If they’re keeping their head above water, even barely, it means they are keeping their head above water. Without delivering a product. For YEARS.
They’re earning money by selling empty promises year after year. Not a lot of money. They’ll never become billionaires from this game. But there are lots of people in there (mainly executives and CEO and whatever) earning a decent salary. On empty promises! It’s as close to a scam as it can be without being illegal.
I guess, but the fact they are now laying people off is for sure a sign that things aren’t going well enough. CR might live the rest of his life in a mansion but his legacy is in a crapper and he’s not gonna get another chance at this (at least I hope people wouldn’t fall for it twice).
He basically pivoted the WC success into making movies (the Kojima model) and the Wing Commander movie was so bad that it killed both the franchise and his career in film. He still had money so got to be a producer on a few flicks, but never had any creative control again.
And Freelancer was so horribly mismanaged that it basically “blacklisted” him as far as game dev went.
Star Citizen was basically an attempt to take advantage of the crowd funding craze that somehow also keyed in on what is largely the rise of “influencer” games where people care more about the dream of doing something than actually doing it (Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online are earlier examples where the vast majority of fans will never play the game but might buy it to “try it”).
Speculation, but I assume the attempts to make a bunch of tech that does what everyone else already does but poorly is trying to build out a portfolio for a buyout.
And it is worth understanding that Wing Commander… very much benefited from being “first” and for having a few celebrities involved. Even by WC4 there were “third party” games like Star Crusader that were basically better in every possible way. And Star Wars had been doing x-wing games since '93.
And then Freespace hit in 98 and was a revelation (with Freespace 2 in '99 basically being the gold standard to this day).
In a lot of ways, Squadron 42 was so anticipated mostly because we hadn’t had anything in the genre for years by that point (Darkstar One sort of existed?). Sort of like how almost all the xcom sickos played UFO ET and found it “fine” and a lot of the JA2 sickos played 5.56 and… anyway. Or us Silent Storm fans who tried to tolerate Hummer & Sickle.
Dwarf fortress is a finished game and the original version, which is awesome as is, was always free. Not at all comparable to star citizen or eve online
Dwarf Fortress is very much NOT finished. Its roadmap is already more complex than most live game feature sets and Tarn and Zach are generally pretty adamant about it likely never being “finished”
Maybe consider reading more rather than just having a knee jerk reaction of “comparison to thing I don’t like, bad. I MUST REPLY!!!”
Look at it another way.
If they’re keeping their head above water, even barely, it means they are keeping their head above water. Without delivering a product. For YEARS.
They’re earning money by selling empty promises year after year. Not a lot of money. They’ll never become billionaires from this game. But there are lots of people in there (mainly executives and CEO and whatever) earning a decent salary. On empty promises! It’s as close to a scam as it can be without being illegal.
I guess, but the fact they are now laying people off is for sure a sign that things aren’t going well enough. CR might live the rest of his life in a mansion but his legacy is in a crapper and he’s not gonna get another chance at this (at least I hope people wouldn’t fall for it twice).
Their laying people off mean that the honest workers are losing something. But the actual scammers, the people at the top, they’re still there.
They lay people off because they don’t want to reduce their own salaries.
We’d all hope so but how many times have people fallen for Peter Molyneuxs shenanigans.
At least his games got (more or less) finished and are playable.
His “legacy” has always been in the shitter.
He basically pivoted the WC success into making movies (the Kojima model) and the Wing Commander movie was so bad that it killed both the franchise and his career in film. He still had money so got to be a producer on a few flicks, but never had any creative control again.
And Freelancer was so horribly mismanaged that it basically “blacklisted” him as far as game dev went.
Star Citizen was basically an attempt to take advantage of the crowd funding craze that somehow also keyed in on what is largely the rise of “influencer” games where people care more about the dream of doing something than actually doing it (Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online are earlier examples where the vast majority of fans will never play the game but might buy it to “try it”).
Speculation, but I assume the attempts to make a bunch of tech that does what everyone else already does but poorly is trying to build out a portfolio for a buyout.
And it is worth understanding that Wing Commander… very much benefited from being “first” and for having a few celebrities involved. Even by WC4 there were “third party” games like Star Crusader that were basically better in every possible way. And Star Wars had been doing x-wing games since '93.
And then Freespace hit in 98 and was a revelation (with Freespace 2 in '99 basically being the gold standard to this day).
In a lot of ways, Squadron 42 was so anticipated mostly because we hadn’t had anything in the genre for years by that point (Darkstar One sort of existed?). Sort of like how almost all the xcom sickos played UFO ET and found it “fine” and a lot of the JA2 sickos played 5.56 and… anyway. Or us Silent Storm fans who tried to tolerate Hummer & Sickle.
Dwarf fortress is a finished game and the original version, which is awesome as is, was always free. Not at all comparable to star citizen or eve online
Okay.