Star Citizen is reworking its roadmap to avoid 'distractions' caused by unhappy players

pcgamer.com:

Cloud Imperium Games is making changes to Star Citizen's public development roadmap to reduce «distractions» caused by players and followers who consider long-term goals as solid promises, and kick up a fuss every time the plan changes.

The latest "Roadmap Roundup" begins with a lengthy explanation of how Star Citizen's roadmap has been presented since 2020,, when CIG introduced some updates to increase the transparency of the development process. Those changes included an in-depth Progress Tracker, which aimed to shift the focus «from delivery to progress,» the idea being that players could follow what Cloud Imperium was actually working on at any given time, rather than when the work was expected to be done.

Longer-term projections remained in the form of the Release View section of the roadmap, which enabled players to see what was planned for the future. That section was reworked in various ways, though, including the addition of tags indicating whether particular features in the works were «tentatively planned» or «committed.»

But more than a year after those changes were made, Cloud Imperium has decided that this approach was a mistake, because «It put too much attention on features that had a high probability of shifting around.»

«It has become abundantly clear to us that despite our best efforts to communicate the fluidity of development, and how features marked as 'tentative' should sincerely not be relied upon, the general focus of many of our most passionate players has continued to lead them to interpret anything on the Release View as a promise,» the studio wrote.

«We want to acknowledge that not all of you saw it that way; many took our new focus and our words to heart and understood exactly what we tried