Star Citizen - "Incompetence And Mismanagement On A Galactic Scale" - Forbes

The typical problems which almost also ruined Freelancer.

I remember when the very first announcement of this "project" was done. A new Chris Roberts game.

As a Wing Commander fan who also enjoyed Privateer and LOVED to play Starlancer/Freelancer I was happy about that very first rendered video. I even had the chance to chat with Ben Lesnik (the community manager/PR guy back then) about it that day and share the information here at the Portal. Ive seen the positive feedback from the fans... the many questions about the project... and an official poll about what players actually would what this game to be.

1-2 weeks later the offical livestream with Chris Roberts started... an event many players anticipated.

Unfortunatly this livestream also killed my hopes instantly.

Instead creating the game players wanted (based on the official poll) a totally different kind of game was announced. A kind that Chris Roberts failed to deliver 10 years before that livestream, but this time even bigger. I still don't know why they even bothered to ask players about which kind of game they want if they never had the intention to go for these wishes. Was it ignorance or delusion?

Even worse.... that guy had the nerves the belittle the efforts of other developers which kept the genre running while he was absent from the gaming industry (for 10 years). It felt like he was blaming others while he actually did nothing during that time. That was followed by megalomaniac comments about saving PC gaming. Did PC gaming need such a messiah? Absolutely not. Did the Scifi genre need a Chris Roberts? Well, there have been plenty of Scifi games that were released during his absense. Evochron, Eve online, Darkstar One, Starshatter, Jumpgate, Black Prophecy, Shattered Worlds, Battlestar Galactica, Nexus, Tarr Chronicles, Wing Commander Arena, Dark Horizon, Black Prophecy. The genre was not in such a bad shape as he claimed.

And then he made the announcement how all of the stuff that he wanted should be financed and I remembered why exactly he lost his company and why Microsoft had to step in in order to finally bring the Freelancer development back on its track. Of course no publisher would give him the money. He failed to create his last game 10 years ago and since that produced pretty bad movies. His only chance to raise money was to find enough people blindly believing in this project. Most preferably people that did not know about his past failures.

Yeah, I think that livestream... or more specifically the arrogance of this person on the screen ruined it for me.

A positive glimpse of hope vanished and got replaced by a very sceptical point of view. Maybe the right decision, maybe a wrong one that needs to be corrected somewhen in the distant future.

the year has changed

I think ED went with the more clever approach. Releasing content step by step and improving upon it. No endless discussions about if the game is a scam because there is a game players can enjoy for years and funding is based on players... not on hopes.