Star Citizen management sucks?

I don't know which 'fake shock gif' to use.

I went for Joseph Joestar.

Star Citizen. My god it's been a while hasn't it? Well, I mean it's been a long time since I did a blog which really went to task on the goings on over at Cloud Imperium Games. And that has been because of a couple of reasons. Firstly, that was because I didn't really come across anything worth talking about, they've been decently controversy free for the year (perhaps conspicuously so) and secondly because I just covered them so extensively in my first couple of blogs. The one's were I looked at their Rise and Fall. (Make sure you put some time aside if you want to read them, they're a doozy.) No, it would take something truly scandalous to get my attention again, something that either changes my mind 180 or simply bookends that which I've researched about them so far. (Today I'm looking at the latter kind of story, if you couldn't tell.) So buckle up as we take a look at a rather tangible, and pretty upsetting, example of how the mismanagement which defines CIG as a studio effects the world outside their game too.

So perhaps you remember a little bit of an natural disaster happening over the winter. No? In Texas? The whole sudden snowstorm which rocked a state that was totally unprepared for it? Basically it was like any winter over in the UK, during which everything grinds to a halt like this doesn't happen every year, except that core chunks of infrastructure were specifically built under the assumption that this wouldn't happen. State-wide construction standards typically designed all residential homes with methods to shed heat, great for the hot summers but potentially deadly for this snow storm, roads were inoperable for longer than one would like thanks to there being not enough anti-snow vehicles and materials to hand, and the power grid was knocked off course thanks to both the blizzard and the fact that Texas rocks an entirely independent grid from the rest of the country, meaning a few setbacks would bring the entire place offline with no backups. Safe to say, it was a terrible winter over there and it resulted in people losing heating for days, having their homes flooded from burst pipes and, in the worst of cases, dying. Serious stuff.

And that sort of makes you wonder what a game studio like Cloud Imperium Games has to do with things, doesn't it? Well, as I mentioned in that Rise blog I linked to, back in February 2013 Cloud Imperium opened up an Austin branch, meaning that they, alongside many other prominent game studios, had employees in the crosshairs of this natural disaster. What a conundrum. There's no stricter test of one's worth than placing them in situations of emergency, and as an employer who's expected to look after those under their company name, there come certain responsibilities that need to be met. Other studios like Aspyr, Certain Affinity and Owlchemy labs halted operations completely, aware that this week it was of much more import for their employees to focus on keeping their families warm and fed. EA and Gearbox didn't stop everything ('Too big to fail' as Activision is fond of saying) but they did put up employees in hotels, deliver them supplies and check in with them to ensure, you know, that they were safe. CIG on the otherhand, did none of that. And "why" is the question on everyone's lips right now.

Yes, during the snowfall in Texas employees were treated to the ultimatum from management that they had to either make their way into work, or figure out to make it up to in the meanwhile. (It almost sounds like a mafia movie when I phrase it like that, doesn't it?) Some sources that reached out to the news claimed that they were outright told to consider entering paid over time if they absolutely could not make it into the office or work from home. That's right, rather than try and reach out and help their staff through this troubling time, management did the rounds cracking the whip and keeping people sweating. It would be a couple of weeks before top brass could reach out through email about the situation, thanks to the state-wide Internet blackouts which, incidentally, made working from home pretty much impossible for a lot of folk; and when they were finally in touch, CIG used it as an opportunity to reinforce their stance on overtime and let everyone know that they weren't getting off the hook for this. You know, despite how every other industry in the state was trying to pick up the pieces as best they could. (Does CIG know something about the Texas storm that the rest of us don't?)

Of course this was ridiculous. Having to spend vacation days or go into overtime in order to make up the cost of a natural disaster is some dystopian 1984 kind of thing, unless CIG truly thinks that it's staff were living it up in the week they spent shivering in their homes hoping their sewer systems don't burst and try to flood them. (Talk about living the vacation dream!) All this smells suspiciously like CIG punishing their staff for trying to take a sicky, and according to some sources that is exactly what the impression was. Yeah, somehow the idea got around that the Austin office was taking a snow day and overblowing the effects of the storm, a perception which, apparently, lasted longer than the week of chaos. Do you believe that? Because I honestly don't. Even over here across the North Atlantic ocean I was aware of the situation in Texas by at least day 3, and I don't even have any employees in the state! The instant and interconnected state of world news makes ignorance a pretty tough pitch to sell, but then what's the alternative? Malice? Straight lack of a will to compromise? As I implied earlier, we can merely speculate.

For their part, CIG management at least came back with excuses on the 21st, offering that most ironclad of explainers in that "Oh my god, we didn't know, how terrible." It wasn't until the cult leader himself, Chris Roberts, got ahold of this that any promises of recompense were made, in that everyone would be paid. No word on whether or not he'd make plans to compensate any vacation days or overtime that staff felt pressured into entering, but I'm sure he will; they're all about damage control now. CIG have known about this pretty big blunder for a few weeks now and have been trying to reach out individually to staff to 'check up' whilst, I imagine, slipping a little bit of the "but we don't really need to tell anyone about this, now do we?" But it seems too late, as the story is now out there and it a fair number of staff have been more than ready to throw their management under the bus for being clueless and unhelpful in a time when there really was no excuse to be.

Cloud Imperium Games is a surprising company to see in one of these controversies, I must say, because outside of the hairbrained way they've been making their money-black-hole of a game; I've never really heard of any huge internal blunders like this coming out of them. I mean sure, there's been the odd accusation of nepotism considering how many of Roberts close friends are in important roles, but those accusations are typically being made from the outside and I certainly don't know enough about his family to comment on who's qualified for what role. And yet in the same breath I find it hard to believe a studio the size of CIG (Around 500 staff) couldn't have known about one of the biggest natural disasters of the year so far. Which leads me to believe that they undersold it to themselves purposefully out of some learned stubbornness in order to justify forcing staff into pushing themselves and either to ignore personal responsibilities or simply pass the buck in perpetuity. That's just my theory on the matter, but it certainly seems to make more sense right now than any official statements.

The only thing I can't reconcile in my brain after all of this is what the hurry was to push their Austin staff so. They've been working on the same game for the better part of the last decade and have proven how easy it is to raise more funds if things get dire by simply skewering their future in-game economy by releasing a new preorder 'megaship' and feeding off their backer's lifeforce. CIG doesn't have to answer to investors, (or at least, not to the same degree as other developers do) they don't have to answer to the community, (their cult shields them from criticism) perhaps somewhere along the way the big wigs decided they didn't even have to answer to themselves either. Take this flash of dystopian corporatism as a prelude and it spells a dark future for every industry, when employees are treated like soulless work horses and worked tirelessly without care. Or maybe I'm being hyperbolic and this was all a huge misunderstanding. Let me know where you fall on all this, I'm still undecided.