Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games can't seem to catch a break these days. The studios working on Star Citizen recently came under fire for being in dire financial straits after information about a loan from a U.K., bank was discovered, but the developers were quick to deny any financial problems.
Over on the official RSI website, attorney Ortwin Freyermuth addressed some concerns that emerged regarding news that RSI/CIG had taken out a loan from U.K., bank. Freyermuth explains that the loan has to deal with a Government Game tax credit rebate that the studio earns every month while working on Squadron 42 development.
Freyermuth details how the tax principal accrued during this year can be payable during the tax returns in the following year. The idea is that this will help alieve some of the financial hardships moving through the development process on the U.K., side.
Some people argued that Roberts Space Industries put up the entire Star Citizen IP and project for collateral in case payments couldn't be made, but Freyermuth denies these charges. He instead says that all is standard fare and usual business practice when it comes to U.K., financing and rebates.
Unless you're a finance accountant, a lawyer, or a professional number cruncher, most people aren't entirely privy about the proper process of how all of this actually works.
The scare came from tweets, forum posts and blogs from media claiming that CIG had run out of money and had put up the Star Citizen IP for collateral in order to keep working on it. Speculation ran rampant and doom-saying took precedence in the conversation.
There have been a lot of worries and doubts over whether or not Star Citizen will ever be finished. Some people feel it's taking too long, others believe that it's all a scam. For people who regularly follow the weekly updates and video packages produced each week called "Around the Verse", there are in-depth details on the progress being made from each studio week after week, even if it's as simple as updating code, fixing animations, working on ships, or squashing bugs.
A lot of it gives insight into the actual hurdles and engineering challenges developers face from the inside when it comes to building complex design tools made to handle micro and macrocosmic algorithms.
In the case of Star Citizen the game is doing something that the CryEngine was not built to handle, hence why CIG had to gut the engine, build its own network infrastructure and latch onto Amazon's Lumberyard (which is based on the CryEngine) in order to Jerry-rig a solution for handling procedural planet generation, capital ship rendering, and large scale player-to-player interactions across a persistent online universe.
While some gamers and members of the community are still leery about Star Citizen, others are hopeful that with alpha 3.0 on the horizon it may quell some of the criticisms of the space sim. Having public information about the loan certainly didn't help, but RSI was quick to make a public statement to put a lot of the speculation to rest.
