Star Citizen, by Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games, is an ambitious title about space. Although it’s a dream come true for gamers to know about its concept, the game is showing signs of incompetence development. Because of that, the gaming industry in general and even some backers of Star Citizen is starting to feel overall worried.
Where did the money go?
According to Forbes, from the original $288 million (Rs 2005 Crore) in Cloud Imperium’s bank account, by the end of 2017, only $17 million (Rs 188 Crore) million remained. Despite effort from Roberts to fund the project by putting spaceship models on sales, only thousands can be collected. Unfortunately, after a long wait of seven years, it’s clear that Star Citizen is nowhere near finishing. All we get to see were only rough demos, showing a clear stagnant in the development process.
Micromanaging problem
On the other hand, several Cloud Imperium employees did comment on the issue and attribute such development lag to Roberts’ “micromanaging” and “meddling”. In fact, it took him a crazy 17 months to finish the model design of five characters. Apparently, Roberts has been taking too much work himself and therefore, failed to deliver in a timely manner.
In the past game promotions, Roberts teased every one of the huge content that feature “100 star systems” in a playable universe. Unfortunately, it seems that Cloud Imperium didn’t manage to complete any of them. Currently, they only have two almost finished planets, alongside nine moons and a plain asteroid.
It's not a fraud, it's incompetence!
Regarding the issue, Forbes assures backers and deny a potential fraud in Star Citizen. Forbes pointed out that Roberts is developing the game using that budget. However, it was poor micromanaging and managing of resources that led to this unfortunate scenario.
As for now, we can only hope Star Citizen will deliver the gameplay content that people have been longing for. Obviously, the stakes are much higher for Roberts and his studio, all due to the huge amount of money as well as the dedication and heart from its fans. What Star Citizen must do now is to ensure a reasonable return on investment for everyone that contributed. Currently, Star Citizen is still in the development phase with no exact release date.