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Instead of discussing whether Star Citizen is a scam, let's imagine what Star Citizen might have been like if it were a scam. Pretend you're a scammer. You're going to run a Kickstarter scam. You describe a huge video game that has a bunch of features everyone wants. You hope to rake in a few tens of thousands of dollars, but somehow it succeeds beyond your wildest expectations, and now you've got more money than you've ever seen in your life. So, what do you do if you're running a scam? Well, first you start using some of the money to raise even more money. Start offering a bunch of extras, solid gold spaceships shaped like dragons or whatever. Don't worry about game balance. Then use some of the money to develop an actual game demo. Don't worry about bugs, priority #1 is cool pictures that will enable you to raise more money. Keep spending more money on marketing. Keep reaching out for more rounds of investments. Do keep working on tech demos because you're now in the business of raising money. You're not at all opposed to actually making a game, and if you happen to finish making something, that'd be great, since you can sell it for even more money, but you've already achieved all of your goals. As things start to slow down, you announce another game and repeat the whole process. Now, that's quite likely not what happened, but from the outside, the symptoms look the same. Here's what I imagine is most likely version: I've got experience making space games. I want to make another space game. I take a guess at how much it might cost to make (say, $23 million and two years), but I'm not actually any good at estimating cost and development time. I'm in way over my head, but I've got a LOT more money than I've ever had to manage before, so at least I can hire a lot of people. The people I pick aren't any better at this than I am, or I'm not listening to their advice. We're two years out from launch. No Man's Sky comes and goes and the reaction to the release is existentially terrifying to me. Gotta keep adding stuff! Oh god we're running out of money somehow, gotta get more money so we can finish this. Hire more people! Oh god our staff is up to 600 and people think we're a scam just because we haven't released a game yet. Put the whole development calendar online, we're working hard here, please please make this work. We're two years out from launch. Oh god how are we out of money again. Raise more money, hire more people! The early graphics look stale now, gotta refresh them. We've been two years out from launch for almost a decade. I'm still confident that the game will be out in two years, but I'm smart enough to recognize that I've been confident about this for six years and that fact fills me with dread. |