quote:

There is an early video from Chris (I'm not going to search for it - Google that sucker!) where he states under no uncertain circumstances that the REAL money only rolls in once they release and start advertising. Box sales alone post release will dwarf all development dollars to date. This is just for Squadron 42. The Persistent Universe MMO will be gravy on top.

While the pledge money SC has raised so far seems like a lot (and in certain respects, it is a very large sum), it is a FRACTION of the potential.

To understand this, you have to understand the power of advertising. Advertising is extremely effective at promoting a product or brand. There is a reason that 30 seconds of airtime at the super bowl can be $10 million or more - it means advertising is so effective that a 30 second add, even for a well known product or company, will pay out MORE than the cost of that ad.

Knowing this truth, we have to understand that the entirety of SC's popularity to date is word of mouth. Considering there are more than 1.75 BILLION PC gamers worldwide, an insignificant fraction of the players who will one day know about this game actually are aware of it today. The world is THAT big.

Further, they will sell chits (UEC) for real money after the release of the game. This microtransaction option alone will fuel the game for a very long time. Decade easy, probably more. And there will be of course expansion packs for SQ42.

Also consider this: they went from 12 people and a pipe dream, to a world-class, global development studio with several 100s of full time talent. They've built the foundation for something that can create multiple games, multiple IPs, like all development studios do. There is EVERY incentive to get the games released so they can expand their scope and make REAL money, diversify, and be profitable for decades. The Pokemon franchise has made $90 BILLION. The Mario franchise has made $30 BILLION. Call of Duty, maybe a bit more apropos to compare, has made $17 BILLION. And Star Wars, in totality, has made $70 BILLION in video games alone.

To continue their current set up any longer than they minimally need to before switching to a fully operating development studio with released games only delays them arriving at a point where REAL money starts coming in.

At the end of the day, it truly does just take what it takes to make the game they're making. There is no incentive to not get it made as quickly as they can, without sacrificing the fidelity, scale and quality they are looking for.

The trick is: they've got to release an amazing, compelling game for this all to come true. Hence why they are making sure it gets done right.

4th Stimpire Queen posted:

Ok...can anyone explain how the heck something like that can happen? Is, like, the character state shared between different game modes? Wtf!?

And yeah I know the basic answer is but just wondering if someone more tech oriented can explain what the heck might be happening.

So I had a bit of an adventure last night posted:

Imagine this: You've been shot in the head, you stagger around and then fall to the ground onto your back. Your blood leaking out onto the cold snow. Your vision fading. Then... you hear:

Faintly - weee wooo, weee wooo. You force your eyes open and look up into the sky, and see the pretty red flashing lights of - The Cutty Red - The Ambulance, with two combat medics inside.

weee wooo - closer - weee wooo - closer - WEEE WOOO, BLAAAARRRT BLAAAARRT BLAAAARRT WEEE WOOO WEEE WOOO

They are on a mission, a singular mission. They are screaming down through the atmosphere for one thing... to save YOU.

Ladies and gentlemen, have I painted a picture for you? I hope so, because this is what The Cutty Red is all about.

Kikas posted:

I would love to know why SC is so poo poo.

Bootcha posted:

4th Stimpire Queen posted:

This is great, I also wanna add another element called normalization of deviance.

Normalization of deviance is a phenomenon by which individuals, groups or organizations come to accept a lower standard of performance until that lower standard becomes the "norm" for them. This phenomenon usually occurs when individuals, groups or organizations are under pressure to meet schedule requirements, conform to budgetary considerations or deliver on a promise, while adhering to expected standards or prescribed procedures. Faced with a situation in which relaxing the standards or procedures gets the "job done," they decide to utilize lower standards or less robust procedures with the expectation that when things get back to "normal," they will go back to utilizing the higher standards or procedures.

Every time this is done successfully, it becomes easier to do it the next time. The successful use of the lower standard over time is perceived as somehow an acceptable substitute for the original standard and,  therefore, becomes the norm or the "new" standard for performance. As a result, the individual, group or organization stops seeing its action as deviant.

Sounds familiar, hm?

AndreTheGiantBoned posted:

Mods?

Star Citizen: weee wooo - closer - weee wooo - closer - WEEE WOOO, BLAAAARRRT BLAAAARRT BLAAAARRT WEEE WOOO WEEE WOOO

Bumble He posted:

mr. bootcha, just read your interesting stuff there. good read as always.
but can we even apply these categories to cig?

the answer could also be "every information cig is giving out is smoke, mirrors, flashbangs, some more smoke grenades and then throw another mirror at the backers just to be sure."

you know how insects zig-zag their way through life so they are harder to catch. maybe thats all they do?

Bootcha posted:

I'm going to give an additional reason. Why SC and CIG seem to baffle the mind isn't so much one singular reason (other than Chris Roberts himself), but a cavalcade of reasons. And one of those reasons is:

Communication.

I'm not talking about what CIG barfs onto a spaceship sales page, or what marketing or community managers tell their backers. I'm talking about how CIG communicates information, both internally and externally. Information flow. Of the many things I've researched off of tangents of this project, is Safety Science. In short, Safety Science is the study of Risk Management, and Information Flow as a "culture". To begin with, there is the Three Cultures Model:

Pathological organizations are characterized by large amounts of fear and threat. People often hoard information or withhold it for political reasons, or distort it to make themselves look better.
Bureaucratic organizations protect departments. Those in the department want to maintain their "turf", insist on their own rules, and generally do things by the book - their book.
Generative organizations focus on the mission. How do we accomplish our goal? Everything is subordinated to good performance, to doing what we are supposed to do.

This is not a hierarchy scale of bad-to-good. Think of it as the flavor of communication exchanges, seen in tone of messaging. Pathologic and Bureaucratic organizations tend to be "reactive" cultures, where as Bureaucratic and Generative organizations tend to be "proactive" cultures. When things are in control and no unexpected (or "anomalous") events happen, you might not actually see or be able to interpret how an organization actually communicates as a culture. Speaking of, we have a set of ways in which an organization might respond to anomalous information, which does have a scale:

(1) First of all, the organization might "shoot the messenger".
(2) Second, even if the "messenger" was not executed, his or her information might be isolated.
(3) Third, even if the message got out, it could still be "put in context" through a "public relations" strategy.
(4) Fourth, maybe more serious action could be forestalled if one only fixed the immediately presenting event.
(5) Fifth, the organization might react through a "global fix" which would also look for other examples of the same thing.
(6) Finally, the organization might engage in profound inquiry, to fix not only the presenting event, but also its underlying causes.

The scale of reactions might appear like this:

Suppression.........Public Relations.....Global Fix
---@--------@------------------@---------@-------------@---------@
........Encapsulation.............Local Fix.................Inquiry

Good information has these characteristics:

(1) It provides answer to the questions that the receiver needs answered.
(2) It is timely.
(3) It is presented in such a way that it can be effectively used by the receiver.

The above criteria sounds very simple, but in practice they are often very difficult to meet. For example, the first criteria is often the most violated. Information should respond to the needs of the receiver, not the sender.

Information flow is a vital resource. Better or worse information flow leads to better or worse functioning. It's not a case of requiring lots of information, no. More data/information isn't necessarily better. There are two critical reasons for attending and paying attention to information flow.

(1) First, when information does not flow, it imperils the safe and proper functioning of the organization.
(2) Second, information flow is a powerful indicator of the organization's overall functioning.

So...
How does this apply to Star Citizen and CIG?

There are so many things I could list about what we've all seen with CIG's communication and information flow culture, I'd be writing this for days. Hell, you could probably even spot some signs in CIG's own post-patch post-mortems. But here I'm going to give you two examples of CIG's Pathalogic Culture of Information Flow

First, the old roadmap before it turned into a gaslighting shitshow had SQ42 entering "beta phase" in Q3 of 2020. As the Q3 deadline approached, zero information was being communicated to backers about the status of this "beta". Q3 ended, without so much as a peep from CIG as to the status. It was only during the virtual/online CitCon in October where Roberts left it specifically to one of his subordinates to break the news that SQ42 would not be entering beta this year. They then said more information would follow as to the status of SQ42. Obviously, this hasn't happened outside of the monthly reports where we hear about the mess hall, Vanduul spear animations, and bedsheet cloth physics.

In this case, the information the receiver (the backers and the rest of the world) wanted (where's my SQ42 beta), was Encapsulated for multiple quarters if not years, and then put through a Public Relations strategy. The answer only provided information as to "is it beta?", and did not provide any further information, nor was it timely, and the information provided cannot be used effectively by the receivers as to the status of the project. This leads to further evidence of a "reactive" culture of a Pathologic/Bureaucratic organization.

The second example, doesn't really have the same timetable of events, but absolutely shows just how inflexible and unready even CIG's best department (Marketing) is at dealing with anomalous information. So for awhile Chris Roberts public appearances has been cut off, behind a blackout. Then, we see him pop up in cute little videos with his family, project related, from his wife Sandi's (the on-again-off-again VP of Marketing) twitter account. Earlier this year, Chris hasn't been heard from for awhile, not since an uncharacteristic quick opening for CitCon and a Letter from the Chairman evoking the Kennedy USA/USSR space race. Then all of a sudden, Sandi starts tweeting out that CR and some of the big execs at CIG are visiting the newly created Montreal office. That's kinda big news, the big boss coming down to establish the roles, goals, and culture expectations of the new office. You would think the Star Citizen website would be on top of this event, providing links and context to this visit. You would think the Marketing department would have been prepared to make this visit part of the media content for that week.

What happened was the opposite. The only information that came out of that Montreal office visit came from Sandi's tweets. The CIG website didn't have any reference to the office visit, and the marketing media content that week completely omitted any mention of the visit. To this very day, not a loving peep has come out of any official CIG channel about the office visit. CIG's Marketing department, for all we talk about as the strongest aspect of CIG, was and continues to be incapable of processing this anomalous information. Arguably, this information was Encapsulated within Sandi's tweets. The information provided did not in any way have the characteristics of good information. While it can be argued that the anomalous information itself was "proactive" (ie without prompt), how it was handled by the CIG organization itself leads to further evidence of a Pathologic/Bureaucratic organization.

These two examples, plus the years of insider leaks and published articles both external and internal, ranging from the Forbes article, the Kotaku/Escapist articles, the post-mortems, to the Jennison letter, to theAgent's "hello" posts, hell even to the recent SCLeaks post about bad communication; all of these show a consistent culture of bad communication and worse information flow.

And again, information flow is a powerful indicator of the organization's overall functioning. It is not empirical evidence, but it's a really loving good way to gauge if a company has internal management problems.

The Titanic posted:

Applying business logic to a company based off of deception and deceptive practices is never going to come out right, and it's gong to look like they're maybe doing it all the ways and simultaneously none of the ways.

It's not corporate marketing strategy that established companies who need to maintain a solid reputation amongst their peers so, it's what a company built off of donations and the good will of people have done.

The only way the company can continue to exist is to sell something that doesn't exist to as many people as possible who will believe the snake oil is exactly what they always wanted.

Until they make a product and exist as a company based off the success of their product, rather than hand outs and charity, it won't fit into any good categories that makes logical sense because you're applying logical principals of ethical-bias upon it.

That's how I see it anyway. :humility:

Trilobite posted:

And I agree, CIG doesn't act like a company that has a product and needs to satisfy its customers, doesn't want to act like one, and -- god only knows why -- apparently doesn't need to act like one, because their income doesn't rely on doing those things.

Scruffpuff posted:

After the event was handled, the CEO called a meeting and asked the following question: "How could we have prevented this?"

drat Dirty Ape posted:

We call this the ‘blamestorming’ meeting.

Thoatse posted:

WEEE WOOO, PAAAAARP PAAAAAAAAAARP PAAAAAARP WEEE WOOO WEEE WOOO

Scruffpuff posted:

I'd love to say my company fits somewhere in that layout, but so far I can't really pin it down. A few years ago we found a growing problem that, if left unchecked, would eventually bring down all services and leave clients unable to use our services. It was brought to the attention of the CEO, and every project manager, and the entire company was fully aware of the problem and the fix. It was brought up every so often.

The response from the CEO, managers, and every employee was the same: do nothing. Note I'm not saying the problem was ignored; the problem was fully acknowledged and understood. They simply did nothing. There was always some new shiny bullshit to chase, especially if a client dangled some cash in our faces for doing so.

Until the company went down exactly as predicted. Suddenly it was an all-hands-on-deck five alarm fire until someone finally had the balls to give the order to the engineer to fix the problem permanently.

After the event was handled, the CEO called a meeting and asked the following question: "How could we have prevented this?"

I'm not sure what to call this, but it's happened, and I say this with no exaggeration, hundreds of times.

Scruffpuff posted:

Example 1

Scruffpuff posted:

Example 2

The Titanic posted:

I feel like y'all going to lose your minds trying to wrap your head around cig and the people running it because you're doing what everyone else in the world is doing and assumes most companies try to do:

Hold themselves to some degree of ethical honesty with themselves and their customers.

...

Applying business logic to a company based off of deception and deceptive practices is never going to come out right, and it's gong to look like they're maybe doing it all the ways and simultaneously none of the ways.

...

Until they make a product and exist as a company based off the success of their product, rather than hand outs and charity, it won't fit into any good categories that makes logical sense because you're applying logical principals of ethical-bias upon it.

That's how I see it anyway. :humility:

Bootcha posted:

"Communication is hosed".

The Titanic posted:

Yup.

I hope some day for a good analysis from people on the inside giving an amazing retrospective of what happened and how and the timeline. It'll probably have to span many different people to encompass the whole mess.

4th Stimpire Queen posted:

This is great, I also wanna add another element called normalization of deviance.

trucutru posted:

scatological gameplay coprofication

ArcCorp: the best candidate for planet living experience - a game inside the game posted:

Hi,

Yesterday, I was talking with an orgmate about ArcCorp, and we was dreaming about the huge potential of this planet due to its actual condition: a planet almost fully build, a city the size of the planet. So yes, we know it's not finished and more is plan for later like a rework of Area18, the creation of the little ocean and some parks. But even in its current state, it's easy to imagine how ArcCorp could have the best potential for a planet licing experience.
A fresh start...
You open the game the first time, and by a happy hazardous, you decide to start your SC life at ArcCorp, an entire planet of cities, the Coruscant of Star Citizen. You wake up in your bed and discover your little habs with the minimal equipment for life: little kitchen, little bathroom, bed corner, little living room. You don't possess a lot in the cupboards. A standard Odyssey undersuit and its helmet, an Arclight pistol and few clothes. You decide to wear the clothes, you don't touch to the spacesuit, the helmet and your arcpistol because you know that you will have huge problem with BlacJack if you get it, then you leave your habs to buy foods and drinks because, huh, your kitchen is empty and gently caress, you're hungry!

Luckily, you're close to the center of the landing zone, Area18, and you don't have a long drive to find sustenance. Ok, now you are ready to start your activities. You open your mobiglass and check the contracts for beginners.

Bounty Hunter Guild
Mercenary Guild
etc...

Hmm, everything seems linked to a spacewalk except one:

Need a delivery man - Urgent!

Oh, a job for a beginner! Let me check? Hmm, ok, just a pizza to deliver to someone at two metro stations. Let's go! You go to the pizza restaurant, get the pizza still hot, then make your way to the customer habs. Ten minutes later, you meet him. He paids you through the app, the restaurant takes his automatic committee. You arrived at time and you was polite, so he gives you a good review. The restaurant calls you just after to give you another good review. You open your mobiglass again, and you have a little bit more contracts listed, from several local mission givers: restaurants, shops, etc. Corvalex Delivery is in the list and they pay better than the other ones. Hmm. Let's go for Corvalex.
Arrived at the sorting center, you have the choice. You could take the contract where you have to deliver a little cargo box on Lyria, or you could take the contract where you deliver another little cargo box to the Cubby Blast. Let's go for the weapons shop! And again, ten minutes later, it's done. You get paid, you get good review, and you have more bucks in the pocket.
The adventure begins... On ArcCorp.

4th Stimpire Queen posted:

Why play Death Stranding when you can make ends meet as a delivery guy in SC.