Story: space sim
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taken over by EA, and his later company, Digital Anvil, where Starlancer and Freelancer were created, Where taken over by Microsoft. “I don’t mind about being taken over by the people of EA, but when you are part of a publisher, then that will lead to another corporation and eventually destroy the DNA of the small, unordered development studio which actually made sure this part was working.” Origin is an example of how this can go wrong: where the studio initially made the motto “we create worlds” true with projects like Ultima, Wing Commander, Crusader: No remorse and BioForge there eventually became a sequel factory which only respected Ultima Online when it was shut down in 2004. “when you work with a big publisher, you have to not only need to create your game, you also have to fight for your money, fight for the attention you require, fight for a better release date and fight for a good marketing campaign. You have to do a lot of stuff which don't have to do anything with the game itself,”says Roberts.
Besides that the external pressure subjecting you to decide the period of release to set right the first financial quarter of a year, or if necessary temporarily make it a console exclusive for a marketing’s deal you made.”
Besides the bad memories, Roberts has to admit that without the financial help of EA Wing Commander 3 and 4 would never have existed. Roberts may have 40 million dollar but Star Citizen way more ambitious than all Space Sims together and the production costs of a triple-A game were booming the last 10 years. So it is questionable if Roberts will succeed without any Financial help of Microsoft or EA. Roberts got faith in it, for multiple reasons. First of all he can use his entire team for Star Citizen. With Digital Anvil there were only 100 employees which were working on 5 different projects at the same time of which only 30 were working on Freelancer. Secondly his team is in possession of Cry Engine 3 which is ready for the future. With Free lancer they first had to work 2 years on their own engine before they could start with the game. A third advantage is that the expensive overhead of the publisher is eliminated, because there hasn't been a discussion what to do with the marketing, Sales and other departments before critical points can be removed from the list the extra millions through crowd funding are not considered as extra profit but as tool to improve the game and its online infrastructure and support to make it better than it should be. Lastly Star Citizen is a brand new IP and not a sequel, this allows Roberts to do things which he couldn't with Wing Commander, Privateer or Freelancer.
MORAL OF THE STORY: MAKE DECISIONS WITH YOUR BRAIND AND YOUR HEART, NOT JUST YOUR BRAIN.