Oh Im fine with you doing whatever you want with your money, hell we all blow cash on shit we dont need. What I don´t understand is;
Why put money into this? There is zero need to put money into this dumpsterfire. You get the forum giggles for free, free flight weekends, all their videos are free and so on.
With all the shady shit they are doing (no refunds, breaking their own promise to show the financials if they didnt deliver the game by...2016 I think it was, conventions they obviously blow backer money on while promising that every cent will go to "development", the legal issues with Crytek, 100 shell companys..) there are red flags all over the place.
Again; why put money into it?
I agree its very entertaining to follow this, but paying for it? I just don´t get it
Why?
Well a couple reasons (second being the most important):
1. I liked what they were selling in terms of ideas at the time and wanted to put money towards funding. (My last major purchase was like 5 years ago. the 15$ was an up-exchange on an item.)
2. I make terrible financial decisions when it comes to video-games.
So, I mean, you could argue that the last time I spent money on this game was 2015 and you wouldn't be wrong but the last time I REALLY spent money was the end of 2013. If the game releases I'll have some cool things to do, if it doesn't then I'm not going to lose any sleep.
TL;DR of this section -- Because I wanted to and the game looked interesting back when I dropped money on the funding.
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Breaking this into a sub quote:
I honestly think allowing refunds was the dumbest thing they could do, they should have set it up, legally, to not allow refunds from day one (if possible). Why would you allow people to fund your shit and then offer to allow them the ability to pull funds out from under you MID development? That sounds like a TERRIBLE plan along the likes of Kurt Shillings studio where you are banking on money that isn't there hoping that your payday comes before the lenders come calling (Yes, I know Shillings company was doing fraud). It doesn't help that ALL of the people I know that did refunds were TERRIBLE financially, it kinda taints my perspective of the people crying about lack of a refund. They spent rent money on it, food money on it...you name the necessity and they spent the money "Allocated" for it on SC shit. Had a guy in one of my communities that spent his disability for the month (for a couple months) on a TON of Star Citizen shit, THOUSANDS of dollars this dude NEEDED to be using in a better way...on digital ships that his fatass won't even live to fly (I mean technically I won't either, but I'm 35 and lived a healthy life...maybe my kids will be able to see SC release, I know my grand children will!)
breaking their own promise to show the financials if they didnt deliver the game by...2016 I think it was
Meh, this I don't care about, I agree they should stick to their promises, but I can understand why they wouldn't. My guess this is for a very simple reason, they are making a LOT of money from both backers AND private investment (from places like Intel, Nvidia, ect...), they likely fear that to show all those financials would kill their golden goose (the fairly stable income from backers and subs). They would rather take the hit on the reputation and just chug along, legal...but not really ethical...
conventions they obviously blow backer money on while promising that every cent will go to "development"
Conventions are financial drivers for them at this point, I honestly wonder how much of an up-tick in sales they received since doing the CitizenCon. I would assume it's a non-insignificant number.
the legal issues with Crytek
I am not 100% familiar with the case but I thought it was largely dismissed as it was an attempt at a shakedown since crytek basically went under a while before they sued them and now SC is using a completely different engine (LumberYard -- Amazon). From the little I read it sounded bad at first, then I saw that Crytek doesn't even exist anymore, then I saw they hadn't even "Existed" (in a development sense) for a year or so before their legal team decided to fire up a lawsuit.
Not familiar with this one, are you talking about the dozens of development studios they have going concurrently or something else?
I know they have like 2-4 "Offices" based around the world and then like a couple dozen small partners doing various things like weapon designs and what not. If that is what you mean by "shell companies", I just chalk it up to the "C" level people being inexperienced at development and trying to do things the most efficient way possible but not being cost effective. I mean Roberts worked in the film industry for a bit before this project and, as far as I am aware, that industry does things very similarly to this with small companies doing work for singular scenes. Either way, I chalk it up to lack of experience in the industry not generally intent to defraud.
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Maybe the above sheds some light on my perspective on all of this.
Faith
Punko
