Right, but it was also an established studio working on their 2nd sequel to a franchise with established dev teams that had worked on the prior titles.
Thats a huge advantage over a company having to be founded from literally a dozen people up to around the size of the team that worked on GTA V (CIG is about 600 people now).
If you ignore the news, which we all know is fake, and look at what happened with development they actually have done a pretty good job with a few major setbacks.
The initial idea with the Kickstarter was to get together enough seed money that Chris Robert's could take the handful of people working on the project to a publisher and say "see? People actually want this". He was hoping for about $500k initially (which would have been massive for a platform like kickstarter). By the time it closed at over 2 million Chris came back to the community that had backed and asked if we would rather him move forward with finding a publisher or go ahead with making the game himself. Overwhelmingly the community told him to forge ahead without a publisher.
This was in 2013.
They founded a company called Cloud Imperium Games (or just CIG for short) with, at the time, about 10 people and set to work hiring other studios to develop different aspects of the game. It was such a large endeavor in its original scope that they felt it would be impossible to do alone. They also selected cryengine for the engine due to its high graphical fidelity. Both proved to be fateful choices.
In 2015 crytek, the makes of cryengine, went out of business. CIG quickly realized this would screw them badly and went about hiring all of the engine developers in Germany that Crytek was laying off. The company quickly grew to over 150 people and development started moving in-house. They also migrated over to a fork of Lumberyard (Amazon's version of cryengine).
In 2017 two major events happened. First, CIG realized the studio that was producing the FPS portion of the game had not been forthright in their progress or adherence to the standards set by CIG. Its somewhat complicated, but essentially all the work that studio had done, which would represent a fair portion of the completed game, was thrown out (they were pay over 10 million over the course of 3 years. Biggest mistake CIG has made).
Second, with the help of all that german engineering talent they massively changed the scope of the game. Originally planetary landing zones were meant to be theme-parks (ala Mass Effect) with limited ability to explore. However they made the decision to change the entirety of cryengine from 32bit to 64bit to support full-scale planetary bodies. Its cannot be over-stated how big of a scope change this was. One planet, Hurston, has a diameter of 2000km. This is roughly 1/6 the size of earth. It is one of 3 fully explorable planets (and 12 moons and 1 dwarf-planet). Currently, interplanetary distances are modeled at 1/10 scale and planets themselves are about 1/6 scale. Planets are actually 10s of millions of kilometers apart (gigameters, if you will) but they still have millimeteric precision.
So 5 years after launching the kickstarter, they had to scrap a major portion of the work and massively increased the scope while building a company from the ground up. During that time, their company headcount grew to about 250 people. They also did a full-mocap storyline for the single-player game with a pretty star-studded cast (https://imdb.com/title/tt5194726). As of 2020 they have 4 studios across LA, Austin, the UK, and Germany working on the game with over 500 people employed (publicly released financials with headcount info: http://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/corporate/cloud-imperium-financials-for-2019) and have over 100 job openings they are trying to fill.
So in the first 5 years they had a few big blunders, which is not unheard of for a new company. In the last 3 years though any honest evaluation from a backer would be that they have done a phenomenal job.
That doesn't mean they are almost done. There is still a huge amount of work to do.
Because of the scope and scale of the game (which has never been tried before) they had some major technical hurdles to overcome. First, they needed a way to cull out objects from the server that were not needed at the moment. They already had a method of doing this on the client they called Object Container Streaming. They implemented the first version of this tech on the server engine at the end of 2019, causing the game to go from "its a pretty alpha but practically unplayable" to pretty damn fun. They called it Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS).
They have two major technical hurdles left: a global persistence system for everything in the game (called icache) for storing and retrieving data for SSOCS as it was culled or recalled by the server. Next, since they want one seamless universe and not multiple game servers that you join they need the ability for multiple game servers to work together seamlessly (server meshing). The first iteration of icache is (fingers crossed) coming this year and meshing will come some time after it as it is dependent on icache. The average community consensus is that the single player game won't see a beta until 2022 at the earliest and the mmo universe will be closer to 2024.
They have a road map that is publicly available (https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/progress-tracker) that essentially gives a Jira Tempo-esq view of what they are working on.
To call it a scam or a failure is to be dishonest. Don't believe the fake news. They had a rough start but since 2017 have been killing it. Calling it a failure of a project simply shows that you havent followed the development or you dont have the background to understand the massive changes and challenges they have faced. When people in the industry speak up, its usually in admiration of a) CIG's candor/openness during such an early stage or b) humor at the community's lack of understanding of where they are in development (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/fd5su2/what_alpha_means_and_what_beta_means/).
...because the good ones are leaving in droves.
As a former cop (did it in my youth, out over a decade now) I cant imagine the mass demoralization that has been going on in departments. What we are seeing with all the negative police footage these days are departments where the ratio of bad cops is inflating by simple attrition.
I thought the documentary was excellent. She did kinda give short-shrift to the BLM side of the argument but I didnt really expect anything else from her. Very insightful commentary on crime in America, how it lead to modern policing, and how its breaking down around us right now.
The ending was...somewhat bleak but not anything that would surprise a pede here. I spend the last 1/4 loading mags and cleaning guns.
My firsthand comments from my wife make me think its a very divided world in healthcare. Just in her ER:
- census is down like 40%
- acute respiratory issues are up and the acute wing in the ER is always full
- while much of the hospital is empty, the ICU is full 90% of the time
- acute respiratory patients can wait up to 36h to be admitted
Basically on the days she gets put in acute she comes home drop-dead tired. Anywhere else and shes bored.
I started rewriting it for modern times:
Such has been the patient sufferance of the People; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present Political Establishment is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over the People. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
They have set themselves apart as a separate class from The People whom they are supposed to serve.
They have refused to subject themselves to the same laws which they subject the People to.
They seek long terms in office, refusing reasonable limits on their Term.
They have instituted laws by decree of unelected Bureaucrats, bypassing the legislative voice of the People.
They allow unelected Bureaucrats to create onerous rules and regulations that force the State into every aspect of the People's lives.
They have reduced the recourse the People have when Bureaucratic authority is abused by making themselves immune, in effect, from Civil or Criminal suit.
They have refused to allow Civil Authorities to preserve the peace by imposing law and order during times of unrest, while utilizing those same Authorities for their own physical security.
At the same time, they have ordered the Civil Authorities to silence the free and peaceful protest of the People as they redress their grievances against the Establishment.
They conduct elections without adequate oversight and refuse a free and open examination of the results.
They have maintained a sustained series of Conflicts with other Nations without a formal Declaration of War.
They have ignored the basic freedoms established in our constitution. Where these freedoms to still maintain tatters of what was enshrined, the continuously seek to strip what remains away.
They have instituted secret courts whos proceedings are not subject to public scrutiny.
They have instituted extrajudicial imprisonment of Citizens.
Thus, they have deprived the People of the right to Trial by Jury.
They have remanded the People to their homes by executive decree.
They have stripped from the People the ability to work for their own sustenance by their own efforts.
They have imposed edicts barring the peaceful gathering of the People for any reason.
They have restricted the ability for people to worship their Creator in the manner that seems appropriate to them.
They have allowed, ordered, and carried out the extrajudicial killing of Citizens abroad.
They have allowed the People's property to be expropriated by the State without Trial.
They have empowered private corporations who were founded or subsist on Government subsidy to constrain free speech.
They have created a patchwork of laws regarding arms such that a legal scholar must be consulted before traveling amongst the States while bearing arms.
They have instituted laws allowing the State to strip a Person of arms by force without trial.
They have instituted laws making certain forms of speech illegal simply because it is seen as distasteful.
They have fomented domestic strife and insurrection, pitching the people against each other.
They have called their followers to violence and threatened retribution against their political opponents.
They have unequally applied the laws to their political allies and opponents, subjecting those who do not agree with them to a hostile Judicial system and letting those who agree with them go free without facing Justice.
It needs expansion.
It will be, in time. Im a patient man. My two concerns are