Star Citizen Debacle Reportedly Continues with Mandated Crunch

A new report claims that Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games is mandating its developers work seven days a week in order to meet their deadlines for an upcoming convention.

According to Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson, a staff email was sent by Cloud Imperium management earlier this week, and in that email, the studio says that developers need to “double down over the next 18 days” in order to finalize an upcoming Star Citizen patch and a demo for shooter Squadron 42.

The email apparently continues by saying that “for the next two weekends, [Cloud Imperium] will be mandating extra time for all those working on deliverables for [Citizencon]”.

The mandate includes necessitated office working on the Fridays of October 4th and October 11th, which are, according to Henderson’s report, usually times when the studio would be working from home.

Additionally, Cloud Imperium will require workers to be in the office on the weekends of October 5th and October 12th for both Saturday and Sunday. Staff will supposedly receive time off in lieu for these weekends, which they can then use at a later time.

According to Insider Gaming’s report, this isn’t the first time Cloud Imperium has made unreasonable demands of its employees in recent months, either; staff were apparently also told they would only receive Squadron 42-related time off in lieu when the game ships, and only if they’re still with the studio when it does.

Following the initial email, Cloud Imperium apparently sent another to staff, offering them the day off on Monday, October 21st to “give a little break for everyone to rest after our long Citizencon weekend”.

Star Citizen is an ambitious space sim that’s been in development since 2010. It was first Kickstarted back in 2012, and its initial campaign raised more than $2 million.

Since then, the game has gone on to amass more than $700 million in crowdfunding, but despite that staggering total and the length of time since it began development, there’s still no Star Citizen 1.0 release date.

Cloud Imperium has promised to reveal a roadmap to release at some point this year, but at time of writing, that roadmap has yet to materialize.

What definitely did materialize, though, were a tribunal’s findings earlier this year that Cloud Imperium discriminated against a disabled employee by mandating a return to the office with no provision for said employee’s disability.

We’ll keep you posted on Star Citizen and bring you more as soon as we get it. Stay tuned.