Star Citizen and the Curse of Abundance
I occasionally read about Star Citizen "development."Development began in 2011. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the game still isn't complete in 2026. No one else would be, either.
I started thinking about Star Citizen's fundamental problem, and it's abundance. That sounds strange, right? Well, stick with me, and I'll explain.
Creating anything involves making decisions. Lots of them. And many of those decisions are based on constraints. Haiku is an obvious example. Those constraints are part of the process that creates art, whether it's writing or music or art.
Or games, which have some of all three in them.
Star Citizen, though, has no constraints. They've already blown through $250M, and there's always more pouring in. "Joe, we need two million dollars by Friday. Make a JPEG of a spaceship shaped liked a Funyon and sell the hell out of it."
If someone is going to pay you to make a computer game for an unlimited length of time, why not just continue making it? Add any feature you want, as long as it's cool. Don't worry about it being necessary, because the whales will pay.
If somebody was paying me $100,000 a year to write The Man You Trust, I can guarantee you that I would never finish it. There would be no constraints to force me to make decisions. It would just keep getting longer and longer and longer. I'd really enjoy the lack of creative stress, but the finished product (if I ever finished it) wouldn't be very good. It would be bloated and incredibly indulgent.
In other words, it would be a lot like Star Citizen.
As long as adequate funding is available, Star Citizen is going to exist in some strange paradox where the funding that makes development possible also makes it impossible to complete.
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