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Is Cloud Imperium co-founder Chris Roberts to be blamed for the Star Citizen’s delays and long seven-year development?
Is Cloud Imperium co-founder Chris Roberts to be blamed for the Star Citizen’s delays and long seven-year development? A recent Forbes report has exposed some sad things behind the games which raised over $242 million in crowdfunding.
Forbes states that of the total $288 million, only $14 million remained at the end of 2017, but then Roberts got more money with the help of the sale of spaceship models being sold for as much as $3,000 each.
Much of the team’s time is spent on making demos to keep players dropping cash on spaceships. Some players spent from $1,000 to $4,500 and some of them decided to contact the Federal Trade Commission for refunds.
“As the money rolled in, what I consider to be some of the old bad habits popped up — not being super-focused,” said Mark Day, whose company was working on the game in 2013 and 2014. “It had got out of hand, in my opinion. The promises being made — call it feature creep, call it whatever it is — now we can do this, now we can do that. I was shocked.”
What is more, lead character artist David Jennison says that it took him 17 months to complete work on just five characters because of the team’s problems.
“All the decisions for the character pipeline and approach had been made by Roberts,” he said in a leaked letter to the studio’s HR department. “It became clear that this was a companywide pattern — CR dictates all.”
Do you think we’ll ever witness the release of the game? Discuss the story in the comments.