Star Citizen – THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH VIDEO CONTENT
Hello & Welcome to some more Star Citizen, today I wanted to talk about Star Citizen Limbo and a lack of meaningful content from CIG when it comes to community and video content.
I was Tweeted this morning:
“When will community leaders like you get involved in the “CommunityContentGate”? All top spectrum threads in General, Subs’ Den, twitter are about the surreal lack of content quality, quantity and depth. We need ambassadors, and reaction from CIG.”
We are in a little bit of Star Citizen Limbo Currently, this happens most often in February where CIG have released a Patch in December BUT there are bugs that haven’t been addressed and players may of seen all the new content in that patch BUT don’t want to play more due to those bugs and impending resets. That’s not to say there is nothing to do, lots of people are playing and enjoying Star Citizen now, large Orgs and having loads of fun, I just saw a video from Digital Foundry that are making a Star Citizen Series looking at various aspects of the Game, it’s tech and development BUT we are waiting on fixes, persistence, more juicy video content, concept sales and the next major patch 3.9.
Something that I am really looking forward to is SC Alpha 3.8.2 coming by the end of February with the Carrack and some other important bug fixes. We might have a sale for Valentines Day and there could well be a Concept Sale around the same time.
Contributing HOWEVER to this is also a lull in video content in Januarys and a slow start to the year. Video content has been lacking for a while from CIG imo.
I can only speak for myself BUT I would expect better & more video content, as well as more generally community content.
I understand the irony and hypocrisy of me calling anyone out when my content and editing is pretty low effort.
I also want to say that even if CIG does produce more content I am always going to want more than that. I am a super consumer of Star Citizen Content with a bias towards making videos with any info that I can.
So what type of content could CIG actually make? Subscribers contribute an estimated $3-3.5 million each year ($3.26 million in 2018) this is to help the development of the game and to support Community Interaction and Video Content… they have the budget.
Disco Lando is a Associate Creative Producer at CI and in charge of a lot of this content directly now and I quite like a lot of what he does & his presenting style… he is also a good chap… BUT they have the budget to have another host to fill in and create more content too IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE ALL JARED ALL THE TIME he can’t possibly do everything, though I do think he typically has good vision for content… we need more.
Anyway these are some of my suggestions and what I would like to see CI make content wise:
Let’s Start with the Major One Video Content as with everything I talk about here, some of this CIG do currently do in some form OR have done in the past but there is room for expansion.
Ship Shape – People love spaceships and a monthly or every other month episode looking at what’s being worked on with ships, where they are in the pipeline and any teasers would be great.
Inside Star Citizen – I’d like to see them at least 12 – 15 mins in length, they should cover news, features and what’s coming in the short term for the most part.
After Every Major Patch Release SC LIVE takes a 3 Week Break, this would be ok if there was other content to fall back on BUT I would think this is the perfect time to do tours of the new locations in game and have the devs talk about them and missions and new things you can do in the game and the design choices behind them.
Deep Dive into Features (Both Long & Short Term) – I’d love to know about Science gameplay, Salvage Plans, How will Insurance work, there are a mass of topics.
Location Tours – When a location is nearly finished have someone that helped make them walk through and talk about what’s going on and why.
Calling All Devs – They are bringing this back, tho I would like it in addition of Star Citizen LIVE not alternatively with.
TownHalls – With LIVE Questions going to major high level devs like Tony Z, Todd Pappy, Erin Roberts, Sean Tracy, Luke Pressley.
Game Dev Live – They do these as part of Star Citizen Live, but sometimes they miss the mark with the content… bobbleheads as a choice for content will live in infamy (400 likes & 2.2k dislikes). They need to be talking about the game and have engaging content with Game Dev Live, that more accurately reflects the work and Dev does and how that affects the game.
Studio Updates – They used to do a quick update of what the studios were individually focused on in brief.
They certainly don’t need to do all of that every week or even month & some of it might work better as articles, forum posts or in written form… speaking of this, it’s not just video content, I think it would really benefit CIG to have:
More Regularly Updated Roadmaps with more details on the Tasks on Then.
A Roadmap to Completion well more of a Listing All Planned Features for the Game Roughly.
I would like to see a Roadmap stretching out at least 12 months at any given time, with the Roadmaps as long as they are updated at the earliest possible stage I don’t really mind if bits move around, knowing CIGs plans and intentions is important to me.
The Roadmap Round Up they do each week is actually very useful, it’s just disappointing when we see features removed from the Roadmap.
I’d also like to see less Obscured Roadmaps, there are “surprizes” they throw in for patches like ships, features & missions.
Concept Ships & Vehicles – I personally want to see Concepts at their earliest stage and prefer less straight to flyable ships where the Concept Phase is effectively cut out for viewers.
Monthly Reports – They do these already for Squadron 42 and the PU. Though they copy the AI portions and have them on both reports. I would consider expanding these out to also list all Roadmap Changes over the month as well.
Community Interaction Wise – More Devs Talking about what they are working on and Answer Questions on Spectrum.
Polls – To Help Decide & Prioritize Features and Ships – Get the Community Involved & talk about what they want.
Have Threads to help pick what Questions are asked and what topics are covered in SCLive (They do kind of do this already) BUT also to just have answer threads on Spectrum. It doesn’t always need to be a video.
Subscriber Goodies are much less important to me than more Videos & Community Interaction. However Goodies I’d like to see would be more unique aesthetic/display items, decals, skins, flair items. The Holo-Skull Helmet looks mega cool for example.
Give me things like the Portraits of Hurston’s CEOs or a Piano… that’s quirky BUT nothing that is in game advantage.
Access to Ships for the month – Have Subscribers Vote on it maybe…
I actually really like the Jump Point Digital Magazine typically, even if it’s been a little watered down over the last couple of issues BUT in depth Features, First Looks, Concepts (Recently Jump Point has had a bit less NEW stuff in it and more talking about what we already know).
1st Wave PTU Access is actually a good shout from CIG as well for Subs imo.
My Conclusions – I think a lot of this boils down to I want more interaction from CIG and for them to hold less back BUT also CIG need to potentially hire more people that’s job is to create videos or other content for the community. Star Citizen thrives when it’s community are engaged.
As I said I can only talk about this from my point of view and there may be lots of other better options I haven’t thought about… There is an argument to be made that getting devs to answer questions and be involved in videos and the like takes them away from development HOWEVER I suspect there are devs that would do this stuff in their spare time, there is likely someone free at any given time to answer something and it doesn’t really take much time away… a couple of hours a week of manpower seems negligible to me… also you could have it someone’s job to just go round asking team leads and producers what’s being done OR sitting in on meetings via skype or physically there and then having a lot of that relayed to us.