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Star Citizen: An Analogy
rpmcmurphy
Member EpicPosts: 3,502
They gave money to help fund something which didn't exist because they were told if they did, they would have said games which didn't yet exist which included specified features they desired by a date they found reasonable.
That date was November 2014.
The date has long since passed. New dates have been given which have long since passed. Assurances that 2017 will see the release of Squadron 42 are not even believed.
Reasonable expectations for delivery times are usually a part of a buyer's calculus when pre-ordering. If told in advance "We have no clue when this game will deliver but we need money anyway", many people might not have chosen to back it. And we go through similar calculations all the time as consumers.
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If you order a pizza because the commercial for that Old Country Pizzeria said you'd have delivery in 30 minutes, you have the right to expect it within that approximate timeframe.
By around the 45th minute if you don't have delivery, you'd probably start to get annoyed.
If you called and the cook / owner said, "Oh I'm sorry, but I can assure you my pizza is going to amaze you. It's a secret recipe I developed in the 90s, using gaslight ovens, only now, my ingredients are better than I ever dreamed of back then. You just can't get this kind of pie from a soulless chainstore by Big Pizza because they care only about profits and compromise. But my pizza is almost done, I can see it cooking in the oven right now. Here, I'll have my wife text you a picture of what it looks like!"
"The picture looks good enough," you sigh, "I guess I can wait."
If an hour goes past, you'd be getting mad and would probably be getting pretty hungry. Now you call back. It rings and rings and eventually, you get put in a hold queue, approximate wait times are 15 minutes, but then a recording of the owner says "It's taking longer than we expected but we didn't expect so many orders! With this extra demand we've got extra money and we've now increased the size of all pizzas, although we did run out of pepperoni so we've dropped that ingredient from all pizzas. But don't worry, we've tripled the size and now all pizzas will include tri-injected mozzarella layering, a technique Big Pizza wouldn't even dare attempt because all they care about is profits and compromise!"
Well, now you're annoyed, especially since pepperoni was what you expected, but tri-injected mozzarella does sound interesting and oh look, you just got another pic texted to you, of the chef and his team all working on your pizza. You guess you can wait another 15 minutes.
16 minutes later, no pizza has arrived.
30 minutes later, you call. An annoyed kid voice answers, and before you can even finish saying, "I ordered this thing an hour and a half ago please just bring me--" you get quickly dumped to a voicemail box. But it's full and can't take any more messages.
Yet minutes later, you get another text. It's actually a video, called "The Road to Pizzaville." You sit and watch it. It's slickly made, yet it explains the unexpected challenges encountered when the cook and his team started trying to implement the tri-injected mozzarella technique that wasn't even a part of the pepperoni pizza you originally ordered. Unexpected setbacks related to features you never requested have completely destroyed any hopes you might've clung to for reasonable delivery times. Yet happy customers are featured in the video, along with a new-agey bit of stock music, and they're all saying "It will be finished when they finish it" or "I'm so glad I backed Old Country Pizzeria - they really do care."
2 hours in, you're now furious. If you'd known there was any chance it would take this long you'd never have ordered. Yet repeated calls go unanswered. A recording plays telling you've they've closed the voicemail system and you should download their new app. You download it to your phone but it doesn't work on mobile. So you log in from your desktop. You see a bunch of pizza memes. Some other customer has written a novel about how delicious he knows his late Pepperoni pizza sans pepperoni will be while yet another guy theorycrafts about the possibility of quadruple-injected mozzarella layering in his pizza.
Anyone writing as you might "Where is the pizza I ordered?!" is immediately shouted down by people saying "It'll be done when it's done!" Or "We voted for this delay so we could get the tri-injected mozzarella tech!" Or "Well at least this isn't the kind of garbage we'd get from Big Pizza because all the care about is profits and compromise!"
You see a picture of the kitchen, taken very recently. They are unloading bags of flour from delivery trucks. The note from the owner says, "We've finally got flour- now, let's get cooking!"
A note below that from the assistant chef explains that now that they have flour, they are "beginning to crest the hill of crust-baking architecture functionality."
You are now livid. The scales are falling from your eyes and you wonder if you've called some kind of lunatic asylum that thinks it's a pizzeria.
You type up a complaint in the app:
"Wait, what? You've had no flour all along, you're just starting to mix ingredients for the crust? Then what was with that pic I saw of my pizza? Was that even real? It can't have been, you had no flour yet! But what about the Road to Pizzaville?! Have you been gaslighting me the whole time?! What kind of madness is this I just wanted a Pepperoni pizza in 30 minutes! What is HAPPENING?!"
Then the replies from other customers start.
"You're one of THEM!"
"You're just an entitled millennial who doesn't know anything about pizza development!"
"What right do you have to question the chef or his methods?"
"It will be done when it's done. We've always known this since the beginning! You can't rush perfection and I for one know it will be worth the wait!"
"Of course he uses gaslighting, that's part of his secret old country technique!"
The discomfort of being set upon and insulted by faceless strangers makes you want to close the app. The contradictions in communications have you trying to piece together an alternative narrative to make sense of it all. Yet either it is lunacy at every step, or you yourself have lost your mind.
You try to distract yourself from all the cognitive dissonance and from the gnawing pains in your stomach by turning on the TV.
It's a commercial. For Pizza Hut. For $20, you can get a deep dish large pepperoni with cheese in the crust. It's not triple injected. It's not a gaslit oven nor an old country recipe. It's just a chain operation job made the same way it's made in thousands of stores across the country by people in a zombie state, performing their actions robotically. But they're probably sane zombies and it'll be ready in 30 minutes. Oh, and they have pepperoni.
It doesn't sound that bad, really.
Comments
Just after placing your piazza order you had a vote with some other folk who had placed the order at the same time and told told the store you wanted a much bigger piazza with more toppings - even after you were told it would take significantly longer. You went along with the vote despite the store offering you a refund. And when the store owner revealed it would a bit longer still you again turned down the offer of a refund.
You don't sound that bitter really.
After three years of NOT cancelling the "pizza" - cancelling which was very easy in the first three years - people start to bitch and moan because the "pizza" maker did rethink his voluntary cancellation policy ?
And most of those people that bitch and moan DID NOT ORDER THE "PIZZA" AT ALL in the first place! They just like to bitch and moan on general principle - many of them on a dedicated bitch and moan website and forum (SomethingAwful Pizza.com) founded for that very purpose.
Probably the same people that make a fool of themselves for years now quoting a November 2014 deadline that was already obsolete at the end of this
Probably the same people that ignored every single clue/reference/indication that timelines are estimated and subject to change in a crowdfunding project .... the same people that personally signed off that this is ok for them by accepting the Terms of Service.
False analogies are like as.h....s ***cough** errmm ... opinions - everyone has one.
Have fun
MAGA
Yeah I thought it was pretty funny, pretty apt in some places as well.
I don't know why you don't just laugh a long even if you don't see the humour in it. Getting wound up and trying to defend things when it's just a silly comedy sketch is really not worth it.
It does not sound like you are having fun
It would need to be funny first ;-)
Have fun
Bashing, Really?
It's a funny analogy that someone else had written (a star citizen fan I believe) that was posted here because it was amusing. If that counts as bashing then what the hell?
Ya don't order the pizza but ya sure get saltier than the ones who did about its delays!
SomethingAwfulPizza.com
I did not make this one up.
Check out the "Der Fuhrer" Pizza.
Have fun
Have fun
I could go on and on about how those analogy's are flawed (building a house / ordering a pizza etc) but It's really like trying to explain to a toddler. There's no capacity on the other end to understand basic stuff so there's really no point besides leaving a basic clue:
A kickstarting campaign is to get the ball going and provide a way to start something, to get the ball going, estimates of delivery are just that, estimates.
CIG was not a gaming studio, it was a group of friends and a couple of dev's with an idea and ambition to make a game like no other. There was no facilities much less staff, tools, pipelines. All they had at the time was the CryEngine full license, used to make the pitch video and get the ball going.
Rest is history, in 5 years they went from no company to 5 studios, 400+ dev's and developing proprietary cutting edge technology and partnering along with industry giants like Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Amazon etc while developing what is considered by many the most ambitious game project ever attempted.
Not too shabby imo.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Star Citizen Defence Force hot drop inc.
Surely the ability to sell pictures of ships has never been achieved on a scale such as CIG has managed, guess that could be cutting edge.
The analogy is true in a lot of ways, and no one can deny that customers are not down to wait forever for their products.
But I personally think that Star Citizen still has a long time before the critical "release now or riot" phase happens. (At least the rest of 2017, in my opinion)
I haven't invested any money into it myself, but space sims are my favorite genre next to MMORPGs, and I'm looking forward to the game so I'm trying to stay optimistic!
The third year we were continuously told large parts like Star Marine were "weeks not months or years" away and shown video after video of how great it was. We were given target dates that showed the game was delayed a bit but coming along nicely
So still no real reason to ask for a refund. It was not until the end of the third year that the whole thing changed, CR completely changed his position and said Star Marine was in the game and then dropped the "no refund" dynamite. Then we saw the spending on the lavish office, change in the ToS to say they no longer have to even release a game, missed date after missed date and the whole "timelines are artificial and I dont have to follow them" nonsense when CR was the one who gave us those dates in the first place.
While we may someday get a great game and in no way do I feel this was a scam, I do believe this project was heavily mismanaged and we will be lucky to get a 75 million dollar game out of the 140 million CR has taken in.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
I have a feeling we might not be answering the call this year, call me crazy.
They turned a corner SQ 42 was the big focus then they made it about 3.0 so that makes 3.0 pushed back at least a year the way they do things, maybe longer.