A cringe-inducing livestream for Star Citizen has broken containment and is giving non-fans an unflattering look into how the developer works.
If you’re at all familiar with the name Star Citizen, it’s likely because you’ve heard it described as the most expensive video game ever made. As of this May, the budget has exceeded $1 billion thanks to crowdfunding, which could make it higher than even GTA 6’s estimated budget.
Alternatively, you’ve heard of Star Citizen because of its negative reputation. After its early access launch in 2017, a damning 2019 report alleged developer Cloud Imperium Games was beset by ‘incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale.’ It’s still yet to see a proper launch and yet it continues selling microtransactions (well, we say microtransactions, the most expensive spaceship is over $1,000).
Now, the game and studio’s notoriety have only worsened thanks to a disastrous livestream that demonstrated how buggy an upcoming mission is and the uncomfortable tension amongst staff members.
For context, Star Citizen is meant to be adding a new mission called Siege Of Orison (though it’s technically a revamp of an older mission from a few years back) but it was postponed because of technical issues.
No doubt in an effort to get fans excited, Cloud Imperium Games opted to host a livestream featuring some of its own team members playing through the mission to show, as content director Jared Huckaby says, ‘the intended design’ and ‘how it’s supposed to work.’
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If you’re averse to cringe, we’d recommend skipping the stream because it is borderline uncomfortable to watch, since the gameplay is very glitchy throughout, despite running on a private server, and it doesn’t look very good anyway.
What’s worse is the hostility between team members. Perhaps some of it is born out of frustration with playing a clearly buggy game while being livestreamed, but the general vibe is that nobody seems to like one another.
The YouTube comments single out one team member named Elliot as having an aggressive attitude and taking potshots at content manager Oliver Hull, who only joined the team in June.
By the end of it, the team isn’t able to complete the mission and are forced to wrap up since their time has run out. It’s at this point that Huckaby, despite being the one to introduce the stream, approaches Hull and tells him ‘It’s your show, wrap it up,’ leaving him to very awkwardly make some closing remarks about what a good time they most certainly had playing the game.
The stream aired earlier this month and we’re honestly shocked Cloud Imperium has left it up, since it provides a very unflattering insight into the studio and its work culture.
While nothing can be completely scrubbed from the internet, doing so might have helped keep it contained to the Star Citizen community, but it’s now broken out and is being shared and discussed by prominent YouTubers such as MoistCr1TiKaL.
‘Go easy on the dev team, it was probably the first time they’ve actually played the game,’ reads the top comment by tomsbasement4884.
‘Incredibly awkward, cringe, forced, slightly sinister feeling at times, and the local server gameplay was still terrible. No one was having fun here. Felt like a hostage video,’ says tomato6460.