposing the purpose of the ships isn't to sell JPEGs but to be part of game action - what's the purpose of having so many ship types in a game (say, any space simulator, not SC in particular)? Is there a way to make that useful/fun? Is it something outside the game action and more related to the way players interact with each other? Just grasping here. I'm just curious about that aspect of game design.
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IMO there should be half the ships there are now and a working game.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
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Derek - supposing the purpose of the ships isn't to sell JPEGs but to be part of game action - what's the purpose of having so many ship types in a game (say, any space simulator, not SC in particular)? Is there a way to make that useful/fun? Is it something outside the game action and more related to the way players interact with each other? Just grasping here. I'm just curious about that aspect of game design.
I am no game designer but more ships = a lot more complexity when it comes to getting anything approaching a balanced and rewarding game.
It is all very well Backers beating themselves off over a particular ships aesthetic and its imagined game mechanics but (and we are entering the realms of utter fantasy here) were Star Citizen to be released as an MMO, any significant advantages of one ship over another are going to magnify the advantage players using them get over those that dont (within a particular "profession" lets say)
This means that in actual gameplay, as opposed to the imaginary game Backers are currently playing in their heads, most ships would simply be mothballed or melted etc in favour of those that were game efficient.
In a game like this where your ship has to get you from A to B through a whole range of situations before you get to do the profession you are trying to do to .. make $$ or have fun etc ... the way it flys relative to other ships is a huge part of the game in and of itself/
One of the reasons I sat up and smelt the coffee was the realisation (and I should have known better in the first place) that with all my years playing MMORPGs there was no way in hell that Star Citizen was going to work as an MMO.
Just taking a seemingly simple subset of the advertised gameplay, CRoberts and Erin are so full of shyte about how an MMO plays that there is no way they could deliver an actual MMO.
I dont think there is a single profession that they have come up with that doesnt have huge problems in terms of how it would actually work in SC nevermind work and be fun.
They haven't got a clue.
Most Backers couldn't handle the level of alternative gameplay people like me would visit on their PVE pass times, nevermind the people hacking and/or farming currency to sell in the RMT business. The level of whining from players losing their shit would be deafening.
And at the same time they wont be able to do their professions in any case so getting robbed on top of that is going to send many to the exit.
They cant design an MMO, and they certainly couldn't run one...
As we have seen, they cant deliver a game without huge technical issues and these technical problems sink a game as fast, or faster than game design, gameplay failings.
So CIG are screwed and it is never going to be an MMO..
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Derek - supposing the purpose of the ships isn't to sell JPEGs but to be part of game action - what's the purpose of having so many ship types in a game (say, any space simulator, not SC in particular)? Is there a way to make that useful/fun? Is it something outside the game action and more related to the way players interact with each other? Just grasping here. I'm just curious about that aspect of game design.
It's stupid kind of progression system. You progress through various JPEGs the more real life money you spend on SC.
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Derek - supposing the purpose of the ships isn't to sell JPEGs but to be part of game action - what's the purpose of having so many ship types in a game (say, any space simulator, not SC in particular)? Is there a way to make that useful/fun? Is it something outside the game action and more related to the way players interact with each other? Just grasping here. I'm just curious about that aspect of game design.
I think you already know the answer to the question. Star Citizen is no longer about a game it's a high fidelity ship collection simulator.
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I think you already know the answer to the question. Star Citizen is no longer about a game it's a high fidelity ship collection simulator.
Yeah, SC, but I was actually curious if there is any way that multitude of ships would make sense in a real game, to improve the gameplay, and the fun. I'm not a gamer myself so I don't have much of a sense of how some of these things work.
Like "addictive gameplay" - I do get that directly because I have "addictive" behavior in other things (some OCD/ADD you know), and space combat, I get that too because I read a lot of military SF and other similar stuff because I like to imagine that kind of thing.
Other aspects I don't get for myself but I get that other people really really would like to do it, like the whole idea of careers for mining or salvaging or whatever, because not only is there the evidence of the forums where SC backers talk about that stuff incessantly but also because of other games like all the different railroad simulators where you basically hang around making train schedules and then executing them.
It's the multitudes of different ship kinds I don't get how that adds to gameplay - unless it is totally and only about collecting the whole set. (Which if that's what it is would be something else I do get, because, well, I have some of that kind of anal retentive behavior too, and also because of the various card games, like Pokemon or whatever, where you collect things and that's a large part of the game.)
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Derek - supposing the purpose of the ships isn't to sell JPEGs but to be part of game action - what's the purpose of having so many ship types in a game (say, any space simulator, not SC in particular)? Is there a way to make that useful/fun? Is it something outside the game action and more related to the way players interact with each other? Just grasping here. I'm just curious about that aspect of game design.
It's not a big deal really. e.g. my Battlecruiser/Universal Combat games have over 100 air/space craft - all user playable and with different roles. So with SC it's the same thing. Except that most of the role-based space craft don't have their gameplay roles. e.g. bombers have nothing to bomb, mining vessels have nothing to mine etc.
The issue is that once CIG figured out that they could make money selling JPEG futures, they had no incentive to stop doing it.
Take this 100i for example. They claim that they just wanted a $45 variant starter ship. They have a bunch of other ships - already in the game - which they could have used for that. But no, here comes another JPEG that's not likely to ever be in the game.
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Yeah, SC, but I was actually curious if there is any way that multitude of ships would make sense in a real game, to improve the gameplay, and the fun.
It would in a single player game, where you can choose from a huge range of ships - a bit like choosing different weapons in Far Cry. I say single player game, because it doesn't matter if one ship is overpowered compared to another since the game difficulty would scale as you progress.
In an MMO however, since you could come up against anyone in any ship type, then you have the worst form of pay to win. Obviously you could try and keep players of a similar ship power / ability in the same server together, but this would defeat the whole idea of having an MMO. The solution CIG have hit on is to punish players who attack others (not fully implemented it seems), but if you can only legally kill NPCs then why not make it single player?
The only thought which has actually gone into the game is about convincing whales to part with more of their cash in return for shiny ship Jpegs and empty promises.
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Judging from the dropoff in the latest leaderboard numbers, just about everybody who plays Star Citizen is in Evocati by now.
Average concurrent players/unique players per day (estimated from 3.1 leaderboards):
Star Marine: 2.6 / 161.4
Arena Commander: 2.1 / 80.1
Murray Cup: 0.5 / 31.4
Total: 5.2 / 246.2
(https://i.imgur.com/L0crIRM.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/4B3IWy3.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/NcGTHTh.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/bJEajRf.png)
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Gee, look at that curve. I wonder what happened in July 2015 to cause a spite pledge spike
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/340495618868772875/474668398605762581/lol.png)
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How are so many people still pouring so much money into this mess?! :shocked: I would have at least thought funding would be down this year over the last few.
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With all the crap that has happened and the general public now obviously against the project how is 2018 their second best year thus far? This is maddening!
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With all the crap that has happened and the general public now obviously against the project how is 2018 their second best year thus far? This is maddening!
That would assume that the funding chart is accurate. We have NO reason to believe that it is.
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In case you were wondering whether or not this train-wreck was still a thing.
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/480616863353798664/uniques_latest.png)
That spike came from when the travesty that was 3.0 first landed in Dec 2017
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/480617118971461647/ac_latest.png)
average of 2.24 people in Arena Commander over all game modes combined
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/480617469753425920/sm_latest.png)
8.2 people in SM of which 7.5 of them are in Last Stand and 0.7 of them are in Elimination
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/480617759680495641/mc_latest.png)
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Derek - supposing the purpose of the ships isn't to sell JPEGs but to be part of game action - what's the purpose of having so many ship types in a game (say, any space simulator, not SC in particular)? Is there a way to make that useful/fun? Is it something outside the game action and more related to the way players interact with each other? Just grasping here. I'm just curious about that aspect of game design.
Part of that , imo, was due to CIG trying to siphon off of ED's realized and working assortment of successful ship characters, and shamelessly trying to get some attention of ED players with .jpg concepts such as the "i800" or whatever that looked like the cutter except with their expensive trailer showing the insides with style which you can't do yet in ED due to no spacelegs yet. So they tried to hook using the other side of "greener pastures" ploy to those who got bored and impatient with Frontier Dev. or take ED for granted too quickly. Later on they shamelessly appropriated that EvE "construction" ship design look as was seen. But what else is to be expected of a game project gone awry /w greed due to overzealous whaling & Derek-spiteing fools. So basically you can have a successful line of ships like in ED where it's already part of the roleplaying lore to have specific manufacturers making uniquely appealing ships that are each chosen by preference by the cmdr, but only in a finished already working structure of a space game.
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Also the 3.0 disastrous patch was supposed to be the Jesus Patch.
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Citcon revenue update and comparison to previous years.
Usually I mark the start time of the sale by looking for a very obvious upward spike in funding. For this year, there was a small spike at 16:05 UTC right at the start of the con, and a larger spike at 19:30 UTC which presumably marked something becoming available. To forestall any possible objections from Citizens I have presented revenue plots for 2018 using both start times.
It's too early to call it right now, but we might need to release the Kraken posthaste.
(https://i.imgur.com/MKyomnP.png)
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ShitizenCon rev down about 50%
(https://imgur.com/PtDMHxc.jpg)
They can't lie in the positive as they would be in a Catch-22 situation because then whales won't give money, thinking that someone already did. So by showing bad numbers, they're signaling to the whales to pledge moah!
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(https://imgur.com/iUtADE0.jpg)
Getting closer
(https://imgur.com/sHUwPAD.jpg)
Approx 750K behind 2014 & 2015, and almost 1M behind 2017. 2016 is out of sight
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What is 1605 and 1930 for this year's CitCon?
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What is 1605 and 1930 for this year's CitCon?
Those are the specific time stamps for two separate tracking on the same day.
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(https://i.imgur.com/CFLVcv4.png)
:emot-lol: look at all that spite pledging in 2015-2016
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Hope they're reducing their burn rate to match their new income … or the whole thing will implode in an instant as DS has often warned.
(Just kidding. I'm not really hoping that.)
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(https://i.imgur.com/mPhinPf.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/V9ZLyur.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/dMU0Vts.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/rhtwubx.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/FFOmm1b.png)
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Those guys are a special kind of stupid.
By latest metrics, about 175 whales bought the Kraken with warbonds (new cash money) @ $1,400.
And they *claim* (it's bs) to have 2M backers.
Basically, Star Citizen is where it has been since 2016 whereby a few whales are paying for those who don't pay anything anymore or who just have a base package. This is the standard model for F2P games; except those are completed products.
When the final end comes, it's going to be all kinds of hilarious because it hasn't occurred to whales yet that it's not a sustainable model when you have about 450 people working worldwide and you have a burn rate of approx $4m a month in which key studios are literally insolvent (according to their UK financials).
Something's gotta give. Which explains the quiet exits, inability to hire top talent etc.
You can't fix stupid, but you can laugh at it.
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(https://imgur.com/N55Autf.jpg)
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScro1cB3p9-Waizu7b4FA4Tv7M-iyBDOYYaKmKv0LKDdhJOLQ/viewanalytics
This is how they milk waves. Big spenders are first in line.
(https://i.redd.it/d797w499a8t11.png)
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(https://i.imgur.com/3HSqq3H.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/ojt91gD.png)
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I find it hard to believe that many people bought the ship that quickly with new cash. Is it likely that they knew Citcon was going to under perform so they did this whole wave release gig to cover a serious padding of the funding chart to make sure their little meter wasn't low, but also didn't arouse suspicion like their usual mystery people deciding to buy completion packages randomly?
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(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/503235748129144853/Rplot11.png)
(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/362664170254106624/503235743809011712/Rplot10.png)
http://pledgetrack.rabbitsraiders.net/
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I was going to say that this Kraken is possibly the only Kraken these dweebs are going to get in their lifetimes.
Even after paying for it.
But they are not getting this either !
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Yeah, no fracking way that funding chart is real. They're not even hiding it anymore.
(https://i.imgur.com/ybW3FWZ.png)
(https://imgur.com/Olexich.png)
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Yeah, no fracking way that funding chart is real. They're not even hiding it anymore.
OMG their shitty scam marketing tactics must really work! This is the most successful citiCON concept ever.
The whales must have been circling in their waves to cause those big spikes as soon as they were able to purchase, well played CIG. :rolleyes:
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OMG their shitty scam marketing tactics must really work! This is the most successful citiCON concept ever.
The whales must have been circling in their waves to cause those big spikes as soon as they were able to purchase, well played CIG. :rolleyes:
Exactly. Even disregarding the +- errors in the funding chart, those spikes precisely show how they work the scam to milk their most avid backers. Trust me when I tell you this, the ending is going to be all kinds of glorious. Just wait.
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Is the suggestion they just make these numbers up then or is it padded with extras or what?
They're keeping the lights on, so funding must be coming from somewhere right?
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IIRC the funding chart is highly suspect.
There have been various analyses done on the cost of running the entire operation which included those looking at industry burn rates, those looking at some of the accounts filed in the UK, those that consider what has been said, written, behaviour of various people connected to the project and everything imbetween.
It should go without saying anyone making predictions about the future can only do so based on historical facts at best. This escapes many Backers who like to claim that anyone like Derek who predicts something is necessarily not worth listening to if predictions about Star Citizen don't come true. They compound their ignorance by being selective about which predictions they ignore and those they cite.
If CRoberts could continue to raise funds and stay clear of any legal/personal impediments then it stands to reason that he could carry on "developing" the game. That much is obvious.
So every time we have a major funding event something gets pulled out of the bag and some extra cash goes into the coffers.
They appear to have plugged the refund leak but few people are playing the demo and nor have they done so for a long time (if ever).
CRoberts got lucky with SC = he is no genius and he didn't see this coming. SC is getting old, already is old and it is only a matter of time before people won't carry on funding it. We know that the game is years off - no matter what and we know it is going to be no game most people that backed are going to want to play because he has mis sold them all dreams and gamers don't play games the way most of these Backers want the game to be played like - even if you could provide them with the means to do it.
Just take that troop ship in the last Demo. Why do you need a huge ship to kill 3-4 NPCs that you can kill in a minute ? How are you going to get x number of people to come along for the oh so monotonous ride and rest of the mission and for what reward ? It would far more fun to do this
Then of course we have the Crytek legal case, the Coutts Loan, key people continuing to leave (remember the guy that was doing the flight model), the debacle that is SQ42, the ongoing engineering debt and the technology it is based on. Plus of course not least industry experts views.
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IIRC the funding chart is highly suspect.
There have been various analyses done on the cost of running the entire operation which included those looking at industry burn rates, those looking at some of the accounts filed in the UK, those that consider what has been said, written, behaviour of various people connected to the project and everything imbetween.
I suspect it as well but you see players begging for skins and bragging on the ships they buy with screen shots. I cannot help but wonder if its not that far away from what is shown. If if they are falsifying the numbers, it would not surprise me if they were over 130m maybe even much more.
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Is the suggestion they just make these numbers up then or is it padded with extras or what?
They're keeping the lights on, so funding must be coming from somewhere right?
It's not 100% off. But there are so many ways to fudge numbers, that financial institutions have experienced people and software to detect things like that.
It's not hard to claim you are making $100K in order to show interest, when in fact you are making $50K - and carrying debt. No different from telling one group of investors that you have raised $100K, when you only raised $50K, thus trying to convince you to give you more money. It happens more times than you think. And though it's not as bad as a Ponzi schemes, it's about the same effect.
In fact, read up on this guy who just got sent to prison for 6 years. Among his schemes, was inflating the net worth of one of the companies he was seeking investors for.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/21/arts/music/fyre-festival-billy-mcfarland-ja-rule-criminal-investigation.html
In the case of CIG, aside from the fact that we already know that the funding chart doesn't take into account refunds or external loans, investments etc, they can plug any number they want in there because if they don't, their whales will panic and stop giving them money. So even if they got $100K, they can claim they got $150K in order to prove on-going interest in the project.
It's all lies. And I am 100% certain, that it's all going to be exposed either when the govt gets involved, they collapse and investors and banks come calling, or via the Crytek lawsuit.
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Wow, that's quite scummy. Have they been doing that from day one? Was the Kickstarter amount legit?
How do they pay their wage bill if they're not getting the amounts they say they are? All those staff must cost a fortune every month.
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Wow, that's quite scummy. Have they been doing that from day one? Was the Kickstarter amount legit?
How would they be able to fudge numbers on a third-party site where they have no control?
How do they pay their wage bill if they're not getting the amounts they say they are? All those staff must cost a fortune every month.
Obviously they make enough money for operations, though they have been laying people off, while others leave voluntarily.
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How would they be able to fudge numbers on a third-party site where they have no control?
Shouldn't it be possible (at least theoretically) in the same way as music labels did fudge sales rankings?
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Shouldn't it be possible (at least theoretically) in the same way as music labels did fudge sales rankings?
What are you talking about? Only Kickstarter has access to their own numbers. So what is displayed on the Kickstarter page, is 100% accurate. So there is no way for CIG to fudge those. They do however have control over their own website. So they can do whatever they like.
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How would they be able to fudge numbers on a third-party site where they have no control?
Obviously they make enough money for operations, though they have been laying people off, while others leave voluntarily.
So paying all those staff and the operating costs of five studios must cost what, about 3million a month? They say they've raised almost 200 Million in about 6 years. That all seems to check out though right? They had a loan too I remember hearing, and investors? Didn't they also start with very few employees in the first couple of years, overheads would have been much lower.
The funding chart would have to be very wrong if it was true they have no cash left it seems. Yet they keep on operating so it can't be too far off. Or am I missing something?
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Or am I missing something?
Yes, you're missing the part where you think we're idiots who don't know that you're one of those guys. :emot-lol:
ps: echoing the same nonsensical talking points was a dead giveaway. Serendipity, is that you? How are you doing ol' buddy?
Please come talk to us over here (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=134.new#new) about the amazing performance gains and great stuff in 3.3. Thanks!
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Arrgghh, you got me guvnor. Grab your banhammer all swift like, did you miss me?
Just thought I'd pop back and see what y'all were talking about these days. It's about a year isn't it since I was here, all the impending doom talk from then looks a bit silly now.
Wasn't citcon 2015 going to be the last one? Is 2018 going to be the last one now? What about 2019?
Anyway, good to talk again. Have fun.
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Hi Serendipity - have you bought yourself a Kraken?
It would make my day knowing how much money you've wasted on this unplayable garbage.
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Hi Serendipity - have you bought yourself a Kraken?
It would make my day knowing how much money you've wasted on this unplayable garbage.
I haven't bought anything from CIG for a long time. Most of my spend came from donations for my Voiceattack profile. Turns out sci fi nerds love their sci fi enhanced with a talking ship emulator. One citizen even bought me a constellation!
True story. Anyway, I bought a freelancer and an avenger over a couple of years. Then when donations started coming in I used them to buy an aurora here and there, always expecting them to dry up, but they didn't for quite some time. An org gave me 50 quid here, citizen throws me a fiver there. Apparently it adds up. Once melted I ended up with a few nice ships. Haven't downloaded the 3.2 client, never mind the 3.3 PTU. I'm waiting for more to do before sinking more time into it.
I'm technically a professional programmer though, which is hilarious.
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What are you talking about? Only Kickstarter has access to their own numbers. So what is displayed on the Kickstarter page, is 100% accurate. So there is no way for CIG to fudge those. They do however have control over their own website. So they can do whatever they like.
I'm talking about them simply investing in the game themselves, in the same way Record Labels actually sent people out buying CDs or might have even been Long Plays back in the days. Because they also couldn't fudge the numbers of sales retailers reported.
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Haven't downloaded the 3.2 client, never mind the 3.3 PTU. I'm waiting for more to do before sinking more time into it.
You really should play it now, since it won't be long before there is nothing left to "play". Those stupid enough not to see that the are funding a ungoing scam can't keep up with the costs of running the scam. It's how all schemes collapse in the end.
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You really should play it now, since it won't be long before there is nothing left to "play". Those stupid enough not to see that the are funding a ungoing scam can't keep up with the costs of running the scam. It's how all schemes collapse in the end.
Change the record. You said almost exactly the same thing a year ago. Still here. Still working. Still solvent. No collapse.
Any feelings of doubt creeping in yet?
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Nope. Instead of pimping $100 to $300 ships they have inflated everything to $600 to $2000 ships. It cannot continue. What's next? The $5000 ships to keep things afloat?
Remember according to Robbers you are not buying a ship you are backing the project with this "contribution". Except that since they put the ability to buy currency and ships in game it's clear that you ARE buying ships.
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Change the record. You said almost exactly the same thing a year ago. Still here. Still working. Still solvent. No collapse.
Any feelings of doubt creeping in yet?
Nah, none of us know when this will all collapse, but we all know it will eventually. Why? Because their business model isn't sustainable in the long term.
Look at how much progress has been made since last year: they've added more ships sure, but what about gameplay: box finding missions, scramble races, a mining mini game? They claim to be adding Hurston, yet this will be another empty area devoid of any actual gameplay, assuming it actually gets released this year. And what about all the other "tech" demos that they've shown off over the years at GamesCom / CitizenCon? Where are all those cities / moons / planets / sandworms etc?
Their business model relies on maintaining the faith of big spenders to "pledge" towards the development of the game. Combined with their inability to actually make the game: they have no incentive to actually release a finished version which can be sold for normal prices. The challenge is to show enough progress year on year and create a new Jpeg to keep the money flowing: which CIG have proven time and time again to be very good at. The problem is that they can't keep doing this: something is going to give eventually, they'll lose the confidence of the biggest whales then the money will dry up, people will lose their jobs and it will all be Chris's fault.
Sure, they might keep going for a few more years, but how much are they going to accomplish in that time? They'll release lots of ships and Jpegs. But will they add Hurston? will they finish the Stanton system? Will they stop the game crashing all the time? Will they actually add some gameplay? Will Squadron 42 get released? I really suspect not.
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Nah, none of us know when this will all collapse, but we all know it will eventually. Why? Because their business model isn't sustainable in the long term.
Look at how much progress has been made since last year: they've added more ships sure, but what about gameplay: box finding missions, scramble races, a mining mini game? They claim to be adding Hurston, yet this will be another empty area devoid of any actual gameplay, assuming it actually gets released this year. And what about all the other "tech" demos that they've shown off over the years at GamesCom / CitizenCon? Where are all those cities / moons / planets / sandworms etc?
Their business model relies on maintaining the faith of big spenders to "pledge" towards the development of the game. Combined with their inability to actually make the game: they have no incentive to actually release a finished version which can be sold for normal prices. The challenge is to show enough progress year on year and create a new Jpeg to keep the money flowing: which CIG have proven time and time again to be very good at. The problem is that they can't keep doing this: something is going to give eventually, they'll lose the confidence of the biggest whales then the money will dry up, people will lose their jobs and it will all be Chris's fault.
Sure, they might keep going for a few more years, but how much are they going to accomplish in that time? They'll release lots of ships and Jpegs. But will they add Hurston? will they finish the Stanton system? Will they stop the game crashing all the time? Will they actually add some gameplay? Will Squadron 42 get released? I really suspect not.
Excellent and very nice response, even thought I love to troll reddit no matter how mean they are I have always been respectful. I would add TOS changes and going back on the "Audited accounting" promise to show how the money was spent. FTR's long video is also sad considering the first 50 mins is just crashes, game stability has been going backwards for sometime. I even wonder what happened to bug smashers and some of the more talented faces we used to see?
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Nah, none of us know when this will all collapse, but we all know it will eventually. Why? Because their business model isn't sustainable in the long term.
Look at how much progress has been made since last year: they've added more ships sure, but what about gameplay: box finding missions, scramble races, a mining mini game? They claim to be adding Hurston, yet this will be another empty area devoid of any actual gameplay, assuming it actually gets released this year. And what about all the other "tech" demos that they've shown off over the years at GamesCom / CitizenCon? Where are all those cities / moons / planets / sandworms etc?
Their business model relies on maintaining the faith of big spenders to "pledge" towards the development of the game. Combined with their inability to actually make the game: they have no incentive to actually release a finished version which can be sold for normal prices. The challenge is to show enough progress year on year and create a new Jpeg to keep the money flowing: which CIG have proven time and time again to be very good at. The problem is that they can't keep doing this: something is going to give eventually, they'll lose the confidence of the biggest whales then the money will dry up, people will lose their jobs and it will all be Chris's fault.
Sure, they might keep going for a few more years, but how much are they going to accomplish in that time? They'll release lots of ships and Jpegs. But will they add Hurston? will they finish the Stanton system? Will they stop the game crashing all the time? Will they actually add some gameplay? Will Squadron 42 get released? I really suspect not.
Yup - pretty much all of that.
It's also why they built and sold the previously unannounced Valkerie for ShitizenCon, then released it in a badly broken 3.3. Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, they invented a new JPEG (Kraken) to sell. Why? Because they already pre-sold all previously known ships, most of which aren't even built. The only way to raise cash money is through new shiny things which only the most devout (going by the sales generated) will buy. Yet, nobody is asking them why they didn't just build and release one of the JPEGs they already pre-sold. I wonder why.
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Yup - pretty much all of that.
It's also why they built and sold the previously unannounced Valkerie for ShitizenCon, then released it in a badly broken 3.3. Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, they invented a new JPEG (Kraken) to sell. Why? Because they already pre-sold all previously known ships, most of which aren't even built. The only way to raise cash money is through new shiny things which only the most devout (going by the sales generated) will buy. Yet, nobody is asking them why they didn't just build and release one of the JPEGs they already pre-sold. I wonder why.
I still get lol's every time someone ask's about when they get to fly their hull-c. Then without fail backers come in and say they are working on the tech to make it fly. Then I always ask myself why do they not see the backwards development cycle.
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I still get lol's every time someone ask's about when the get to fly their hull-c. Then without fail backers come in and say they are working on the tech to make it fly. Then I always ask myself why do they not see the backwards development cycle.
Yeah, it's so bloody obvious that it makes no sense that backers aren't crying foul in unison. They're completely brain-washed if you ask me.
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Yeah, it's so bloody obvious that it makes no sense that backers aren't crying foul in unison. They're completely brain-washed if you ask me.
They really pulled the stops out this time with the manipulative sales tactics. Love that they released a ship and a jpeg at the same time, makes it look like the Kraken may actually come out at some point, $1400 though, I am in awe at their ability to sell digital goods that have not even been created yet at such a high price, it is fucking awesome.
Remember when microtransactions were...micro? People hated it then but it was small fry compared to this brave new world. These are crazy days we are living, this is going to be the biggest laugh of the 21st century when it all goes belly up.
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I still get lol's every time someone ask's about when they get to fly their hull-c. Then without fail backers come in and say they are working on the tech to make it fly. Then I always ask myself why do they not see the backwards development cycle.
Some ships are made fast, some aren't. They've always said that they'll be making ships as required for squadron 42 and they've always said that ships are being made that we don't know about.
Let's suppose the Kracken makes an appearance in Squadron as the pirate group's base of operations perhaps.
Hull series, not so much.
This constant desire to see evil and mismanagement shows a heavily skewed perception. Just because you don't know the reasons, doesn't meant they don't exist.
I find this fixation on 'predatory sales tactics' most strange. Are we not adults in control of our own cash? Do they not have the fact the game is in alpha and the concept isn't ready to fly yet, right there on the sale page?
What would you want them to do? Not advertise their assets? Not generate income? They're a business. They need to do both.
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They really pulled the stops out this time with the manipulative sales tactics. Love that they released a ship and a jpeg at the same time, makes it look like the Kraken may actually come out at some point, $1400 though, I am in awe at their ability to sell digital goods that have not even been created yet at such a high price, it is fucking awesome.
Remember when microtransactions were...micro? People hated it then but it was small fry compared to this brave new world. These are crazy days we are living, this is going to be the biggest laugh of the 21st century when it all goes belly up.
If you know the history, it's easy to see how they did this combo for max effect. They did the same thing back when they released 3.0 in Dec 2017 and they used it to sell ground vehicles. Then came land (lol!) sales.
They basically added two new ships at CitizenCon. The Valkyrie was the new shiny thing to sell and raise cash money while using the promise of 3.3. The Kraken was another future shiny new thing, again to raise cash money. Both of these on top of ships they already sold and have yet to build.
(https://i.imgur.com/7R98dk8.jpg)
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This constant desire to see evil and mismanagement shows a heavily skewed perception. Just because you don't know the reasons, doesn't meant they don't exist.
I find this fixation on 'predatory sales tactics' most strange. Are we not adults in control of our own cash? Do they not have the fact the game is in alpha and the concept isn't ready to fly yet, right there on the sale page?
What would you want them to do? Not advertise their assets? Not generate income? They're a business. They need to do both.
It's called having an opinion. You don't have to like it, and my guess is that nobody cares.
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More like having an agenda to be honest, but then, that's just my opinion.
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So, just another round of trolling?
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More like having an agenda to be honest, but then, that's just my opinion.
You're kidding right? If not check yourself in to the nearest psychologist.
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You're kidding right? If not check yourself in to the nearest psychologist.
Right back atcha broski!
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So, just another round of trolling?
Apparently so. This new account is very disappointing tbh; and it's not going to last very long because I haven't seen anything lol-worthy so far to encourage it.
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Well now, one mustn't upset the echo chamber now must one. Quick, call me stupid and insane before banning me for no valid reason...
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Well now, one mustn't upset the echo chamber now must one. Quick, call me stupid and insane before banning me for no valid reason...
You know better. Nobody is going to ban you without reason.
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Hmm, not posting things you laugh out loud to seems like a reasonably flaky reason to me.
it's not going to last very long because I haven't seen anything lol-worthy so far to encourage it.
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Hmm, not posting things you laugh out loud to seems like a reasonably flaky reason to me.
Of course that would be a bs reason to ban you or anyone. Not that it's going to happen; so I don't know where you got that impression from. Perhaps you misunderstood my previous comment.
The rules haven't changed. No attacks, no insults - and you can post anything (within reason of course) you want, and people reserve the right to respond, lol, or both.
Anyway, please comment on my latest posts over here (http://www.dereksmart.com/forum/index.php?topic=15.1380)
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Ok, if you can't see where I got that from when you just said the account won't last long because I haven't made you laugh yet then...fine. Have it your way but let us not derail further. Back OT.
It seems the late cap ship sale for this year brought the numbers for the citcon sale up to previous values. That's nice for them. The wave idea was good. Make sure the top spenders get their chance. Sensible strategy. Must have hurt in previous years seeing posts about wanting expensive ship 'x' but not getting one. At least this way most who both wanted and could afford one, got one.
Well played CIG. Kept the bank balance and majority of backers willing to spend, happy.
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Anyway, please comment on my latest posts over here
Sorry, I don't have time to watch 2 hours of YouTube...
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It seems the late cap ship sale for this year brought the numbers for the citcon sale up to previous values. That's nice for them. The wave idea was good. Make sure the top soendrs get their chance. Sensible strategy. Must have hurt in previous years seeing posts about wanting expensive ship 'x' but not getting one. At least this way most who both wanted and could afford one, got one.
I'll hand it to CIG - it's straight out of the marketing (or scamming) play book:
1) Create a sense of exclusivity by only marketing it directly to "chosen" players - also enhanced by making them "work" to get it ie. by explaining why they should have one
2) Create a sense of high value (game changer etc)
3) Create a sense scarcity (limit numbers in each wave)
4) Create a sense of urgency (limited time to purchase)
5) Make it clear that the buyer is competing with others to increase the impact of (3) and (4)
It's very clever psychology and it's paid off for CIG.
I might add that the difference between clever marketing and running a scam is whether or not you are selling a product worth the value you've placed on it.
Serendipity: I can't wait to hear your arguments about why a digital Jpeg is worth $1400
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Some ships are made fast, some aren't. They've always said that they'll be making ships as required for squadron 42 and they've always said that ships are being made that we don't know about.
Let's suppose the Kracken makes an appearance in Squadron as the pirate group's base of operations perhaps.
Hull series, not so much.
This constant desire to see evil and mismanagement shows a heavily skewed perception. Just because you don't know the reasons, doesn't meant they don't exist.
I find this fixation on 'predatory sales tactics' most strange. Are we not adults in control of our own cash? Do they not have the fact the game is in alpha and the concept isn't ready to fly yet, right there on the sale page?
What would you want them to do? Not advertise their assets? Not generate income? They're a business. They need to do both.
Are we not adults in control of our own cash?
I would agree with this but I believe they no longer have the intentions on delivering and Chris has started talking about mvp.
What would you want them to do? Not advertise their assets? Not generate income? They're a business. They need to do both.
I also agree with you, and Chris can silence all of us that believe its a scam by releasing the promised "audited accounting" and showing
all funds have been used on the game, not Maui or capri or anything else.
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Serendipity: I can't wait to hear your arguments about why a digital Jpeg is worth $1400
Capitalism. A thing is only worth as much as people will pay for it.
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Are we not adults in control of our own cash?
I would agree with this but I believe they no longer have the intentions on delivering and Chris has started talking about mvp.
What would you want them to do? Not advertise their assets? Not generate income? They're a business. They need to do both.
I also agree with you, and Chris can silence all of us that believe its a scam by releasing the promised "audited accounting" and showing
all funds have been used on the game, not Maui or capri or anything else.
The audit was only if they fail to produce the games. Seeing as they are still in production, they haven't, yet, failed.
You can't seriously believe they have no intention of delivering the games? Why would they have 5 studios and 450 staff if that were the case? A proper scammer would have sacked everyone, closed the studios and pocketed any further funding. This hasn't happened.
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Capitalism. A thing is only worth as much as people will pay for it.
Consumer Scam (http://www.duhaime.org/LegalDictionary/C/ConsumerScam.aspx): A deceptive sale of goods or services to a consumer designed to extract money unreasonably excessive given the services rendered or goods provided, if any.
Oh, and where is Squadron 42? or even the roadmap that Chris promised us all for last April?
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I would consider a venture to fall into scam mode when they promised one thing and then claim (without a shred of evidence) that backers told them to massively expand the project. When TOS that protect said backers evaporate. When all schedules become meaningless as simply goals and not deadlines, easily shifted without consequence. When all pretense of previous promises become null and void to be replaced with whatever the Emporer declares and the hapless backers can no longer escape with their money. When all the game creation luminaries who originally poured into the project have left, apparently seeing that this ship is adrift, having told the emporer that this horse wont race and have moved on to brighter pastures rather than have their reputations soiled any further from association with this joke of the industry.
So knowing that his previous generals have all abandoned him as they no doubt told him this was a dead end yet he persists in the idea that he is making teenie baby steps of progress yet creating a buggy mess out of what used to run reasonably well back at 2.6 or so. I would think that he has to know his project began foundering long ago, at least as far as actual progress and goals go. No publisher would continue to fund a money pit that showed so little progress after all these years. Mass Effect Andromeda was COMPLETE (but still a bit of a mess) and was abandoned still. This stillborn project Star Citizen, run buy a man child meglomaniac jibbering idiot only exists because legions of fools persist in propping it up, many posting studio created sequences as game footage and sucking in other hapless fools who too will get ensnared in the 2 week gotcha money, you sucker, trap.
You will never see things as we former backers do because we are enlightened and you still have you head jammed firmly up your ass. No it is not necessary for Robbers to pack up his circuis tent and move to a country with no extradition treaties for this to be a scam. It merely needs to keep limping along giving false hope to backers while collecting tens of millions of dollars while the ringleader knows his project is fucked. To me this still fits the very definition of a scam because they know that other than an act of God this game will never acheive it's stretch goals but will sucker the backers dry of every space dime for years while in the process. This is not any different than televangelists who claim to do faith healings clutching the foreheads of cancer patients tossing them to the floor declaring the power of Jesus heals you! Roberts and his wife still collect millions in salary while it fails. It's all good as far as he is concerned. It's his job, selling hope to the hopeless.
This is as much as I will bother to feed this troll.
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The audit was only if they fail to produce the games. Seeing as they are still in production, they haven't, yet, failed.
You can't seriously believe they have no intention of delivering the games? Why would they have 5 studios and 450 staff if that were the case? A proper scammer would have sacked everyone, closed the studios and pocketed any further funding. This hasn't happened.
Maybe I'm misreading section 4 under commercial terms of the 2012 TOS but it seems they have missed every date and are subject to the accounting.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/tos
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/tos/1
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You know better. Nobody is going to ban you without reason.
Well, ban evasion would be a very valid reason.
Would it be possible to delete newly made sock puppet accounts on sight and unban one of the old ones instead, so these could be used instead? This would be more practical for post history. Also I wouldn't have to update my ignore list every time to not have to read shitizen drivel again.
This forum is the only one, which provides low volume relevant information on the Star Citizen trainwreck. Even the SC thread on the Frontier Forums is hard to digest, producing an average of 10k posts per quarter with 80 % noise in it.
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Well, ban evasion would be a very valid reason.
It's quite nice to have a dissenting voice here occasionally.
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Capitalism. A thing is only worth as much as people will pay for it.
This nonsense can justify ponzi schemes, medical quackery, etc.
Corporations also have moral and legal responsibilities. Not just the customer.
The hilarious part is that now the whales are complaining the in-game ship prices are too low! LOL. So they've been told they're making a "pledge" but the whales aren't acting like it.
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It seems the late cap ship sale for this year brought the numbers for the citcon sale up to previous values. That's nice for them. The wave idea was good. Make sure the top spenders get their chance. Sensible strategy. Must have hurt in previous years seeing posts about wanting expensive ship 'x' but not getting one. At least this way most who both wanted and could afford one, got one.
Well played CIG. Kept the bank balance and majority of backers willing to spend, happy.
To be perfectly honest, this one completely surprised me. Even though we know the funding chart is mostly bs, it's hard to ignore that wave-induced major spike in that Oct funding. In fact, it completely supports the theory that it's a consistent number of whales who are funding this. But they are also the ones who, by doing so, have removed all accountability. Because croberts relies on them for these periodic funding spikes, he has zero incentive to ship a finished game - of any kind. Yes, it's their money, but I gotta say, knowing that this game as pitched is never going to see the light of day, I can't imagine what those people will do or say when the inevitable finally happens. It's bad enough that some of them are already pissed that in-game ship buying is here, and they're pissed that others can get their thousand Dollar chariots by just grinding, and which they claim isn't prohibitive enough. And that's only the beginning.
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The audit was only if they fail to produce the games. Seeing as they are still in production, they haven't, yet, failed.
The audit was for if they failed to deliver the game by a date certain. That was 18 months from Nov 2014. Then they did yet another ToS change (http://dereksmart.com/forums/topic/star-citizen-tos/) that removed and changed it to the new wording. That's part of the scam that we all keep going on about. Classic bait and switch.
You can't seriously believe they have no intention of delivering the games?
I don't believe that anyone here has made that specific claim. I am certain that they are intending to ship one or both games. Whether they do or not, and in what form, is what the on-going debate is about. And as long as they continue to have insurmountable technical challenges, along with scope creep, they continue to reduce the chances of them ever shipping what they promised.
Why would they have 5 studios and 450 staff if that were the case? A proper scammer would have sacked everyone, closed the studios and pocketed any further funding. This hasn't happened.
I can't believe we're still have this silly argument. Right now on the FTC and SEC websites are ENTIRE companies sued and eventually shut-down for running an active scam. Are you actually serious (yes - you are, because you've been saying this forever and a day).
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I would consider a venture to fall into scam mode when they promised one thing and then claim (without a shred of evidence) that backers told them to massively expand the project. When TOS that protect said backers evaporate. When all schedules become meaningless as simply goals and not deadlines, easily shifted without consequence. When all pretense of previous promises become null and void to be replaced with whatever the Emporer declares and the hapless backers can no longer escape with their money. When all the game creation luminaries who originally poured into the project have left, apparently seeing that this ship is adrift, having told the emporer that this horse wont race and have moved on to brighter pastures rather than have their reputations soiled any further from association with this joke of the industry.
So knowing that his previous generals have all abandoned him as they no doubt told him this was a dead end yet he persists in the idea that he is making teenie baby steps of progress yet creating a buggy mess out of what used to run reasonably well back at 2.6 or so. I would think that he has to know his project began foundering long ago, at least as far as actual progress and goals go. No publisher would continue to fund a money pit that showed so little progress after all these years. Mass Effect Andromeda was COMPLETE (but still a bit of a mess) and was abandoned still. This stillborn project Star Citizen, run buy a man child meglomaniac jibbering idiot only exists because legions of fools persist in propping it up, many posting studio created sequences as game footage and sucking in other hapless fools who too will get ensnared in the 2 week gotcha money, you sucker, trap.
You will never see things as we former backers do because we are enlightened and you still have you head jammed firmly up your ass. No it is not necessary for Robbers to pack up his circuis tent and move to a country with no extradition treaties for this to be a scam. It merely needs to keep limping along giving false hope to backers while collecting tens of millions of dollars while the ringleader knows his project is fucked. To me this still fits the very definition of a scam because they know that other than an act of God this game will never acheive it's stretch goals but will sucker the backers dry of every space dime for years while in the process. This is not any different than televangelists who claim to do faith healings clutching the foreheads of cancer patients tossing them to the floor declaring the power of Jesus heals you! Roberts and his wife still collect millions in salary while it fails. It's all good as far as he is concerned. It's his job, selling hope to the hopeless.
This is as much as I will bother to feed this troll.
Basically all of the above. Well done. :emot-bravo:
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Well, ban evasion would be a very valid reason.
Yes, of course
Would it be possible to delete newly made sock puppet accounts on sight and unban one of the old ones instead, so these could be used instead? This would be more practical for post history. Also I wouldn't have to update my ignore list every time to not have to read shitizen drivel again.
Yeah, but it would be the same amount of work and disruption e.g. I could have un-banned his Serendipity account, then banned the latest sock puppet (his 3rd so far btw) - and we'd be back arguing with the same person.
This forum is the only one, which provides low volume relevant information on the Star Citizen trainwreck. Even the SC thread on the Frontier Forums is hard to digest, producing an average of 10k posts per quarter with 80 % noise in it.
Yeah, I agree. And that was precisely why I issued the warning to him earlier this morning.
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The hilarious part is that now the whales are complaining the in-game ship prices are too low! LOL. So they've been told they're making a "pledge" but the whales aren't acting like it.
Yeah, I've been following that fallout - and it's hilarious :emot-lol:
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I would consider a venture to fall into scam mode when they promised one thing and then claim (without a shred of evidence) that backers told them to massively expand the project. When TOS that protect said backers evaporate. When all schedules become meaningless as simply goals and not deadlines, easily shifted without consequence. When all pretense of previous promises become null and void to be replaced with whatever the Emporer declares and the hapless backers can no longer escape with their money. When all the game creation luminaries who originally poured into the project have left, apparently seeing that this ship is adrift, having told the emporer that this horse wont race and have moved on to brighter pastures rather than have their reputations soiled any further from association with this joke of the industry.
So knowing that his previous generals have all abandoned him as they no doubt told him this was a dead end yet he persists in the idea that he is making teenie baby steps of progress yet creating a buggy mess out of what used to run reasonably well back at 2.6 or so. I would think that he has to know his project began foundering long ago, at least as far as actual progress and goals go. No publisher would continue to fund a money pit that showed so little progress after all these years. Mass Effect Andromeda was COMPLETE (but still a bit of a mess) and was abandoned still. This stillborn project Star Citizen, run buy a man child meglomaniac jibbering idiot only exists because legions of fools persist in propping it up, many posting studio created sequences as game footage and sucking in other hapless fools who too will get ensnared in the 2 week gotcha money, you sucker, trap.
You will never see things as we former backers do because we are enlightened and you still have you head jammed firmly up your ass. No it is not necessary for Robbers to pack up his circuis tent and move to a country with no extradition treaties for this to be a scam. It merely needs to keep limping along giving false hope to backers while collecting tens of millions of dollars while the ringleader knows his project is fucked. To me this still fits the very definition of a scam because they know that other than an act of God this game will never acheive it's stretch goals but will sucker the backers dry of every space dime for years while in the process. This is not any different than televangelists who claim to do faith healings clutching the foreheads of cancer patients tossing them to the floor declaring the power of Jesus heals you! Roberts and his wife still collect millions in salary while it fails. It's all good as far as he is concerned. It's his job, selling hope to the hopeless.
This is as much as I will bother to feed this troll.
I think Croberts wants to get SQ42 out of the door.
This allows him to show off his Mocap stuff and in the circles he moves in that's all he needs to show off.
Then it is just a question of stashing enough cash and avoiding prosecution for not delivering enough in the PU...
He can survive the game failing because films flop all the time and he can tell the story for a long time if he just wants to maintain an appearance of success.
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I think Croberts wants to get SQ42 out of the door.
I don't doubt that they want to make the game. But at every point where a major decision about the game needs to be made they've always gone for the most technically challenging / non-gameplay / high fidelity option - every time, and this is all down to Chris Roberts. For example:
- Concentrating on the PTU rather than a good single player game
- Clothing: because that matters in a space shooter
- Inverse kinematic picking up animations: nice but totally unnecessary
- Planets: they could just as easily had a transition to a large "level" on a planet
- FOIP: in a space shooter?
I could go on. TLDR: they could have concentrated on getting a single player game out the door and if they had scaled back their ambitions and "fidelity" they might have done it. But Chris is incompetent, he gets fixated on meaningless and technically complex additions to the visuals and seems unable to focus on making anything other than the next tech demo and seems more interested in making and interactive movie than an actual game. For all these reasons they'll never manage it.
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I don't doubt that they want to make the game. But at every point where a major decision about the game needs to be made they've always gone for the most technically challenging / non-gameplay / high fidelity option - every time, and this is all down to Chris Roberts.
It's a lot simpler than that: scope creep
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I could go on. TLDR: they could have concentrated on getting a single player game out the door and if they had scaled back their ambitions and "fidelity" they might have done it.
I might even had played it back in 2014/2015 to get my aging rig to its knees. And then moved on to PlayStation for some real SP games. :grin: (As I did in 2016, just without Squadron 42 in-between.)
But Chris is incompetent, he gets fixated on meaningless and technically complex additions to the visuals and seems unable to focus on making anything other than the next tech demo and seems more interested in making and interactive movie than an actual game. For all these reasons they'll never manage it.
I think Chris is an impostor and just got away with it in the early days with no Internet, maybe by buying and reselling or stealing someone else's shit. That "legacy" is what he is banking on and I firmly believe, that does not really exist. That's why it was so important to get Ben "Developer" on board, reassuring Chris everyday, that he really did Wing Commander.
When I watched the live stream with Chris playing his own game (which for me happened to be shortly after watching the video where he pretended debugging the same game), the penny has finally dropped: This guy is a complete computer illiterate and never developed a video game ever in his life. Not in the 1980s and not today. He has not a fucking clue, what he is doing, nor does anybody else of his entourage.
The only thing that changed is that you can't get away with pretending anymore in this day and age. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work anymore in the connected era within a billion-dollars industry. There are small indie developers who know what they're doing proving wrong his "never been done before" narrative, which might have worked in a 1980s publisher boardroom. And the whole world knows instantly.
The famous psychiatry doctor impostor Gerd Postel stumbled over the same issue: 100 years earlier his stunt might have worked until retirement, but he tried it at the end of the 20th century, when people recognizing him as a mailman were a few hours of a car drive away and not days on horse. So of course, he met somebody by chance and got caught.
That's the magic of the Internet: It will not only debunk Croberts' Star Citizen, but his entire legacy as the big scam it was from the beginning. He built an entire career on pretending.
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I might even had played it back in 2014/2015 to get my aging rig to its knees. And then moved on to PlayStation for some real SP games. :grin: (As I did in 2016, just without Squadron 42 in-between.)
I think Chris is an impostor and just got away with it in the early days with no Internet, maybe by buying and reselling or stealing someone else's shit. That "legacy" is what he is banking on and I firmly believe, that does not really exist. That's why it was so important to get Ben "Developer" on board, reassuring Chris everyday, that he really did Wing Commander.
When I watched the live stream with Chris playing his own game (which for me happened to be shortly after watching the video where he pretended debugging the same game), the penny has finally dropped: This guy is a complete computer illiterate and never developed a video game ever in his life. Not in the 1980s and not today. He has not a fucking clue, what he is doing, nor does anybody else of his entourage.
The only thing that changed is that you can't get away with pretending anymore in this day and age. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work anymore in the connected era within a billion-dollars industry. There are small indie developers who know what they're doing proving wrong his "never been done before" narrative, which might have worked in a 1980s publisher boardroom. And the whole world knows instantly.
The famous psychiatry doctor impostor Gerd Postel stumbled over the same issue: 100 years earlier his stunt might have worked until retirement, but he tried it at the end of the 20th century, when people recognizing him as a mailman were a few hours of a car drive away and not days on horse. So of course, he met somebody by chance and got caught.
That's the magic of the Internet: It will not only debunk Croberts' Star Citizen, but his entire legacy as the big scam it was from the beginning. He built an entire career on pretending.
Very well stated. Also, thing is that even the devs who have worked on this project, know the truth about his involvement and influence. And during the lawsuit discovery, Crytek will also know the truth once they start going through version control logs. Everything will unravel soon enough; and this being the industry that leaks everything, eventually it will all come out.
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(https://i.imgur.com/fxqH8tO.png)
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That just boggles my mind and I cannot understand how or why for the spending, but I believe the chart etc like schedules are all bs.
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Yeah, it's bs. But we don't know to what extent.