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Chris Roberts, co-founder of Cloud Imperium and Star Citizen designer, is behind most of the delays and laborious development of this seven-year-old game.
A Forbes report (via GamesIndustry.biz) revealed the disaster of Star Citizen's development, which raised more than $ 242 million in crowdfunding to cover both the MMO and the Star Squadron 42 single-player campaign.
According to Forbes, out of a total of $ 288 million in Cloud Imperium's coffers, there were only $ 14 million left at the end of 2017, but Roberts managed to raise more funds with the sale of spacecraft models sold up to $ 3,000 each, while development seems to have stagnated somewhat.
Much of the developer's time is wasted doing demos to prevent gamblers from spending money on spaceships. Disgruntled players report spending between $ 1,000 and $ 4,500, some of them coming close to the Federal Trade Commission to get refunds.
The FTC has received 129 consumer complaints regarding Cloud Imperium, with claims of up to $ 24,000.
"The game that they promised us can not even work," said one player after spending $ 1,000 at stake. "The performance is terrible and it's still in an" Alpha "state. I want to go out. They lied to us.
Roberts has long boasted about the scale of the game, claiming that it will consist of 100 star systems, none of which have been completed to date. It is hardly sitting in front of a complete solar system.
"As the money came in, what I consider to be [Roberts’] Old bad habits have emerged – but not super-targeted, "says Mark Day, whose company was tasked with working on the game in 2013 and 2014." In my opinion, the situation had gotten out of control. The promises that have been made – call it feature ramp, call it as it is – now we can do it, now we can do it. I was shocked. "
A number of former studio employees cited Roberts' interference and micromanagement as a hindrance to the progress of Star Citizen, a senior graphics engineer describing a scenario in which they were responsible for refining the visual effects of ship shields. . Several reworkings and several months were necessary to satisfy Roberts.
A similar story was told by David Jennison, a former main character artist, who explained that it took him 17 months to complete the work of five characters because of the same problem.
"All the character pipeline decisions and the approach had been taken by Roberts," he wrote in a letter leaked to the studio's Human Resources department. "It became clear that it was a global scheme at the scale of society: the CR dictates everything."
A beta version of Squadron 42 is expected to be ready in 2020, but the release date of Star Citizen remains to be seen.
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