Just read this in the Bluesnews discussions:
- Is it true that Star Citizen could be the Donald Trump of game development?
- It's way worse. It could be Marilyn Manson - cult-like and batshit insane.
Question asked of whom, and answered by whom? And more importantly, what was the tone of the question and the answer? As read as presented it reads as all negative doom and gloom, and even a bit insulting, but if it were just musings between Sinperium and myself, for example, it could be quite the opposite. We don't hate each other at all, we get along quite well and will likely work together often in Star Citizen, but if you take our text and just post cherry picked lines, the good natured ribbing and competitive challenges we throw at each other could be made to seem like we hate each other and have permanent kill on sight orders.
I ask because there's a very large portion of the gaming industry that wants to see the game fail, or at the very least fall very short of expectations. Publishers, for example, would love to see it fail to protect their business model and source of income. If developers all switch to crowd funding, then there's no need for publishers. Publishers study the market and decide what kind of game is viable to make. Publishers push advertising. Publishers push deadlines which inevitably force an unfinished or buggy product to be released. Publishers want the most they can charge for a product compared to spending the least to maximize profit. Publishers also create an ecosystem where clones of successful games are created over and over again and new types of games or a resurgence of an older genre are suppressed. With crowd funding, the gamer becomes the publisher. The gamer is footing the initial cost of development. The gamer advertises the game. The gamers themselves prove how much the market wants something. The gamer decides how much risk to take and is interested in the product, not the profit. Publishers, by rule of survival, cannot allow games like Star Citizen to be made, because Star Citizen proves not only are publishers wrong with their market studies and insistence that PC gamers aren't a good market and that certain genres are dead, but also completely unnecessary.
Then there are the game developers themselves. I'm not saying developers don't care about the product they create, but imagine the 8th Call Of Duty clone being made. If taken to crowd funding, the gamer says, why the hell would I want that? It's exactly the same as what I've already got... Not enough is spent and the game isn't made, but if it appears in the store one day, the gamer says, eh, why not. I'll take it. Some developers keep their studios open specifically because the publisher is paying them to make more of the same because they know the gamer will buy it. So to these developers, crows funding is a scary realization that gamers could decide the fate of their studio based on first impressions, rather then just careless spending out of boredom.
Then there are the players that feel threatened by Star Citizen. We will break them down into two groups. The first is the console player who enjoys the lion's share of the game development resources, because they believe the rhetoric by the publishers that all PC games are pirated to the point that they make less then 10% of their possible sales, so those of us that play on PC's are all criminals and are killing the industry, an industry that makes more money then most others combined, mind you. Star Citizen making the money it already has, and the support it gets, proves their beliefs are bullshit, like us PC gamers have been saying for over a decade, and lets face it, no one wants to be proven wrong in such spectacular fashion. The second is the player that perceive themselves as rivals based on the product they support. This isn't their game and as long as this one is doing better then theirs, it's up to them to troll until this one isn't as good or both outright fail. Is EVE a rival of Star Citizen? Of course not, but if you listen to the vocal few of either player base, like the highlanders, "There can be only one." Do be aware that I said players and not gamers for either of these, because real gamers, people like me, if we like a game, or are at least interested in it enough to get it, we will play it regardless if it's another clone or what system it's on.
There's also a group of people that take every bit of information and dissect it and hold it as gospel truth despite being said as tongue in cheek commentary and then plaster it everywhere if it takes longer or isn't exactly as said and use it to badmouth the game.
There's even a group of fans that just don't understand the development process and are only used to finished playable products on their machine ready to go and can't grasp the reality that these things take time to make and usually are 3 or 4 years into development before you ever hear a single word about the game. They see the setbacks and claim doom for the project despite every single game ever made went through this exact same development process, except that they didn't know about them because they're not public knowledge.
Basically, what I'm getting at is posting something like that and not providing anything else to allow me to figure out the tone of the comments forces me to judge the commentators based on only what is presented. The question asked could be a positive or negative based on how you view a person whom no doubt has a very polarizing effect on people and then getting a negatively framed response about something else not asked in the question (I interpret the response to be about the fans and not actual game development), but again using a frame of reference that could either be positive or negative depending on your personal views of that frame of reference. I'm a fan of both Donald Trump and Marilyn Manson, so I'm actually insulted that both are being used in a negative manner. I'm not a cultist or bat shit crazy, nor do I want Trump for president, but the man knows how to generate money for himself and being in charge of policy and generating money for this broke ass country is a good thing. So I'm really only left with one position in all of this. Fuck the person whom asked the question and double fuck the person whom answered, as neither demonstrates they know the subjects they are discussing and could be from one of the many previous groups of people I outlined that have no problems bashing something that benefits us all if and when it succeeds, based on that little cherry picked plain text posting.
Space is not really my thing ( medieval fantasy
) but I wish Chris all the best, SC fate is crucial for the future of crowdfunding and gaming in general.
If you don't already know, Shroud Of The Avatar (aka Ultima) and Bard's Tale 4 are in development. I'm not a part of Shroud (yet, since I'm waiting to see how much of my time is absorbed by SC and Descent: Underground), but I am a part of Bard's Tale since it's single player and I can go at my own pace. And thank you for your support. 
If you join Star Citizen sometime in the future, make sure to look me up, I could always use more bodies on my ships that don't have to be pilots... I need turret gunners, damage control officers, mining laser specialists, doctors, farmers, telescope operators, component overclockers, and a whole bunch of other stuff... Just because the setting is different doesn't mean we can't lure you in with something fun to do. 
