Author Topic: Star Citizen Media Musings  (Read 1144165 times)

dsmart

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Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

Spunky Munkee

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #796 on: August 11, 2018, 12:11:53 PM »
From the interview "With a project like this, and you know Chris (Roberts) himself is a coder and he’s up every night poring through the code, the man is a machine."

You must be joking. He skillset is so outdated I doubt that he serves any useful function. People probably avoid him like a disease.

jwh1701

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orko

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #798 on: August 11, 2018, 05:04:40 PM »
From the interview "With a project like this, and you know Chris (Roberts) himself is a coder and he’s up every night poring through the code, the man is a machine."

You must be joking. He skillset is so outdated I doubt that he serves any useful function. People probably avoid him like a disease.

I agree. All of this reminds me of a past job of mine, and i need to get it out.

I once worked nearly a decade for a boss who was a proud, self-taught "coder". In reality, he was a remarkable sales person with strong negotiation skills, but zero interest in coding. I nearly burned out there, because I needed to rewrite everything he wrote whenever his projects needed support... And they always did, as he left them unfinished. Sometimes he even sent releases to end users without debugging a single line of code, and every single time he let others assume his products were complete. They always were complete to him, despite being bug-ridden unstable vomits of last night's spaghetti code that sometimes crashed immediately on startup. And to make it even worse, once you took responsibility and fixed the products no matter what, he started questioning how it could take so much extra time to finish the thing, so you were stuck alone with the intially fucked up project with now pissed customers for any subsequent problems, and they could be anything from incorrect specs to completely missing features and obviously big financial losses to customers.

I get this similar feeling of blind pride (read: he's a narcissist) from CR. I've seen a few videos with CR in front of a PC playing and "coding" SC and he has looked so goddamn lost in those. I doubt he cares about coding as a craft or modern project management methods at all, at least in a way that really promotes self-repairing development cycles and produces better teams. Despite CIG seems to be running some king of agile method with milestones in public, their results speak more of a fixed budget waterfall project.


If I'm correct, CIG has never successfully closed a public sprint/milestone. They have never focused enough to complete a feature and then polish it to version 1.0, and if any of the glimpses of reality hold, I'm not too surprised. There seems to be constant changes in their already exploded plans (let's add tanks, mechs, bar experience, toilet animations etc.), they fight against unrealistic time estimates ("I absolve myself from that." - CR), there has been public blame shifting both to external and internal parties by CR, they have designed and implemented systems and demos to later ditch them completely, not to mention nepotism, straight out lying about non-existing products and a bunch of other things stirring the soup. How could anyone focus in a mess like that? No matter how cool it can be to work at CIG - professional teams usually adapt well and build synergies on their own - it can all be poisoned by a number of ways, and under NDA it's not pretty.

In my eyes, this whole CryEngine - StarEngine - AWS/Lumberyard engine shift along with the evolution of the game's genre to "Singleplayer - Co-Op - MMO - Cinematic FPS RPG - Flight Sim - Virtual life sim - Universe scale civilication sim - Open world everything sandbox" are the most obvious examples of decisions made in hindsight by an opportunistic sales person, not an experienced developer.

dsmart

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #799 on: August 13, 2018, 01:30:39 PM »
Adrian, the author, responded to one of my Tweets. My response was worthy of a multi-tweet thread

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1028991113020039168
Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

jwh1701

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #800 on: August 13, 2018, 04:41:15 PM »
Adrian, the author, responded to one of my Tweets. My response was worthy of a multi-tweet thread

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1028991113020039168

Nice, most people I know including myself do not think of wccigftech to be very reputable. This interview
just reinforces that we cannot be to far off on that opinion.

DemonInvestor

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #801 on: August 13, 2018, 10:23:02 PM »
Adrian, the author, responded to one of my Tweets. My response was worthy of a multi-tweet thread

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1028991113020039168

Well asking hard questions isn't nessecarily in the best interest for people already invested into a failing project. Especially true if there's no clear criminal case and recoverable assets. As speaking out would only reduce the chance for someone who already invested of getting anything of value back. Though such behaviour would mean he'd be already aware of the company inability to answer said hard questions, but hopes there's something recoverable (at least through new investments). And as far as i read psychological material there's this protective measure of people not wanting to find out that they really fucked up with some decisions.

So Derek you really shouldn't wonder about invested people not publically asking hard questions. Good answer of you, though.

dsmart

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #802 on: August 14, 2018, 04:14:37 AM »
Well asking hard questions isn't nessecarily in the best interest for people already invested into a failing project. Especially true if there's no clear criminal case and recoverable assets. As speaking out would only reduce the chance for someone who already invested of getting anything of value back. Though such behaviour would mean he'd be already aware of the company inability to answer said hard questions, but hopes there's something recoverable (at least through new investments). And as far as i read psychological material there's this protective measure of people not wanting to find out that they really fucked up with some decisions.

So Derek you really shouldn't wonder about invested people not publically asking hard questions. Good answer of you, though.

Yeah, I am well aware that it would go against the grain for them to ask any hard and/or pertinent questions. I wasn't even going to respond to that article at all, because it's the usual bs. My first twitter thread was just an overview about missed opportunity. He responded to it. And that's what prompted my second thread (above).

Regardless, the point I was making is that it's these fluff pieces which end up making them complicit in the on-going scam because they become proxies for CIG.

Anyway, I just checked my Twitter feed, and it looks like he left a swath of responses. This morning is going to be all kinds of fun. :emot-lol:
« Last Edit: August 14, 2018, 04:17:34 AM by dsmart »
Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

dsmart

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #803 on: August 14, 2018, 06:20:32 AM »
Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

Meowz

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #804 on: August 14, 2018, 07:42:44 AM »

BigM

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #805 on: August 14, 2018, 07:52:25 AM »
He came back

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1029338750298537985

Not being the brightest dealing with developing games and math (always sucked at it, lol) thank you for writing so even someone like myself can understand where you are coming from. The thing is if I can understand how this whole thing has been a scam, it shocks me so many are still defending Roberts. We live in strange times.

jwh1701

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #806 on: August 14, 2018, 07:56:47 AM »
He came back

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1029338750298537985


The replies are so great,
 
 :perfect: "article itself reeks of bias, gratuitous bs, irresponsible writing, wanton fanboyism - and ZERO accountability"

DemonInvestor

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #807 on: August 14, 2018, 02:01:35 PM »
He came back

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/1029338750298537985

I don't really follow you on the going concern projections so far, but i follow you on their inability to deliver what they promised. And that the changes of TOS and overal sales behaviour implicate problems. An analysis i'd be really interested in, is how many project leads they lost over time, while them not having finished their job. As those key positions indicate how likely they'll finish with the project. But i guess those an analysis would be hard to do.

dsmart

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #808 on: August 14, 2018, 04:43:56 PM »
I don't really follow you on the going concern projections so far,

Yeah, "going concern" is a simple concept that is somehow hard for mere mortals to understand.

I explained it as best as I could in my Tweet storm to him this morning. Here's another way to look at it:

1) company needs $4M per month to operate; which means $12M per quarter

2) at the end of Q1 of that year, they had $16M cash on hand, and they are making $4M per month. They are "going concern" because the income is self-sustaining as long as it remains constant and/or exceeds current levels of income

3) something happened and in Q3 they had $8M cash on hand, and they are making $1M per month. They are now no longer a "going concern" because with that cash on hand, coupled with the reduced income, they will be insolvent (expenses exceed income) by end of Q4

4) they go out and get a loan, investor money etc and they are once again a going concern for a period of time. btw this is the very basis of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing during which companies use that period to not pay any bills, until they can restructure via cost cutting measures, new cash, debt financing etc.

In the case of CIG, in Q4/15 (Oct to be exact) they were rumored to have cash on hand for 90 days (end of Jan 2016), and at their growth rate would no longer be a going concern by end of Q1/2016.

In order to prevent that, they started doing all kinds of shady sales shenanigans to raise enough cash to sustain their monthly burn rate.

That's all there is to it.

In the case of F42 group, if anything happens to the CIG/RSI parent, they will go under immediately because they are in debt, and have NO independent source of income other than what they get from the US parent. As per their 2017 filing, by the end of Q1/2017, they had enough cash on hand for barely 1 week of operating costs. Which, by all accounts, means they were insolvent. Of course they are still around a year later because the parent is still financing their operations.

but i follow you on their inability to deliver what they promised. And that the changes of TOS and overal sales behaviour implicate problems. An analysis i'd be really interested in, is how many project leads they lost over time, while them not having finished their job. As those key positions indicate how likely they'll finish with the project. But i guess those an analysis would be hard to do.

Nobody knows or cares to track that sort of thing. It's not relevant in the general scheme of things because having the same people on the project doesn't mean it's going to fare any better. They've proven that much already via their inability to finish a SINGLE game after 7 yrs and $191M.

People come and go all the time. The issue is that replacing lost experienced people, with new inexperienced ones, tends to be the quicker path to failure. Especially in the software industry.
« Last Edit: August 14, 2018, 04:47:50 PM by dsmart »
Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a TV show about a bunch of characters making a game. It's basically "This is Spinal Tap" - except people think the band is real.

Meowz

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Re: Star Citizen Media Musings
« Reply #809 on: August 14, 2018, 06:27:20 PM »
When the average person speaks about SC they seem to only think of the total amount raised (according to the accurate and precise fund counter lol) and the final bill of known projects with no regard to income vs. debt and revenue in reserve vs funds taken out. Just, "CIG has 190mil and GTA5 needed $128mil to develop so it's a done deal, only thing needed is time." Consider all of CIG's marketing as being free while throwing in unfamiliar terms such as "going concern" and there is the problem with them understanding you Derek lol.

 

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