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What would you like the Star Citizen community to understand and appreciate about the role of tools in making video games?

TL;DRSean Tracy wants the community to appreciate that tool developers work without middleware and often take blame for problems that actually lie elsewhere, though the job is rewarding.

Sean TracyManaging Director of Technical Operations

Imagine working for these guys, these developers, right? You meet them all the time. No, the biggest thing I want them to appreciate is that there are guys that are working for their favorite developers to do that job. We don't have middleware. It's the thing I'm really so proud of. Yes, we started out of Lumberyard. Yes, we started out of CryEngine. I've had a whole history with that. But we have become something so unique and so big that sometimes we're so busy on what we're doing, we look up, and we'll even do some competitive analysis. I'll go into Unreal, I'll go into Unity, I'll look at other games, projects or whatever, and realize how at the top of the game we are. We are progressing amazingly, and those tools people are part of the reason why. There are huge areas of this game that aren't getting the tooling they need, because I'm sure developers are watching this going, my tool's total garbage, right? Because I hear that stuff all the time too, every day. But it really depends on the area. It really depends on the process they're in. And it really depends on what they're working on. One of the things I like to say a lot of the time is that people like to complain about editor stability, is what I hear a lot. I'm like, hey, do you play the client? They're like, no, I'm always running in the editor. I'm like, well, listen, the client's running in the editor. So the editor is no more stable than the game. So please make the game stable and that editor gets more stable. It's things like that. It's just the reality of the work that we do that the tool that it comes into gets the blame. CopyBuild, the one I talked about at the onset. Exact same thing: CopyBuild's slow today, CopyBuild's not working, CopyBuild this, CopyBuild that, and in the end, it's never CopyBuild. It's always a network problem, build store issue, patcher bug. So, honestly, it's a tough job to take that kind of stuff, but it's also incredibly rewarding, because I was just doing some work today, and I even said to the guy, just tell me it works, I need that dopamine hit. And realizing that just satisfying sometimes the request or the need of a developer honestly gives me a sense of pride and joy and reward. So it's a great job to have, but it also can be tough on the same token.

Star Citizen Live›Q&A Tech Talk w/ Sean Tracy·
Published on this date.5 Mar 2026