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[–] 11027394? [S] ago 

Summary of Events in 2015

(credit to /u/mesasone[1] )

 

The short story is that CIG has been harassed by another developer for the past few months, and last week several articles were posted by The Escapist repeating/collaborating his claims of fraud and abuse. CIG is refuting these claims. A big, confusing mess has ensued. Back in June or July, another developer, Derek Smart (DS), started publicly attacking Chris Roberts/CIG/SC, claiming fraud and demanding an external audit on how backer money has been spent, threatening to start a class action law suit. He claimed to have a large number of other backers (which turned out to only be a handful) who felt they were being scammed.

 

CIG responded by refunding his and other backers pledges. Interestingly, Mr Smart never cashed the refund check and when CIG investigated further found that he gave a non-existent address. So they cancelled that check and mailed another to his lawyer at a known corrected address. Additionally, when issuing the initial refund they checked into the activity on his account and found that DS never downloaded or logged into the game, implying he would have little or no idea of the actual state of the hangar module and Arena Commander.

 

DS also claimed to have reported CIG to the FTC and that they were conducting an investigation into the conduct of Chris Roberts and CIG, but when a Freedom Of Information Act request was submitted by a backer, the FTC responded that they were taking no such action. DShas continued to sling shit and attack CIG/Chris Roberts/Sandi Gardener, with the most serious situation currently coming to a head when the website/magazine The Escapist published several pieces basically repeating DS's claims (and claiming confidential sources).

 

10/1/15 Escapist published a big article making all sorts of claims, including explicit racism and ageism in the CIG HR department, embezzlement, abusive management practices and more. It is claimed there were 9 sources who were current and former employees at CIG for this article. Some were anonymous, others confidential. The author claims that at least three of these sources were vetted over Skype where they showed a CIG issued photo ID badge and pay stub. Curiously, the employee badges are generic RF ID badges and have no photos on them, and CIG has disclosed they don't issue Employee ID Badges.

 

Prior to the Escapist piece, CIG was e-mailed a list of questions, which only covered a few of the article's claims and given 24 hours to respond. Chris did respond the questions, but they were not included in the article due to some questionable circumstances (Escapist stated that the response landed in a spam folder). CIG published Chris' response on the Star Citizen website after they failed to include it in the article, and the author then edited the article to include some of Chris' answers.

 

One or more CIG employees (specifically, Thomas Hennesey) have explicitly made themselves available for interview to the folks at TheEscapist, and over 24 hours later they have yet to contact him. The Escapist was offered the option to take a tour of one of the CIG studios sometime in the near future. Entire quotes from the sources used in the article were found posted verbatim on Glassdoor.com a few days before the article was published - some are arguing that the reviews on Glassdoor are the "sources" used by the author, but it's more likely that they were posted by the person or people who contacted The Escapist. In any case, it's important to note that the reviews on Glassdoor.com are completely anonymous and not vetted in any way - anyone can leave them, regardless of having official employment history or not.

 

There is also quite a bit of questionable activity/bias being presented by other staffers at TheEscapist, including some very biased comments back in their podcast on Friday following the publishing of the article and giving users a "badge" of their profile for reading the article.

 

The long and short of is that some questionable journalistic ethics were presented in the publishing of this piece, and now CIG are having to dedicate resources to fight back and set the record straight that would otherwise be used to prepare for the big demo for the Citizen presentation and/or BabyPU release that is slated to be released shortly.