Star Citizen Developer Crunch for CitizenCon

The perpetual development cycle of Star Citizen somehow keeps finding ways to get sillier, courtesy of the leadership at Cloud Imperium Games.

An anonymous Star Citizen developer has leaked an internal memo that details a grueling 18-day crunch to avoid a potential PR disaster at Citizencon 2024.

CitizenCon 2024 is a fan event by Cloud Imperium Games and was created to celebrate Star Citizen. The first convention happened in 2013 when the game entered early access. Back then, developers promised Star Citizen would come out in 2014.

Ten years later, the game is still in early access, albeit in better shape, but the scope of improvements hardly matches the time and money invested (north of $700 million thus far).

The hellish October crunch aims to push out patch 3.24.2 and assemble a playable demo of the Squadron 42 campaign, a star-studded disaster that has been in development since 2012.

Wake Me Up When October Ends

The specifics of the CitizenCon crunch seem inspired by the worst of AAA studio practices, a testament to their commitment to making Cloud Imperium match big names like EA at every step.

Fridays, traditionally a work-from-home day, now have mandatory office presence, but that is nothing compared to the requirement of full workdays on Saturday and Sunday. These are officially flexible, but it is highly ‘encouraged’ to be physically present.

Cloud Imperium will “compensate” workers by giving them breakfast, lunch, and TOIL (time off in lieu) to use later.

The poor management and treatment of developers is made more sinister when you tie in an earlier leak from July. Employees have had to work 12 extra weekly hours to ship a demo for CitizenCon, again in exchange for TOIL, but there is a catch. Any TOIL earned between then and the convention can only be cashed in when Squadron 42 releases, which at this point will occur sometime before the heat death of the universe. Additionally, this will only be available if the employee in question is still employed with Cloud Imperium Games at the time of release.

The company was careful not to infringe on UK labor laws, reminding its developers based in the islands that they need to have 11 hours outside of work per every 24-hour cycle.

Charitably, Cloud Imperium is gifting one (1) day off for free after CitizenCon is over.

These demands from management are a systemic issue within the company and, unsurprisingly, have caused talented workers to quit the Star Citizen team despite the hostile job market in game development and tech today.

In Space, Nobody Can Hear a Release

Star Citizen players are right when they say the game is broadly enjoyable now, but critics frequently retort that this sentiment is the bastard child of Stockholm Syndrome and a sunken cost fallacy.

It is easy to be deeply invested in a game you have spent thousands of dollars on. “At this point, why not stick around until it is released?” And thus the Star Citizen cycle continues, for another year… or ten.