When I wrote about the latest update to Star Citizen, Chris Roberts' highly-ambitious, massively crowdfunded MMO — with over $250 million pledged so far — I expected it to be received as some interesting insights into an online world that many people haven't thought about much lately.
What I didn't expect at all was a religious war.
But a text-based one more or less broke out in Comments, the first wave led by Star Citizen apostates unleashed by an online community devoted to hating Star Citizen. (Yes, that's a thing.) Some of the milder comments:
lol scam citizen. How much Chris paid you to publish this bullshit?
Scam Citizen the list of excuses why they keep missing their own deadlines continues. But fortunately the Roberts Family and his friends are now millionaires for selling you your own dreams and changing it last minute…
Well I never heard of this blog until now, and based on this article I can see the blog is shit…
I wonder how much Crobblers paid for this disinformation… It will never be released, because if it ever is, the money stream from fleeced rubes would suddenly end and the game would be publicly reviewed as a finished product, which is something the Crobblers will never allow…
"Crobblers", I guess, being a portmanteau for "Chris Roberts promoters". Which is witty! But it's the level of conspiratorial rage that's totally fascinating to me. Why do so many gamers actively, hungrily want this one indie game project to be a sham, and fail?
"I'll be the first to say I've had and continue to have frustrations with Star Citizen," my colleague Joshua May told me, after reading the responses to my interview with him on the game. "That's just life. Things I want got delayed, things I didn't care about got implemented instead, everyone wants something different out of it. Everyone has a different idea of what the final game should be and gets disappointed if they don't think [Roberts' company] Cloud Imperium Games is going in that direction."
An indie game developer himself, May speculates that some of the anger is based confusion over what's required to publish an online world so ambitious.
"It can't make everyone 100% happy, because everyone disagrees on the end product," as he puts it. "That's the nature of any video game, especially MMOs. People just aren't accustomed to seeing the sausage made and most of them don't understand it."
Surely many Star Citizen detractors are angry because they've pledged money to Roberts' project over the years, and now feel buyers' remorse, because it's still far from complete. But last year, crowdfunding increased, while more and more content has been added to the project. Despite that — or perhaps because of that — many detractors still insist it must all be a scam.
"Skepticism is healthy, but it's increasingly getting far enough along in development that the skepticism is less and less warranted," notes May.
But if Star Citizen has its detractors, it also has its defenders — for instance, this reader comment that apparently came in via a pro Star Citizen community:
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