Q1 2025 Option

We are here.

For those who have been following the doomsday letters, we have a couple of major things that have been going on in the last couple of months and it's all started to come to ahead. In October we saw the 7 day work week mandated leading up to citizencon. We saw how they wasted their marketing budget on vanity projects for citizencon and at their offices. We had the firing of the QA team and the removal of several key department heads at the company in a bid to reduce costs. As to why? The Calders are coming people and the time is now.

Here is a table I've constructed targeting ONLY the Marketing Budget using the 2022 financials released last year and the new player numbers from CCU game. What you're going to see might be concerning.

Year over year the marketing budget has always increased yet the cost being spent to gain a new player is about the same amount of money it costs to buy the basic game package.

If we look at 2017 to 2022, the median increase in the marketing budget is around 27.1%. Based on this, we can guestimate the budget of the marketing team for 2023 / 2024 and calculate the cost per new player using the known amount of new players for those years from the CCU game.

These numbers are catastrophic. If the cost to get a new player is MORE than the cost to buy the basic package, it means the marketing team better have assembled the avengers of whale hunting: Captain Ahab, the Japanese whaling research fleet, Gepopetto, Pinocchio, and rehire Ben Lesnick. It means the company is in deep shit. We don't even need to look at the costings for other departments, this says everything we need to see. The product is unsustainable. Even with the company raising record breaking money for 2023 and 2024, just because we're making money now doesn't mean this is healthy in the long term.

To stay afloat, it is running entirely on the hope that existing backers can still be suckered in either by upgrading their existing package or getting whales to fork out $975 usd for an un-killable space ship with automatic turrets, IE the Polaris which is only being killed due to ramming which is only because it isn't practical to have 10 fighters shooting at the ship for 15 mins. They are nerfing things to justify new products. They are creating event mission chains that justify owning that $975 ship to complete them. Meanwhile we keep experiencing patch releases that are delivered with ever worsening performance. Hell 4.0 over XMAS for a significant amount of players was straight up unplayable for some as long as 3 weeks.

Personally over December/January I must have done more than 20 character resets. You can only reset your character once per hour and sometimes it didn't even work. I decided it was better to just log off and play something else for a good week and a half and I'm sure others did the same.

The Calders... Thanks to the earlier work of u/Golgot100 and others analyzing the UK business filings, we know judgement is nigh as the Calders have the ability to liquidate their shares right now up until March 31st. This could spell disaster for the company as paying out investors might be the straw that breaks the camels back.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/comments/1bfaxx9/tldr_cig_have_a_publisher/

https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_refunds/comments/1bh8px9/comment/kvk0bvd/

All I can say with a certainty is shit is not looking good and I think CIG finally is seeing the writing on the wall.

It will be interesting to see how things pan out.

CIG's financials for 2023 are currently a month overdue. There's something itching in the back of my mind about this, if things are going well, why delay? Maybe I'm wrong and tomorrow the numbers come out but if the financials were delayed until after March 31st, I'd be pretty pissed if I was the Calders. How could an investor make a informed decision to not pull out their investment if the company is delaying to show the numbers.