Last week Cloud Imperium decided to change the way they inform customers about the progress of its upcoming game, Star Citizen. According to MassivelyOP and a lot of YouTube videos I watched over the weekend, CIG has removed release dates farther in the future than the next quarter.
Rather than continuing to display release projections that carry a high percentage chance of moving (those multiple quarters out), we will no longer show any deliverables in the Release View for any patches beyond the immediate one in the next quarter. Even though we always added a caveat that a card could move, we feel now that it's better to just not put a deliverable on Release View until we can truly commit to it. We’re going to emphasize more strongly than ever that you should focus your attention on our Progress Tracker, which has been our continued goal. Going forward (starting after Alpha 3.18), we’ll only add cards on Release View one quarter out. Our process remains the same for updating a feature’s status: cards on Release View will be listed as Tentative until they pass their final review, in which they are marked as committed upon passing. This is no different than how things are handled today.
Sounds pretty reasonable, right? CIG has overpromised and they want to end the practice. But whoever wrote the explanation made a little mistake right before the passage above.
It has become abundantly clear to us that despite our best efforts to communicate the fluidity of development, and how features marked as Tentative should sincerely not be relied upon, the general focus of many of our most passionate players has continued to lead them to interpret anything on the Release View as a promise. We want to acknowledge that not all of you saw it that way; many took our new focus and our words to heart and understood exactly what we tried to convey. But there still remains a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises. And their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community, as well as to prospective Star Citizen fans watching from the sidelines at our Open Development communications. [emphasis mine]
When working on a game in development for close to 10 years that probably needs another 5 years of work before it can launch, upsetting a sizable portion of the customer base is probably not a good idea. At the very least, the company needs hundreds of millions of dollars to complete development.
How much? In 2020, CIG spent $80.8 million. At that rate, CIG needs to raise around $400 million. That's in addition to the estimated $550 million raised through the end of 2021. In other words, CIG needs to maintain really good relations with the whales keeping the studio afloat.
Now, I suspect the whole controversy is not much more than a tempest in a teacup. A very stormy situation amongst a small pool of people. The financial report for 2020 showed CIG turned a profit and I highly suspect the same will hold true for 2021. Until I see evidence to the contrary, I see the CIG money machine continuing to roll on for the foreseeable future.
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