Chris Roberts ‘frustrated’ by Star Citizen scam accusations

Criticism of problems with the early build of crowdfunded record-breaker Star Citizen has bothered creator Chris Roberts.

To date the game has raised an incredible $44,721,324 from nearly 500,000 backers. The game’s first playable build, the Arena Commander, finally released this week after some delay. However, the early access build has been beset by problems, leading to complaints from some backers.

We are deliberately sharing the game at a much earlier stage than any traditional triple-A game and also much earlier than a lot of other crowd funded games,” Roberts said. These builds are early enough that the feedback from people who love this genre so much they’ve been willing to put their money up way in advance of getting the finished product can be actioned on, allowing us to build a better, more stable game in the long run.

We are deliberately making our development process much more open and transparent. Not everything will go smoothly or on time, as a project of this size and complexity will always present unforeseen issues, which is why we have been endeavoring to share information with you that anyone in the traditional publishing model would not.

As soon as we had an internal target that we were hopeful of making, we shared it with you, with the caveat ‘if everything goes according to plan’. My question to you is: should we continue to do this? I’m given pause not by internal criticism from frustrated backers who really just want to get into space (which we completely understand!) but by sensationalistic headlines that imply we’re not working hard or that the game is some sort of scam.

I can assure you that the whole team is committed to making the best game possible, so it is disheartening when our attempts at transparency are used against us to paint a negative picture of this amazing project.”

The RSI site is currently conducting a poll on the viability of release date transparency, although one would presume the outcome would be obvious.