Imagine you spent months enduring the most grueling crunch of your life because the boss just had to have a functional tech demo at this convention (spoiler alert, it crashed multiple times on the big day).

The boss follows up by saying you will get time off in lieu (TOIL) for those days, before clarifying that you can only use cash in your break once the product is released.

This product in question is Squadron 42, a campaign for crowdfunded chaos incarnate Star Citizen. According to the Cloud Imperium Games, Squadron 42 was going to come out in 2014.

Today, former Cloud Imperium employee Gill Eadesseo confirmed that some development team members will not be seeing those perks, as CIG terminated them in the wake of CitizenCon.

According to the source, the company's quality assurance department bore the brunt of it, with at least twelve employees affected.

The QA team had been working at a breakneck pace to comply with management's demands for a workable CitizenCon showcase.

Despite spending a month with an average of 12 extra weekly hours and mandatory office presence, the Squadron 42 demo was messy, crashing multiple times during the big show.

CIG has remained tight-lipped on this subject so far, which is not unusual. During a previous wave of layoffs that hit 100 employees in the United States, the company forced many of them to sign NDAs preventing them from disclosing the situation.

When Star Citizen first announced the Squadron 42 release date, Robert Mugabe was still president of Zimbabwe, remote working was a rarity enjoyed primarily by freelancers, and Nintendo was deep in the WiiU debacle with seemingly no way out.

In the year that Star Citizen crosses the $750 million invested mark, its systemic problems remain the same, and there is no release date in sight.

The game is marked by management that overpromises, propped up by whales ready to spend thousands of dollars on a vision of the game rather than its present state.

Star Citizen in 2024 is playable and looks impressive at a surface level, but the gameplay loop is decidedly shallow, and newly introduced features cut corners to tick boxes.

The lack of transparency and the unsustainable business model make it hard to believe that Star Citizen will ever evolve past a what-if project with a shiny tech demo.

If it ever does, the game will have a hard time shedding its reputation after a decade of overpromising and underdelivering.

Posted: 1 day, 2 hours ago
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/star-citizen-dev-lays-off-staff-immediately-after-convention-crunch/