Star Citizen is possibly the most ambitious game ever not made. The expansive project promises an interplanetary massive multiplayer online experience, a first- person shooter and a single player campaign with the A-list star power of Gary Oldman and Mark Hamill. It has crowdfunded a record smashing $145 million and promises an unparalleled space simulator gaming experience.
That is, if it ever comes out. Star Citizen has been in development by Cloud Imperium Games since 2011, promising empty release dates since 2014. Every year it seems like new features are promised, yet not much is actually delivered. The game in a basic form is available now to its highly enthusiastic backers, who can purchase space ships through donations. The full package of every ship costs $15,000 and some people have actually ponied this up.
Some see the development of Star Citizen as the most transparent in history. Backers receive constant development updates in the form of blog posts and videos. But some see this as a smokescreen to mask dysfunctional management and a development plan to nowhere. Skeptics say the project will never be finished and is locked in “feature creep,” an engineering term that means the adding of new features to the point where the endeavor becomes too bloated or even impossible.
In this context, Liz Finnegan wrote two controversial articles about the game on The Escapist in 2015. In the more sensational of the two, a number of current and ex-employees speaking anonymously accused the game’s lead developer, Chris Roberts, of everything from discriminatory hiring practices to embezzlement of backer funds. The article won third place in the Society of Professional Journalists “Kunkel” awards for video game news reporting.
This month both articles were suddenly removed from The Escapist website (archived here and here). Roberts’ lengthy and somewhat bizarre response to the article, published on the Star Citizen‘s website Roberts Space Industries, also appeared to have been taken down in January (archived here).
Both Defy Media (the owner of The Escapist) and Cloud Imperium Games, the game’s developer, gave the same statement for why the pieces were taken down. “CIG and The Escapist have mutually agreed to delete their comments about each other. We wish each other well and look forward to better relations in 2017.”
It seems Defy Media simply no longer wanted the threat of a lawsuit hanging over their heads, and decided to axe the articles. This kind of arrangement happens often in media, where larger companies can stick up for themselves while smaller players simply cannot afford the risk of a major lawsuit.
The man who noticed the takedowns was indie game developer Derek Smart, who wrote about it on his blog. Smart has been on what can only be described as a years- long crusade against the Star Citizen project and its founder. He became involved in Star Citizen as a backer in 2012 but became critical of the game as its development floundered and ex-employees spoke to him about their doubts the project would ever be completed. Smart sees Star Citizen as a quasi-Ponzi Scheme, where CIG gives its backers just enough new content and updates to keep them happy and donating more money while never intending on delivering the full promise.
In the deleted article “Star Citizen Employees Speak Out on Project Woes,” the allegations by the sources paint CIG in a very negative light . The highlights are that former employees claiming Roberts’ wife and vice president of marketing at CIG, Sandi Gardiner, used discriminatory hiring practices. They said she ordered employees to not hire people over 40 and even claimed she once said, “We aren’t hiring a black girl.” They also said that Gardiner created a toxic work environment, routinely blowing up at employees and even calling them slurs like “faggot” in work emails.
The sources also claimed Roberts and his wife were using crowdfunding money to pay for a mansion in Los Angeles and had lavish seven -figure salaries.
Probably most damaging of all for CIG was the employees who claimed that Star Citizen could not be completed as promised with the available budget (which at the time was $90 million).
In 2015, The Escapist stood by it reporting. It published a blog post (now removed) where it explained the vetting of its sources. It said six of the employees gave their real names and the seventh did not, but provided pay stubs by CIG verifying his employment.
Since those two stories, there have been no major allegations of malfeasance at Star Citizen.
It is important to note that Smart is a very polarizing figure in the world of Star Citizen. Some see his war of attrition with Roberts as deluded and ill-intentioned. Roberts once claimed that Smart was using the publicity he gained from criticizing Star Citizen to market Smart’s own game. Smart flatly denies this claim.
As for Star Citizen, it keeps chugging along. CIG claims to be releasing a huge 3.0 patch sometime this year which includes mining, trading, bounty hunter missions and even space pirates! Pretty cool if it ever comes out…
Disclosure: I once played Overwatch online with Liz Finnegan for about an hour.