Mirificus posted:

thatguy posted:

How did Chris take award-winning animators and an award-winning actor and produce this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EC4WHPxnrk&t=45s

ZenMaster posted:

Thoatse posted:

Abuminable posted:

Veni Vidi Ameche! posted:

You're the only one who appreciates my genius.

Toops posted:

Honestly, I'm fuckin' proud of you, Chris. You aimed for the stars, missed horribly, and landed in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Let this be a lesson to you all. Got an idea? Just loving do it. Find a way. Make it work. Always do, even if you're a complete gently caress up. The universe loves action, it needs juice, and as long as you just show up and try, you win. Get off the loving internet. Stop watching the loving TV. Don't play video games, they're all just poo poo designed to keep you off the playing field. And NEVER let that nagging fuckster in the back of your mind tell you you're gonna fail.

Chris Roberts wins at life. He laughs all the way to the mobile banking app on his phone to check his auto-regenerating bank account balance. Scummy? Oh what the gently caress ever. He played by the written rules and that's all that matters. Bad person? I don't know him, but he pays for his wife's movie dreams and gives all his friends jobs, and that's a hell of a lot more than most of us. Immoral? Didn't know you were runing the books on that one. And I'll tell you what. It's immoral to let people as stupid as Star Citizens, with their loving cringecore stunted bullshit fantasies, keep their money. Who the gently caress would wanna make a game for that lot of losers anyway?

gently caress em. gently caress you. And gently caress me.

Chris Roberts is a genius, and he deserves to enjoy his Porches, because god dammit, at least he got up off his rear end and tried.

Abuminable posted:

Now SC is double the (door) pleasure.

https://twitter.com/SandiGardiner/status/927726286482448384

Abuminable posted:

Now SC is double the (door) pleasure.

https://twitter.com/SandiGardiner/status/927726286482448384

mdxi posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzwlhHdhOcc

Abuminable posted:

https://twitter.com/SandiGardiner/status/927726286482448384

Abuminable posted:

Now SC is double the (door) pleasure.

https://twitter.com/SandiGardiner/status/927726286482448384

Toops posted:

I am loving FULLY TORQUED

Abuminable posted:

Now SC is double the (door) pleasure.

https://twitter.com/SandiGardiner/status/927726286482448384

ManofManyAliases posted:

What triggered your meltdown today? Just curious.

Abuminable posted:

https://twitter.com/SandiGardiner/status/927726286482448384

Tokamak posted:

The Agent only continues to post rumours to work over the /r/ds marks. They've been bullshit forever but people keep treating them like a legit source, so why stop?

Combat Theory posted:

Carefull where all that Torque could end up at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ln3VuvQBWg&t=90s

Toops posted:

Honestly, I'm fuckin' proud of you, Chris. You aimed for the stars, missed horribly, and landed in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Let this be a lesson to you all. Got an idea? Just loving do it. Find a way. Make it work. Always do, even if you're a complete gently caress up. The universe loves action, it needs juice, and as long as you just show up and try, you win. Get off the loving internet. Stop watching the loving TV. Don't play video games, they're all just poo poo designed to keep you off the playing field. And NEVER let that nagging fuckster in the back of your mind tell you you're gonna fail.

Chris Roberts wins at life. He laughs all the way to the mobile banking app on his phone to check his auto-regenerating bank account balance. Scummy? Oh what the gently caress ever. He played by the written rules and that's all that matters. Bad person? I don't know him, but he pays for his wife's movie dreams and gives all his friends jobs, and that's a hell of a lot more than most of us. Immoral? Didn't know you were runing the books on that one. And I'll tell you what. It's immoral to let people as stupid as Star Citizens, with their loving cringecore stunted bullshit fantasies, keep their money. Who the gently caress would wanna make a game for that lot of losers anyway?

gently caress em. gently caress you. And gently caress me.

Chris Roberts is a genius, and he deserves to enjoy his Porches, because god dammit, at least he got up off his rear end and tried.

Roflan posted:

If that's really what it were, they wouldn't have people working the mines 12 hours a day/70 hours a week for years to keep up appearances-- too wasteful of company money that's unrightfully yours. I'm pretty sure Crobber an, earnest, lucky fool. Who, if he had any competition or oversight, would be a fall guy or scapegoat... And if Sandy or Ortwin have the slightest foresight, may well still be.

TheAgent posted:

I mean I just tend to post whatever poo poo I heard/read, and a lot of it evaporated

but some of it has been spot on, especially the January leak about 3.0 in 2018 (the same guy who said the scope of the game has decreased)

derek don't even tweet me out no more, so the r/ds guys don't even care about me

shrach posted:

Today's accounting error/mistake is the final one. It builds on the ones that were previously highlighted but this is actually more a series of deliberate decisions. I'm struggling to find a generously innocuous word that conveys making deliberate decisions that are possibly not correct.

4.) Prior year adjustments.

At some point a set of accounts will be filed that are incorrect. Humans can make mistakes. I'll give an example. Say in 2015 a client paid you in cash for £1000 and you accidentally lost the sales receipt and accidentally banked the money in your personal bank account instead of the company bank account. Later on in 2016, the client asks for a receipt and this helps you remember this event. You're now faced with three options.
(i) You could file an amended set of accounts for 2015 that makes corrections. This seems intuitive and I'm sure textbooks and "experts" online will tell you this is the right thing to do. No one ever files amended accounts. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why, but it doesn't happen.
(ii) You can "do nothing". This doesn't really mean you do nothing. It means when you file the 2016 accounts, you add on those £1000 sales that were really in 2015 and you pay the company back the cash from your personal account. So now the company is declaring that missing income, albeit in the wrong period.
(iii) You make a prior year adjustment to the 2015 figures in the comparative when you compile the 2016 accounts. You disclose all of these items and you can file an amended tax return, without adjusting the 2015 accounts themselves.

The UK CIG group were faced with such a situation. Here is the disclosure in the Foundry 42 Ltd accounts that explains the decision:



So the original turnover amount was £15,169,773 and it was adjusted to be £12,737,713. A reduction in turnover of £2,432,060. This means they also had to add £2,432,060 to the balance sheet, as a liability. Since they now owed Cloud Imperium Games UK Ltd that amount. You can see they did all this correct (since they were owed £83,979 separately, this is netted off against this amount due to CIG UK).




So far this is all correct from an accounting angle. However, the UK group of companies are all irrevocably linked. Because of the way the accounts were filed, we have access to the individual filings for 2015 but not the group accounts. In 2016 we have the accounts for Foundry 42, RSI and the group accounts (but not the individual accounts for the CIG company). We can pretty much recreate the missing sets of accounts.

Here is a summary of the 2015 accounts, as they were originally filed. It should be noted that the linked green items, do not appear in the group accounts. These inter-company transactions cancel each other.



Here is an extract from the 2016 consolidated group accounts. Note the profit for the year 2015 shown as £1,088,498.



So the group profit in my summary differs from the 2015 group profit that is disclosed in the 2016 accounts by £2,432,060. Now we know what that is, it's that prior year adjustment. But nowhere in the 2016 group accounts is any prior-year adjustment disclosed. What is disclosed is that the CIG company profit was the same as filed in 2015 at £265,299 profit.



So now we have a big problem. How can we adjust the summary of the 2015 accounts to correct for this prior-year adjustment. Remember all the linked boxes in my summary that can't be changed individually? If we are reducing Foundry 42s turnover figure by £2,432,060 we also have to reduce CIGs cost of sales by £2,432,060 since that is where the turnover came from. We know that CIG (the company) profit stayed the same though, so we know we have to reduce CIGs turnover, also by £2,432,060. So now we also need to reduce RSIs cost of sales by £2,432,060. All good so far. We know that that RSIs profit remains zero also, because we know the groups profit so we also have to reduce their turnover by £2,432,060 however this goes outside the UK group because this is a refund to Roberts Space Industries Corporation, in the USA. So this is going to be an amount in dollars, so it may not match exactly and we have to rely on the accountants to get this right.

We arrive at a new summary, something like this. Bolded numbers are the figures that have been adjusted:



For some reason, they changed the cost of sales in RSI by adding £239,986 to the costs. I've noted it down as a suspense amount because we have no idea why they did this. So to maintain a zero profit, we need to counter this by adding £239,986 to their revenue. This seems like a leap of faith but our summary now matches the group accounts exactly.

So now the group accounts match our summary there are some implications to this. The UK group derives all its income from RSI International Ltd, which derives all its income from the USA company RSI Corporation. Now we can solve why the 2015 turnover figures don't match and the 2016 ones do match. Note the figure does match our summary for RSI, that we have recreated with our own turnover figure by deduction from the group accounts.



We sort of have to now conclude that there must be two different sets of RSI accounts for them to get this "correct" in the group accounts. The RSI accounts that were filed were never corrected for any prior-year adjustment and yet, there must exist a set of RSI accounts that have been corrected in order to get a set of group accounts that is accurate.

The implications here are decidedly tricky. Back in 2015 the US companies would have presumably filed accounts and tax returns to US authories that claimed a dollar amount of expenses equal to £15.3m. Any audits done at this time, would have confirmation letters and invoices for these amounts. As far as audit trails for this £2.4m refund that would have gone back to the United States, well I hope I have demonstrated that this trail is really unclear for anyone that might investigate it. If it were accidentally paid to the wrong entity and then never declared, there would not be any trail.

So the corrections were handled appropriately in the Foundry 42 Ltd accounts. Adjustments were made and disclosures for those adjustments. They used option (iii) from my opening statement. The CIG accounts are slightly trickier, since we have the company accounts for 2015 and the group accounts for 2016 but we can safely say that some adjustments were made but absolutely no disclosures at all. That is sort of an incorrectly implented option (iii) from my opening statement. The RSI accounts have not had any adjustments made and therefore no disclosures and we have some pretty firm suspicions that there may in fact be two different sets of RSI accounts and they are certainly aware that the filed RSI accounts do not match the RSI accounts used for the consolidation of the group accounts that were filed. So it turns out that there was a hidden fourth option that you will not find in any text books and Chris Roberts has developed new solutions to problems and a way to make money apparently disappear.

I can only imagine the state of the dozen or so American companies that are open to zero public scrutiny.

Unrelated hypothetical paragraph
Imagine your company is sitting on £2.4m in the bank that it should not have, that should be refunded to another company in another country. However, in that country, that company does not know it's due any money from years ago. It was all audited and balances confirmed at that time and it's not asking or expecting any money. However, this company with the money in the bank has to get rid of it to make its books balance, it sure should go to the right place and I'm sure anyone would make certain that the right people get this £2.4m.

So as a disclaimer I should stress that I am in no way suggesting that anything unlawful was actually done here. I guess this highlights the "perils" of having multiple shell companies with regard to nice clean audit trails.