Author Topic: Star Citizen - A Media Package for Journalists  (Read 7806 times)

SteveBox

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Star Citizen - A Media Package for Journalists
« on: January 15, 2017, 04:26:00 PM »
My posts on this board intend to skew towards humor (whether it does or does not is left in the eye of the beholder).

The ongoing situation with Star Citizen, though, is no laughing matter. At the least, the situation amounts to gross mismanagement. The likelihood that the situation is much worse than that are far greater.

However, the mainstream media coverage of this situation has been slight, if at all. Outside of the gaming community, little, if any, attention has been brought to bear on it. That lack of media coverage needs to be corrected if we, the public at large, are to be served in having a satisfactory conclusion to this situation.

While perusing Derek Smart's twitter feed, I stumbled upon a tweet linking to a "factual book," "Star Citizen." The book was in jest; With inserted text merged with illustrations that were clearly meant for other content. Yet I couldn't escape that, at it's core, the book may be the solution to what is needed in this case: A simple, straight-forward narrative making the case that the situation concerning Star Citizen needs a much-deeper review by media outlets and law enforcement.

A lot of the arguments concerning Star Citizen may well be factually correct but are they accessible to non-computer literate people? For instance, what does it mean for a computer developer to need 4 years to create a game? Is that "standard"? Is that long or short? How much is $141 million dollars in the context of the type of game that Star Citizen purports to be? Can we name alternatives that were developed in less time & with less money? What about the company structure? How is that common or not common with other game developers?

There has been plenty of mocking of Star Citizen / CIG / RSI / Chris Roberts et all. I have contributed to that in my own way.

And it hasn't worked.

Just as backers have been mocked for their stubbornness in sticking with Star Citizen, we must admit our own stubbornness concerning our approach toward garnering media attention towards this issue. Humorous screencaps are not cutting it. MP3 songs and photo-shopped humorous parody books are not cutting it.

It is time to simplify and devise a new strategy. We must make our case in simple terms that a non-computer developer can understand quickly. I've followed computer gaming my entire life but I have no idea what the switch to the Lumberyard version of the CryEngine truly means. As a non-computer game developer, I have no idea if the corporate structure of RSI / CIG is normal for such a large game or not. Is 4 years a long time to develop this type of game? Is it normal for a game developer to alter their terms of service so frequently?

As gamers, we are used to these issues but many in the media are not.

We should create a media package specifically formulated for the media to spotlight this situation and then distribute it. Simple, factually-correct statements backed up by industry-standard comparisons.

We need to market this in a way that will attract media attention: Was your child scammed? Is your child being scammed? Is CIG / RSI avoiding paying taxes? Angles such as though.

We need to create a section where, if a journalist is interested in pursuing this story, we create questions that they may ask CIG / RSI officials concerning their operation. Simple, straight-forward questions with follow-up questions that clarify any attempts in case the question is not fully answered the first time.

The time for mocking is over. It's not working. Let's start work on a different approach.

Thoughts?

Scruffpuff

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Re: Star Citizen - A Media Package for Journalists
« Reply #1 on: January 15, 2017, 04:52:28 PM »
I agree wholeheartedly, and I've long been pondering something along these lines.  For a time, I was invited to work with a group of people on a project like you describe.

Unfortunately, we kept hitting the exact same wall each time we attempted to collate any meaningful data:  where do we begin?

It's not an easy question to answer.  Everything about this project has been egregiously mismanaged from the ground up - every possible aspect of the development is absolutely beyond compare in any industry, not only the games industry.

Therein lies one of the central problems when trying to define the scope and/or progress of the project through the lens of game development.  You can't compare Star Citizen to other games because of a number of factors:

1)  Star Citizen is not a game, nor is it yet a proper IP.  There is no scope, no plan, no proposed game loop, no economy, no defined plan for income beyond donations, no functioning engine, no functioning netcode.  Because nobody has bothered to define the boundaries of what Star Citizen will, and more importantly, will not be, the game, in the purest sense, is impossible to create.

2)  Star Citizen has spent all of their money on cinematics that show whatever they want, because no game mechanics have been designed, and ship concepts and models, because those are what keep people paying them money.  What every other game company considers the foundation of a game (game loop, engine, and netcode), Star Citizen considers an afterthought.  They're building the house from the roof down, and so any comparisons to proper development simply won't apply.

3)  Star Citizen is set up as a dictatorship with one of the most inept, unskilled, unimaginative, and untalented people in the industry today at its head.  Every single bad decision, and every single failure of this project from every conceivable angle can be laid directly at his feet.  There are parallels in the industry for this, but nothing even approaching this scope.

4)  The toxic cult surrounding the project is quite literally unprecedented not only in gaming, but in nearly any industry outside of organized religion.  It would be a pretty tall order to offer perspective of a company whose primary source of financial income is deceiving the mentally unbalanced.  How would we put that in perspective that the average person would understand?

This project is an unprecedented disaster.  A man with no qualifications (in fact someone who is uniquely anti-qualified) has tricked people out of over $100 million dollars to do something he, and the people under him, have no idea how to do.  It's a hell of a spectacle, but I firmly believe that only once it collapses will the post-mortem coverage become a reasonable goal.

There's just too much dysfunction here to disseminate the details in a digestible format.  The scope of Chris Roberts' failure is something I can imagine people taking two years of graduate school to fully comprehend.

 

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