If you haven't been following the Star Citizen project, it's a good time to check it out, it is after all the largest crowdfunded project to date. Since it is an unusually successful outlier in crowdfunding scene, it's going to garner a lot of attention, not always positive. At the end of the day, any press is good press(much like this forum post), keeping the project rolling, keeping the hype wave and massive development team funded, the carrot of completing the "dream space game" being one reason dollars have been funneled into it from many sources.
Also, a theory that any investment by say venture capital firms that are interested in seeing kickstarter's reputation tarnished in a major way may have skin in the game as well.
Then Darek Smart comes along, a gaming industry "closing man", who likes to gut games to ensure that the investors get their money's worth and a game makes it to market. This man, and his type, are a big reason for mediocre games in the market. The thing that troubles me about his interaction with star citizen is that they actually publicly acknowledged him. Most companies I know tend to keep this sort of thing quiet, yet it seems that star citizen was finding a slowdown and a little bit of drama could help them. Except Darek Smart, being who he is, is an interesting person to publicly acknowledge, and is the type of person that never should be given that kind of public focus(trolls need to stay under their dark bridges). I now am troubled that the endgame of Star Citizen will be that Darek Smart get's paid by the backers to dig Chris Roberts out of the big hole he has dug himself into. Perhaps the original Roberts' plan was that Chris Roberts makes a successful comeback to the game industry, make a lot of friends by giving them our money, Testing a new business model that survives on creating hype to fund a game and hires Mr. Smart to do what he does best, clean up the issue. One of the ways to clean up this issue would be to misdirect the attention of the masses that funded the game to issues that don't matter, like say legal action that makes it seem like Mr. Smart isn't that intelligent when in reality what is actually going on is a fabrication by a few law firms under hire by star citizen. One could almost see them testing their audience to see if they can get away with it right below their backer's noses.
This is definitely a counter theory to what is being presented by the other media outlets, but I would caution that these same outlets have also been getting paid a lot to by star citizen to keep the hype machine going...
I really hope that this perspective is wrong, yet there is enough information now that it actually has some merit. Troubling indeed.
