> So you're saying because it's still in dev and still raising money, so it's not a scam?
At no point have I weighed in on if it is a scam or not. All I am saying is that citing Derek Smart as an authority on the matter is not really a good idea either way. He is hugely biased and is basically praying it fails.
Citing other, probably less biased sources? Great, go ahead.
You may not like him or his games, but at least he's still making games and he has people buying them. So I don't quite know why you have a problem with that when he has made so many games for a very long time now.
As to Star Citizen, well he has been right so far hasn't he? Didn't he say five years ago in July 2015 (I don't have the blog link, but go to his website at www.dereksmart.com) said the game could never be made? At the time they had raised about $85 million. It's not over $300 million and there is still no game. Even with almost $100m in additional investor money.
> To be fair, they disabled the Steam store page when the game moved to closed Beta because they are porting it.
Thanks, didn't know that. However this was 4 years ago based on those blog posts. If we are considering games over-running and not deliverying then I think Derek Smart and LoD are in a very brittle glass house here.
> You may not like him or his games, but at least he's still making games and he has people buying them. So I don't quite know why you have a problem with that when he has made so many games for a very long time now.
You cannot help but notice that none of them are well recieved (with only BC Millenium approaching a rasonable score) and most of them are iterations on a similar/ same idea. This, to me, reduces his authority in regards to game development and how it should be done, to basically 0.
> Didn't he say five years ago in July 2015 (I don't have the blog link, but go to his website at www.dereksmart.com) said the game could never be made?
> It's not over $300 million and there is still no game. Even with almost $100m in additional investor money.
We still don't know if it will be made or not, work is ongoing, dev is happening and patches are being released. If the makers of Star Citizen go bankcrupt without the game being made then at that point he will be correct.
What we do know is that Star Citizen has a huge scope (And to be fair, it does sound like a lot of that scope is Chris Roberts brand scope creep) and lots of technical challenges, it could (probably will) take 10+ years go make.
Basically my point is that Derek Smart is infamous in gaming circles and, given his history and behaviour, I am shocked anyone would consider him an authoritative, reliable, even vaguely unbiased source.
Their recently released financial accounting is all the evidence needed to show that not only was Derek Smart right when he claimed in July 2015 that the game could never be made for $150M (they had raised $85M at the time), but also that it could never been made as has been pitched by Chris Roberts.
Right now Star Citizen is barely a proof-of-concept tech demo, while Squadron 42 which was coming in 2014, is still almost 2 years away from BETA.
After blowing through $200 million of backer money, in May 2015 they sold 10% of the company to an off-shore investor for $46M to continue funding development. And Derek Smart was the first to leak that info as well, and almost a full week before CIG made it public that this was in the works since May 2018 (when Derek Smart first leaked that something was in the works).
Are you seriously saying that opinions of ONE man is somehow so important to the success or failure of a $200M crowd-funded company?
There has to be a reason why you guys always can't seem to help but drag him into all your discussions about Star Citizen. That's how ALL of you made him an integral part of the discussion. And that is how you all gave him the power to shape the narrative, while aiding in the complete destruction of the reputation of the project.
You appear to be a Star Citizen backer. The composition of those statements are a dead giveaway because it contains all the same talking points you guys spread around to attack him for voicing his opinions on the project.
Line Of Defense isn't crowd-funded. It was released on Steam Early Access. His games traditionally take a long time to develop and release because they are complex, and he doesn't have a large team or resources.
Comparing an indie funding his own games to a company that has taken over $200 million Dollars in crowd-funding, and also investor money, is laughably foolish.
Or, crazy idea, I did my own searching on the guy and came to the conclusion I just posted above.. His twitter alone could be used in a psychology course.
Oh I see. In the over 74.6M entries about him on Google, you just happened to pick the detractor talking points which aren't even in the first 10 pages.
Chris Roberts' last game which he was kicked off by Microsoft, was Freelancer. He exited the video game industry shortly after to go make movies. His Ascendant Pictures venture collapsed a few years later.
This is silly. Derek Smart's 'games' are barely games. Chris Roberts, again, has shipped whole bunch of acknowledged classics. Me playing air-guitar in the shower does not make me a 'bitter rival' of Jimmy Page.
You could say they're rivals in who is going to turn out to be a bigger scammer and purveyor of unfulfilled promises. Roberts might end up winning that one overwhelmingly as well.
He was an original backer of the project in 2012. In Summer 2015 he wrote a highly publicized blog in which he claimed that because Chris Roberts increased the scope of the game, that it was doomed. In response, CIG refunded his $250 and kicked him off the project. Then they made the grave mistake of issuing a press release lying about it. It's all documented here:
Since that time, the most avid backers of Star Citizen have been waging a proxy war with him on behalf of CIG. And at times it gets a lot worse than the Usenet flamewars he was engaged in back in the day. They even hijacked a sub Reddit bearing his name, and were using it as a way to harass, attack, dox him etc. Until it was closed (by the mods) about a year ago. They re-opened it temporarily due to him being right (once again) about the dire financial straits of the project, as revealed in their financial statement released this week.
Kotaku has a five-part series which also covers the beef between him and Chris Roberts.
Don't believe everything you read from those who have a vested interest in either Star Citizen, or those who don't like him. So far, he has been 100% on the ball regarding the key issues with this project. From the money part, all the way down to the technology, challenges, schedules etc. Since Summer 2015, he has been obsessively documenting everything about this project. So much so that many on the Internet, including the media, go there for material when writing about this project. It's uncanny and disturbing to say the least.
He apparently has plenty of friends who work on or have worked on the project. And they are the ones who appear to have been feeding him his most accurate leaks. For example, about this investment, he leaked the news on Twitter in May. That same month CIG was closing this deal. We know this because the public filings in the UK which became public in Dec, show all the signatures and actions regarding this $46M investment taking place in May. His latest article lays it all out.
