Chris Roberts clearly needed the leash that he had at Origin/EA. Now that he’s free to do whatever he wants, the result is this. I think this is why major game publishers actually set deadlines for studios and developers and give them firm budgets to work with. Turns out the leash is there for a reason.
It's probably why he was removed from the Freelancer development by Microsoft too, so they could get something out the door.
And the reason he had to go resort to crowdfunding and kickstarter (no publisher would take on this pipe dream) and have Crytek build a demo for him to show off. And then switched to perpetual crowdfunding, even though those early crowdfunding campaigns were a huge success and gathered way more money than was requested / set as goal. Because the incompetence cannot be sufficiently be funded otherwise.
To be fair, the "publishers bad" was a narrative that a lot of project creators on Kickstarter (and other crowdfunding platforms) were pushing and riding at the time. What is weird though is that a lot of people still argue that to be true to this day.
We have way too much to the counter the naive "publisher bad" claim today.
Only a handful projects managed to do well with this approach and they *all* were careful not to blow up their scope with many (or any) stretch goals or increase it due to gathering more money that they originally anticipated.
The majority, though, failed to prove the claim to be true, spectacularly and miserably.
Like it's no secret that the Double Fine Adventure was mediocre at best, but what's more important Double Fine miscalculated and mismanaged its development to the point they had to split release in episodes and pretty much use money from the sale of the first episode as well as from multiple pay-what-you-want sales to gather money to finish production. And Double Fine actually did deliver on the video documentary goal, so they were technically successful on that.
It's also no secret the OUYA console was an utter failure, Massive Chalice, Mighty No. 9, Armikrog, too, to name but a few. Some others never made it to a release and were abandoned. A subset were proven to be outright scams, for the rest there are still some backers waiting for them occasionally yelling hopelessly at the void for updates.
If you can look at Star Citizen, with all its red flags raised for years (and still raising more -- my God, a roadmap to a roadmap in a release year and a meltdown by Roberts after months of absence), and declare that this is different or this is better, I think you are massively gaslighting yourself.
arstechnica.com
I believe its within reason that someone should question whats going on with this game and its lack of any release window.
