He followed that success by starting his own studio, Digital Anvil, with Microsoft as an investor. Roberts first gained fame with his early 1990s hit Wing Commander, a space combat series that grossed over $400 million and featured Hollywood stars like Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell. But in the world of consoles and controllers, he is Keith Richards: an aging rock star who can still get fans to reach into their pockets. If you don’t play video games, you probably have never heard of Roberts. Many high-profile crowdfunded projects, like the Pebble smartwatch ($43.4 million raised) and the Ouya video game console ($8.6 million), have failed miserably. Federal bureaucrats and state lawyers have intervened only in a few egregious situations where there was little effort to make good and a lot of the money was pocketed by the promoters. Creatives are in charge here, not profit-driven bean counters or deadline-enforcing suits. The heedless waste is fueled by easy money raised through crowdfunding, a Wild West territory nearly free of regulators and rules. This is not fraud-Roberts really is working on a game-but it is incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale.
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