Imagine you spent months enduringthe most grueling crunchof your life becausethe boss just had to have a functional tech demo at this convention(spoiler alert, it crashed multiple times on the big day).
The boss follows up by saying you will gettime offin lieu (TOIL) for those days, before clarifying that you can only use cash in your break once the product is released.
This product in question isSquadron 42, a campaign for crowdfunded chaos incarnateStar Citizen. According to the Cloud Imperium Games,Squadron 42was going to come out in 2014.
Starfield: Shattered Space Review
Shattering expectations, but not in a good way.
Today, former Cloud Imperium employee Gill Eadesseo confirmed that some development team members will not be seeing those perks, asCIGterminatedthem in the wake of CitizenCon.
According tothe source,the company’s quality assurance department bore the brunt of it, with at least twelve employees affected.
The QA team had been working at a breakneck pace to comply with management’s demands for a workable CitizenCon showcase.
Despite spending a month with an average of 12 extra weekly hours andmandatory office presence, theSquadron 42demo was messy, crashing multiple times during the big show.
CIG has remained tight-lipped on this subject so far, which is not unusual. During a previous wave of layoffs that hit 100 employees in the United States,the company forced many of them to sign NDAs preventing them from disclosing the situation.
The World Changes But Star Citizen Stays The Same
WhenStar Citizenfirst announced the Squadron 42 release date, Robert Mugabe was still president of Zimbabwe, remote working was a rarity enjoyed primarily by freelancers, and Nintendo was deep in the WiiU debacle with seemingly no way out.
In the year thatStar Citizencrosses the $750 million invested mark, its systemic problems remain the same, and there is no release date in sight.
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Star Citizen may be incomplete, but it gives glimpses of a polish that Starfield lacks.
The game is marked by management that overpromises,propped up by whalesready to spend thousands of dollars on a vision of the game rather than its present state.
Star Citizenin 2024 is playable and looks impressive at a surface level, butthe gameplay loop is decidedly shallow, and newly introduced features cut corners to tick boxes.
The lack of transparency and the unsustainable business model make it hard to believe thatStar Citizenwill ever evolve past a what-if project with a shiny tech demo.
If it ever does, the game will have a hard time shedding its reputation aftera decade of overpromising and underdelivering.
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So many ships to choose from, huh?
