Yeah I saw that but it looked to also have a lot of focus on the dolls and not the dollhouse, I'm more about the house.

I really only want the house building. I had a blast in Sims 2-4 building my dream house and trying out floor plans, optimizing flow of everyday life and just the architecture/design aspects of making it look good. Sadly they always hit limitations which took the fun out of it due to not being able to build like you wanted. Especially roofs were tricky or impossible to get to look good. And slanted roofs wasn't in any base game and I didn't buy DLC (and haven't played 4 in like 5 years+).

If someone could make an house architect game I'd so love it! Build a house for a family of 4 with a budget of X with these bullet point demands. Then get scored on stuff like usable sq footage, how well the bullet points got satisfied etc.

Current Intel is worse than current AMD for CPU heat and Nvidia is currently cooler than AMD on GPU. Also we're on AM5. AM4 lived for a relatively long time, no indication that AM5 won't be a long runner as well. Intel changes socket more often as well so for longevity AMD is almost always the best, except at the tail end of a socket.

4k in the future but want to buy GPU now really only means you should get the 7900 XTX. The 4090 would be even better fit but if you all ready think the 7900 XTX is pricy well then it seems out of the question with a 4090. 7800 is a good deal if you want something fresh but it's not much of a 4k card now and even less so in a couple of years. Though of course depends on what games you play and your view on upscaling. If you think FSR/DLSS are ok then a 4070 Ti is probably a good fit, using DLSS 3 it's perfectly fine for 4k and DLSS will mean it will work in 5 years as well (unless Nvidia makes DLSS 4 and completely drop 3...)

That might very well be. My take on everything I've seen so far is that it likely was ready. Just that CR or someone else said "wouldn't it be cool if we also had X in there?" And then they just said fuck releasing, we need X in there! Then X lead to Y and along the way someone proposed A and that would be so cool but if we have A why not B and..........

If we had access to their Jira or whatever they use I can all but guarantee that the backlog grows faster than they can close issues.

And it's also undeniable that they are developing stuff. Just very questionable stuff at times and they decide to redo stuff all the time.

Truer words have never been spoken

I am saying they're doing a shit job at delivering a game to us backers. I just don't think it's nefarious, just sheer incompetence. They value making the best thing highly, they think the best thing means the most feature rich and realistic thing, and thus they allow scope creep to literally eat money via man-hours in a way that can only and will lead to CIG going bankrupt long before a game is ever released in a finished state. Unless someone high up over there wisens up. Forces a hard deadline and cuts the scope down agressively to meet it and gets the game(s) released. But I find that exceedingly unlikely.

Haha, that's not a yatch. That's a motorboat, we're talking in the $100k-$1000k range with the topend being unlikely. I agree the optics aren't the best but it's not at all crazy to afford something like that on a business leader salary. Sure from a pure ethics standpoint he should take a modest salary and keep at it until the game is released and his obligations to his supporters fulfilled and then get rich. But who has ever been that principled? I can't really fault him for something everyone does. He's also been fairly successful for a long time already so he likely had money before SC as well. Now if I'm wrong and another angle shows this is some gaudy 10 million dollar+ yatch he bought recently then I'll absolutely reevaluate!

It's just because that irks you when there are layoffs. But office supplies are assets, they're on the books and while they depreciate over time it's still something that can be sold and doesn't cost anything after you've bought them. The actual office building is different, since you generally rent it and the staff you need to pay monthly and you can't sell them to recoup part of the investment. High quality chairs etc cost a fortune, but they also last a decade plus in many cases. Still earlier this year they had 1000+ employees, that isn't sustainable for a game relying on donations basically. You need predatory microtransactions for that to workout which is of course part of the reason CIG monetizes in the way they do, they need to keep the boat afloat.

If the average salary is just $20k yearly were looking at a salary spend in excess of $20 million a year, not including offices or payroll taxes, benefits etc. And I imagine that the average salary is higher than that. If they are laying people off the reason is that someone in finance is putting his foot down saying this just can't go on.

The biggest waste is all the employees and the offices to house them. Details like decorations and conference tables are just a red herring, it's not the real issue. Just look at their road map, and then consider that they have 1100 people on payroll working on that roadmap, not including third parties like voice actors etc. It's fascinating.

I was an original backer, I've played various iterations over the years and it really takes a lot of rose tint to find the game as it is enjoyable. The core loop isn't even in place yet. The systems that do exist and work are interesting, the graphics and aesthetics are top notch, in parts, and at times it feels like we're going to get something revolutionary. But then you play for a while and the unfinished jank gets to you, it's not very fun. It's cool, it's impressive, the scope is insane and you can get lost in the vastness of space in ways that other games just can't even approach. But it's not fun. You can make it fun with friends or by setting up your own goals disjoined from the gameplay loop. Like try and jump a vehicle into the cargo bay mid flight or see how tightly you can race around asteroids. But if you just play the existing little loops it sucks. This is of course my subjective opinion. You might love the bounty system and the combat. You might love the salvage runs and transport missions but to me it's like Euro Truck Simulator which is about the most boring shit I can imagine. And both the space and ground combat just isn't even remotely as good as other games that just focus on that, which is understandable but I'm always left with this feeling of "will I really enjoy the finished product?" And I'm not sure. The game they said they were going to make in the Kickstarter, that game I would've enjoyed. I loved Chris Roberts games as a kid, but this monstrosity it has become? I just don't know.

That said I really do believe they're trying to make the best game ever. They just don't fundamentally understand why we need deadlines and a fixed scope to get things out the door.

He isn't, but he's not out there buying multiple sports cars and a yatch either. I really do believe there isn't anything sinister going on, just a whole bunch of good intended people wasting a collosal amount of money on a dream project where devs get to do exactly what they want and don't need to adhere to deadlines, no crunch, no job security threats and just no pressure. It's probably bliss working there but they have no hope of ever making an actual finished product because there is literally noone there with the goal to push a product out the door on X date. It will be done when it's done, and everyone who's ever worked in such a loose environment knows that means never until someone comes in and lays down the law.

And before someone comes in and says "Y indie project bla bla" remember that there is a VAST difference between a small game with say 1000-5000 man hours behind it and a large AAA game which Star Citizen aims to be which entail at minimum 100.000s of man hours of work. You can be extremely loose and take your time with a small idea like say Vampire Survivor and scope creep it to hell and back and it still won't take more than a year or two until there just isn't anything more to do but release it.

There is probably some clever parallel to draw here to utopian political ideologies but my brain is mush after a grueling week so I'll leave that to someone else.