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Comment by fefe23 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this the company world famous for not delivering upon their breathless hype for over a decade?

They remind me of Star Citizen. Both have been fundraising since 2010.

What “delivery” are you expecting from Star Citizen? A version of the game that is branded as “final”?

The game is playable and looks amazing. Everyone who pays for it gets to play it and gets in-game items such as a starship.

I agree that the model is pretty novel, the never ending scope creep is odd… but it’s nothing like Magic Leap with its institutional investors and a sub par v1 release.

I'm hoping you're trolling. I funded Star Citizen when it was announced on Kickstarter in 2012. As of the email I got yesterday, development status is at "Live Version ALPHA 3.17.2". If I'm being generous, it's at what other games would call "Early Access" and is barely playable as a cohesive "game" rather than a tech demo. At this point, I'd even settle for an actual beta.

While Chris is definitely a visionary, he has also historically been a really bad manager / producer. His games normally don’t come close to completion until c level execs at Origin or EA put their foot down. Now in his own company there’s no one to draw a line for Chris so there’s never ending feature creep being funded by vaporware capitol ships

How much have you actually played of the game? I bought it ten years ago too and it has more than enough entertainment value to last me the ten years, it basically cost me like 5 dollars a year.

You're lucky! I Kickstarted Star Citizen and Animusic 3.

Animusic 1 and 2 were great. Glad I never knew about 3 until I found it was just a money sink.

Last time I played Star Citizen, and granted, this was 1 year ago, it was so unoptimized and buggy that, when I went into an elevator in the star port, the floor I landed at hadn't loaded yet, and a fell through the geometry, into space, and asphyxiated. This was.... oh, about 5 minutes after starting play for the first time, on an i7 machine with a 2080 and 32 GB of RAM... Not a wimpy machine.

Star Citizen needs a release deadline, if for no other reason than it would force them to button up, fix bugs, and for godsake, optimize.

I regularly watch Star Citizen gameplay videos on YouTube, it really progressed a lot in the last year. There are still some minor bugs with elevators, shafts, floors, etc. but overall game mechanics and the world they are building is unprecedented.

Have a look at more recent multi-player battles, prison escapes, salvage missions, just planet exploration. I was so impressed the images kept coming up in my dreams.

That's not really the problem. Even developers as incompetent as Hello Games are capable of tacking endless bonus content on their space sim - the issue is that Star Citizen continually lied about the features it would have and the date it would release. That, combined with the endless addition of things that nobody asked for has led most of the community to become completely disenfranchised with the game.

It's safe to say this game is stuck in development hell. Here, let's list all of the major features that hit the game in the past 3 months:

- Made many adjustments to the speeds of ground vehicles

- Window Interior Mapping Shader

- Added New Ship: RSI Scorpius

- Lighting Polish Pass for Hurston Volumetric Clouds

- Paints can now be stored in personal and ship inventories to allow players to move them around the PU. Added paints filter to inventory tabs.

I'm not sure if you've ever worked on a major software product before, but if this is the changelog for an entire quarter at your multimillion-dollar game studio, your project is doomed.

I don’t know anything about game dev, but if you look at other major software products, such as Windows, MS Word, VSCode, Photoshop, Spotify, are their 3 months changelogs more impressive?

Calling Hello Games incompetent is pretty unfair and kind of petty.

I guess so, I do feel a little bad about it. On the other hand though, their faked E3 demo and Sean Murrey's enthusiastic IGN interview will go down in history as the easiest-to-avoid mistakes in the industry. They've done a good job at turning around their reputation by dedicating themselves to NMS, but it's still a shell of a promised game. Sorta like Star Citizen, if CIG ever had the gall to release their game.

> They've done a good job at turning around their reputation by dedicating themselves to NMS, but it's still a shell of a promised game.

Sidenote: I don't know about the last time you checked out NMS, but by now it has way more than what was originally promised. And not just in quantity, but in terms of actual qualitative features and things to do.

"Incompetent" is a charitable framing. Less charitibly they deliberately and blatantly lied in order to generate hype.

Not really. They did pretty well on delivering what they promised. The problem is that they started selling the game multiple years before it was ready. That's not incompetent development, and I would not say they blatantly lied when promising future features.

Kind of scary how effectively the software industry has trained an entire world full of users to pay for something and not expect a finished product in return. Now this mentality is creeping into the world of hardware devices.

In the tech industry, it used to be that the real customer was the investor and the real product was the user (e.g. Social media monetizing users to meet the needs of investors).

Nowadays, the real customer is the founder and the real product is the investor (monetizing investors to meet the needs of founders).

I thought the point of Star Citizen was to never be complete. The original Kickstarter literally said that they didn't want a static universe and that it would be continually updated (as opposed to static releases like yearly). When someone says they want to create a universe that is ever expanding I wouldn't envision a product that can ever really be "finished." You're paying for a product that continually updates.

Let’s not pretend like that’s a magical concept and because it’s getting continually updated that it can’t ever release. A lot of games have done that concept and they see releases.

World of Warcraft, for example, is still seeing regular releases since 2004, when it launched a game that gave a sense of “complete” while still seeing updates. So many updates that Blizzard re-released the original game. Final Fantasy 14, which originally released such a trash version, re-made the game, released A Realm Reborn in 2013 and still sees updates to this day. League of Legends, a free-to-play game, released in 2009 and still sees regular updates, without expansions, and which you can play without paying a single dime to this day.

Being a “never finished” project isn’t a good excuse.

Final Fantasy 14, btw, began development in 2004-5, was announced in 2009, was released in 2010 as a trash game, then that awful version of the game was maintained and even updated while a complete remake was developed and released in 2013 as “A Realm Reborn,” a critically-acclaimed expansion. Even crazier is that Square Enix has released and heavily supported the game for PlaySation 3, PlaySation 4, and PlayStation 5, as well as the PC version.

It’s pretty pathetic that this game has received so much funding and is still in alpha over 10 years later.

Some software is closer to art - not finished, only abandoned.

2013 backer, I am looking for my single player campaign. I could care less for MMO. It was promised for 2014. So....

Promised single player campaign? No game breaking bugs or crashes? More than 50 players per shard in the MMO?

I'd take any of those 3

> I'd take any of those 3

Well you're in luck, they recently started running servers with between 75-100 player slots open. Guess that's at least one of 3 ;-)

Where do companies like this get their money? Another one I was recently surprised to still see ticking is Nikola. Who is giving all these people money? Where is the money coming from?

I believe Nokia’s handsets are now made under license by HMD global (some Chinese holding company). They also make a number of non consumer products like mobile base stations which you might have even used recently. Magic Leap on the other hand is more of a Money laundering/ego laundering scheme than a business.

The company is Nikola, an EV company more famous for the founder creating a gravity powered smoke and mirror show than for any actual products.

And this is in the area of zero interest rate. Image 5% interest rate.

Increased interest rates make it more difficult to get funding. Ie poor ideas have a harder time than genuinely economic interests.

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