Employee says: “€457 million” MMO Star Citizen pays so badly that employees have to move back in with their parents

The spaceship MMO Star Citizen has now received over 457 million euros in “donations” that should be used to complete the game. But now a game tester at the Texas studio is complaining about the lousy pay and treatment of employees. Especially now that the home office rules are expiring and it’s back to the office. Many of his colleagues are forced to move back in with their parents. Given the rising cost of living, they could no longer afford their own apartment in Texas with the salary.

How much money has Star Citizen made so far?

• The counter at Star Citizen is now at 482,598,383 US dollars, which is just over 457 million euros (via RSI).
• For comparison, the video game Cyberpunk 2077, which took 10 years to develop, cost less than half that at $174 million (via xfire).
• After the project’s relatively humble beginnings, revenue has exploded when Star Citizen began selling virtual spaceships. Income has again increased considerably at a high level, especially since the pandemic year 2020.

Despite all the money and years of development, there is still no clear release time window for Star Citizen. However, the project is also extremely ambitious and wants to set new standards in many respects.

According to studio boss Chris Roberts, the Covid-related shift in work to the home office has contributed to the release of planned features being delayed.

Star Citizen wants all employees to return to the office

An employee now complains about this: On the career platform LinkedIn now speaks the former employee at Star Citizen, Kiplan Case. He worked full time in Quality Assurance at Cloud Imperium Games in Austin Texas for 6 months. His job was to find bugs in the game, document them and forward them to the programmers.

According to the tester, however, he has now been fired because he refused to return to the office and “stand up for his employees”. He has been able to work from home for the past few months, but Cloud Imperium Games has now removed their Covid protection order. Even employees with vulnerable family members or people who are vulnerable themselves would only have received a short extension of the home office time and would now have to return to the office.

Case had apparently opposed this. He also complains:

Austin Texas is the 16th most expensive place to live in the US. The cost of living is rising here. Many of us have to drive more than 90 kilometers to get to the office and the prices for gas are not so nice right now.

A lot of my employees have already been evicted from their homes because of rising rents. They are forced to live with their parents again.

No one working in the fastest growing media industry, video games, should ever find themselves unable to afford a home.

Case encourages everyone to think about how their company treats them.

Much sympathy for employees and the difficult financial situation

This is how it is discussed: Case’s post drew a lot of attention on Linkedin. The abolition of the option to work from home is obviously a concern for many in the gaming industry – especially now that the prices of everyday life are rising to hostile dimensions for many people in the USA:

• There is a general lack of understanding as to why Quality Assurance would have to work in the office again. They could do their job from home, say members of the gaming industry.
• Others argue that many gaming studios have indeed switched to “remote” work.
• “Quality assurance” in particular is known to be very badly paid anyway. Therefore, the obligation to return to the office is particularly difficult for them. They only have a few compensation rules that absorb the additional burden of travel costs.

On the other hand, Linkedin makes fun of Star Citizen. In the comments of Massivley Op is it[called:

• “I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be in quality assurance at Star Citizen and keep reporting the same bugs for 10 years.”
• “So the company that’s been deferring a game for 10 years and is known for having an uber-publisher and uber-designer at the helm is also creating a toxic work environment? Who would have thought that.”

“Home office or office?” is a big topic in gaming right now

This is behind it: It’s not a problem specific to Star Citizen that moving away from “working from home” hurts especially now, when gas prices are so high. This is a problem that all companies are grappling with right now that insist on employees “coming back to the office.” And many companies are insisting on this because they have recognized that working from home is especially important in the “phase of Brainstorming” causes problems because there is no informal exchange during work breaks and there is no “short way”.

Like the side Gamesindustry.biz writes, however, many developers they spoke to were not planning a full return to the office like before the pandemic. The genie is out of the bottle. Many developers are apparently looking for partial solutions, such as 2 days of home office a week.

But the case of the tester at Star Citizen seems to be an extreme case: Because the situation at Star Citizen is aggravated by the fact that the cost of living in the Austin region has exploded due to real estate speculation.

Traditionally, “QA” testers are also at the bottom of the food chain in the video game industry, where they are generally not paid that much because they expect the employees to be enthusiastic about “video games”.

We are dealing with the effects of the pandemic on Star Citizen here on MeinMMO:

Star Citizen brings new updates noticeably slower, but collects more and more players and money