Is Star Citizen a Scam?
Star Citizen has crossed the $700 million mark in crowdfunding. After better than a decade and people are still giving this project money. In fact it has ardent fans who climb up into your underwear and beat you about the head shoulders with a baseball bat for daring to question whether this will ever be finished. This is absolutely astonishing to me.
The game first started life in 2009. Think about that for a second. When this game started development Wii Sports was the number one best-selling game. Barrack Obama hadn’t destroyed the country yet. Larry Correia had only just published Monster Hunter International. George Lucas still owned Star Wars and Marvel Entertainment was an independent studio. A kid born that year is now a high school sophomore. And the hottest GPU in the world, the GTX 295 could not possibly run the current Alpha build of Star Citizen.
We are being told that Squadron 42 (basically Wing Commander 4) is pretty much done and just being polished. Consequently, a big chunk of that team is now working on the Player Universe (or PU if you love irony). So we’re almost there right? Why do I have my doubts?
As Razorfist put it, “Over this entire fifteen year development cycle the only thing Star Citizen has never failed to deliver is… excuses.”
Chris Roberts created one of the all-time great games of the 1990s with the Wing Commander series. It didn’t just raise the bar, it put the bar in orbit. The story was a combination of Star Wars and Larry Niven’s Known Space, which was totally workable in 1991. Computer Gaming World made it the game of the year for 1991.
It set the standard for the entire video game industry in terms of what was possible. Not just in terms of performance but in development budgets. Wing Commander cost five times what the industry standard was at the time. It was correspondingly rewarding.
Wing Commander II upped the game by finally revealing the sapient Kzinti-like Klirathi. In Wing Commander III, the faceless pilot now looked like Mark Hamill. The world it was creating was vastly expanded. There were a number of spinoff games like Privateer and Armada.
However, the franchise ran out of steam towards the end of the decade.
Although, it ended with a bang. Wing Commander the motion picture was a bomb pulling in $11 million against a budget of $30 million. Here’s the big thing about that movie. It was written and directed by Chris Roberts himself which indicates a level of ambition and narcissism that is rather surprising in a game developer, although granted there is precedent.
Roberts apparently, took this as an opportunity to start failing upward in Hollywood. He has a bunch of genuine producer credits on films I’ve actually heard of like The Punisher, Lord of War, Lucky Number Slevin, and Black Water Transit.
The last was launched in 2009 which was about the time that Roberts started work on Star Citizen.
He didn’t entirely leave the video game space during this period. In 2003 he launched Freelancer, “a spiritual successor to Wing Commander” It was years late as well as a commercial and critical failure.
He also acquired an actress wife Sandi Gardiner. There are so many horror stories about her on the internet that I decided I would go with Forbes article on the grounds that it was the most easily verifiable:
On a summer Saturday in 2007, a trespasser slipped by a security gate and entered Chris Roberts’ L.A. home. Inside, Madison Peterson, Roberts’ former common-law wife, with whom he had a long on-and-off relationship, was startled and feared her young daughter could be harmed or kidnapped. Peterson later identified the trespasser as Sandi Gardiner, who is now Roberts’ wife (for the second time) and a cofounder of Cloud Imperium. Roberts reported the incident to police, and a California judge issued a temporary restraining order that required Gardiner to stay 100 yards away from Peterson, who claimed in her temporary restraining order application that Gardiner had been stalking and threatening both her and her daughter for nearly three years.
“Ms. Gardiner has an unnatural and irrational fascination with my daughter and me,” Peterson wrote. “I constantly and continually look to make sure my daughter and I are not watched.”
In a court-filed declaration he signed at the time, Roberts said Gardiner had also visited Peterson’s San Diego home and once became violent and tried to strangle him. “I believed that if she had a gun she would have killed me,” Roberts said in the declaration. “I believe that Ms. Gardiner is not emotionally stable.” After three months, the restraining order was dissolved. Today, Roberts says he cannot recall signing the declaration and that what is ascribed to him in the court filings was prepared by Peterson and false. Despite the documentation, Gardiner flatly denies the incidents took place.
A few years later, Roberts cofounded Cloud Imperium with Gardiner and Freyermuth, his lawyer partner from Hollywood. He had remarried Gardiner in 2009. Their first marriage was annulled in 2005, court records show. An actress who is still trying to make it in Hollywood, the 43-year-old Australian-born Gardiner is also Cloud Imperium’s head of marketing and a driving force behind the company’s fundraising.
The initial 2012 crowdfunding campaign was successful, but it turned out that $6.2 million wasn’t nearly enough to feed Roberts’ ambitions. But Roberts and Gardiner came up with an ingenious way to keep raising funds: They would sell spaceships—hundreds of thousands of them.
Star Citizen has gigantic ships and tiny ships, exploration ships and cargo ships, refueling ships and mining ships, heavy fighters, light fighters, medium fighters, snub fighters, destroyers, gunships and many, many more. By Forbes’ count, Cloud Imperium has sold 135 different spaceship models for as much as $3,000 apiece. Eighty-seven of these ships have been completed to the point that players can fly them in the buggy early versions of Star Citizen; some of the other 48 ships seem like little more than fancy images.
“Nobody is obligated to buy more than just the starter ship,” says Gardiner. “All of the marketing is done by the fans virally, and a lot of those ships are because the community has asked for them.”
“[The] marketing of the game has been an objective success, as we’re the most crowdfunded anything, [and it] was overseen by Sandi,” Roberts says.
To supercharge the money that Gardiner was raising, Roberts brought in a big outside investor for the first time last fall. Cloud Imperium received $46 million from Clive Calder, the South African-born billionaire behind Jive Records, and his son, Keith. The funds are meant for—what else?—more marketing.
When asked what it was like to work at Cloud Imperium, one former senior game maker who left in 2018 messaged a link to the Spinal Tapmovie scene with an amplifier volume knob turned to 11. Former employees say Roberts gets involved in the smallest details and pushes huge and complex investments in areas that are not worth the effort. At one point, one of the company’s senior graphics engineers was ordered by Roberts to spend months, through several iterations, getting the visual effects of the ship shields just right. In addition, workers have had to spend weeks on end making demos so that Cloud Imperium can keep selling spaceships—and raising more money.
When I started this article I was fairly certain that Star Citizen wasn’t a scam. I figured it was just another development hell of eternal feature creep like Duke Nukem Forever. But during the 00s Roberts not only survived but thrived in the Hollywood cesspit, and that leaves me deeply uncomfortable. He’s not just a tech wizz who can’t stop improving his dream project if he was able to do that.
On top of that when Chris Roberts started crowdfunding there were some fairly questionable practices. Here’s the first trailer – Imagine.
As you can see it plainly stated “All Footage Captured in Engine.” That is a fairly obvious lie, a lot of that was clearly CG. Granted doing that back then was so common it was arguably a standard industry practice but that was not supposed to be the case in the crowdfunding space.
Squadron 42 does have a release date: Fall of 2015. With Star Citizen launching in 2016. Squadron 42 Beta is also scheduled for release in 2020. In 2019 the FTC had received 129 complaints about Cloud Imperium, I have no idea how many there are now.
The game is not in Beta. It is still in a barely playable Alpha state. Or at least that’s what I’m told. My gaming rig, which is not the lowest end out there by any manner or means, can not run it.
The Star Citizen footage of Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson and Gary Oldman was released for fundraising purposes and there’s no denying that it worked. The game is still attracting investors. Although the fund raising appears to be slowing down quite a bit at the moment.
I’m now having to circle back to the question of was this always a scam? Or was it a legitimate effort that sort of turned into one? Or has it always been honest effort that is incredibly poorly managed? There is no way to tell without a forensic accounting investigation and given lack of regulation in the crowd funding space I don’t see there being a legal basis to conduct one.
I’ll leave you with this question:
How many games have generated $700 million? Star Citizen is either never going to be profitable or is already profitable because its entire business model is built around developing the game.
