While Gardiner insists on the apparent power of viral marketing, much of that investment reportedly went towards more formal forms of marketing which cost quite a bit.Īmusingly, Gardiner – the head of the studio’s marketing division, mind you – says that it’s not her “place to talk about what people spend their money on.” Yet, the studio continues to find new ways to charge players for ships, real estate, and other items which may or may not be useable in any substantial way quite yet. Gardiner insists that Star Citizen players are not forced to buy anything more substantial than a starter ship and that “all of the marketing is done by the fans virally.” However, Roberts himself praises Gardiner’s marketing tactics and credits them as part of the reason why Star Citizen is “the most crowdfunded anything.” Despite the game’s crowdfunding success, though, Roberts has also turned to outside investors such as Jive Records founder, Clive Calder, who invested $46 million in Star Citizen.

One graphics engineer was even reportedly asked to spend months working on the visuals of a ship’s shields until Roberts was satisfied with them. According to some of those close to the game, though, the problem in this instance is that Roberts still apparently insists on having most of the design decisions go through him even as the game continues to expand in size and more and more money comes in. This is a pretty well-documented part of Roberts design process. I was shocked.”ĭay and others speak about Roberts tendency to serve as an ideas man who comes up with grandiose plans.

The promises being made-call it feature creep, call it whatever it is-now we can do this, now we can do that. “As the money rolled in, what I consider to be some of old bad habits popped up-not being super-focused,” said Mark Day, a former Wing Commander producer whose company was hired to work on Star Citizen back in 2013. A new report by Forbes on the development of Star Citizen includes some quotes from people close to the game that shed a little more light on the extent of Cloud Imperium Games’ money mismanagement and Chirs Roberts’ questionable design direction.

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