I genuinely believe Chris Roberts does it to make the game he always dreamed of. That game happens to have an incredible amount of feature creep. He is not the person you want to hand an infinite amount of money to make a project without supervision or externally imposed deadlines.
For everyone else it's a passion or an unusually steady job. Many studios have layoffs as they finish games, but with Star Citizen never getting finished their jobs are pretty secure.
I'm really curious what the single player narrative will be like. Some of the actors (e.g. Gary Oldman) from the original mocap sessions (from ~2014 I think) have passed away so if they want to use their performances they're pretty much locked in to the script they had back then. Or maybe AI can bail them out now?
Edit: Oops, how embarrassing. Gary Oldman is not, in fact, dead. Not sure who I was thinking of.
All the money shenanigans aside, it's interesting watching technology catching up with it. It's starting to look pretty dated for a game that hasn't released yet.
I spent $30 on it a decade ago, got what felt like a couple cool tech demos and minigames for it. Not really worse value for money than getting two movie tickets, and maybe in one or two decades there will even be a completed game I can play
To be fair to Valve, all the evidence I've seen so far as indicated that Valve hasn't been actively developing HL3 for several years (https://www.ign.com/articles/half-life-3-left-4-dead-3-detai... claims it was canceled by 2014), whereas Duke Nukem Forever and Star Citizen have been in active development for well over a decade.
But Half-life is IMO one of the top gaming franchises. And after seeing Fallout adaptation, I think Half-life TV series would also be successful if properly made.
When this game started accepting donations, it was 2012. Mass Effect 3 was released in March of that year. Mass Effect 2 was released just two years previous, in 2010, and the first game in the series was released in late 2007. Less than four and a half years from start to finish.
I know that development cycles have been growing quite a lot longer, but this is ridiculous...
Aside, does $700M make this the most expensive (or, rather, well-funded) video game of all time?
That's... surprising. But it kinda goes to the whole "the stuff that people really care about on social media is really only part of the picture" thing.
I wrote it off when a bunch of Freelancer fans were like "hey, is this going to have third-person ship combat and manual flying through asteroids?" and Roberts said "Yeah!" and then after he got their money he was like "Never mind, that will cost me money from the sim addicts, so we're not doing that."
Yeah, I was basically hoping for Freelancer 2. Galaxy on Fire and then Everspace 2 mostly scratched that itch, but I still think Freelancer did some things better.
It's the cruising and exploration. Flying across giant ice clouds that span half a solar system in Tau-37, hopping among the asteroids of Omega-11 as you hide from the deadly radiation, and all the rest.
That is a very pointless comparison. Mass Effect is a plot-driven theme-park, while Star Citizen is a World-Simulation. Not quite the same type of software. Minecraft or Microsoft Flight Simulator are probably the better comparison.
> Aside, does $700M make this the most expensive (or, rather, well-funded) video game of all time?
World of Warcraft and similar long-running service-games could be in the same range, but it's again a different type, and it's usually not known how much money went into their development.
Nah, think about it. You're looking at about two years between games. Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each, easy. And each game in the series utilized different systems, art assets, and mechanics. Testing/QC alone must have been pretty arduous!
And they did all of that to AAA standards, across multiple platforms.
Say what you will about Bioware botching the ending, they didn't leave their customers hanging. They worked quick. I guess that when customers pay for finished products, that incentivizes a studio to finish the job; when customers pay for pre-release trinkets, and pay dearly, a studio may suffer from a perverse incentive problem.
As for Minecraft, version 0.0.1 Alpha was released in May 2009, and Minecraft 1.0.0 was released in Nov 2011. Not much more than two years. And imagine how small their budget and team must have been compared to Star Citizen's $700M warchest.
> Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each, easy.
This isn't really the way to measure the work required to build a product. A series of books that takes 80 hours to read doesn't cost twice to make as much as Mass Effect.
Complexity and uncertainty is a huge factor.
Mass Effect was a game principally composed of components that everyone involved has built many times before, and where most of the difficult problems are already solved. It's a complex project by some standards, but it pales in comparison to even what is already playable in Star Citizen.
A single feature of "being a person who walks into a ship, sits in a pilot seat, flies up into space, lands on a space station, gets out of ship and into the station, without clumsy transition screens in which you just magically become the ship" is a promise that many games (including EvE, Elite Dangerous) have promised and spent money trying to build for many years, and eventually given up on. Only Star Citizen has actually managed to deliver on this.
It's certainly the case that Star Citizen has lots of very annoying bugs, and doesn't have nearly the number of game loops it wants to have, even after this level of spend. However, it's also very intuitive to me that if someone is solving a novel engineering problem that the other leading experts have attempted to solve and failed at great expense, that this project that actually has managed to get further than anyone else is probably not going to be able to be cheap.
> Mass Effect was a game principally composed of components that everyone involved has built many times before, and where most of the difficult problems are already solved.
This is emphatically not the case. In its time, Mass Effect was considered very innovative -- one of the first "cinematic" game experiences, if not the first. (e.g., https://www.wired.com/2007/07/preview-mass-ef/ )
They did a lot of stuff with in-game cinematography and character face/voice acting that seemed extremely advanced at the time. Don't forget we were just a few years removed from 2D RPGs.
> A single feature of "being a person who walks into a ship, sits in a pilot seat, flies up into space, lands on a space station, gets out of ship and into the station, without clumsy transition screens in which you just magically become the ship" is a promise that many games (including EvE, Elite Dangerous) have promised and spent money trying to build for many years, and eventually given up on. Only Star Citizen has actually managed to deliver on this.
You're totally right that it was considered innovative - I was speaking mostly comparatively. Mass Effect did solve new and interesting problems, but my view is that the scale and inherent risk in those problems were on a different level. For example, Mass Effect released at the same time as Uncharted, which (though a shorter game) arguably outdid Mass Effect in terms of "cinematic" feel, quality of animation, etc. The big industry players trying their hand at the problem were able to meet them head on and solve them. Whereas when we look at the problems Star Citizen is trying to solve, several big players in the field have made substantial investments trying to solve them, but most have given up, and only CIG has actually managed to make substantial progress so far.
I agree with your point on how slow star citizen development is going, if it's even going anywhere at all
But,
> they [bioware] did all of that to AAA standards
What do you mean by 'AAA standards'? You seem to imply it as a good thing but I can only think of it as a bad thing. AAA originally defines a budget not a standard, but when I think of what AAA has become, to me it means microtransactions, incredibly bloated games (100gb?), exclusivity, always-online, DRM, unnecessary accounts, and pretty much missing the point on that games are supposed to be fun.
A positive for 'AAA standards' must be accessibility features & internationalization, but that's all that comes to mind.
I've realized with video games being creative efforts, turning it into office work sucks all the fun out and lets 1-person creations (such as minecraft) run circles around businesses.
Anyway, neither applies to star citizen, which seems to be selling a dream rather than a product, and if it ever got to product stage the reality that people blew their money would set in.
> Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each
40 Hours is not much, especially for the complete run, which usually contains grind and secrets. Going by that logic, Stardew Valley would be a better game, with 200 hours of content. Star Citizen should be even massivly better game, with 300 to 1950 Hours of content. Playtime is a useless metric if you ignore quality, complexity and game-type.
> And each game in the series utilized different systems, art assets, and mechanics. Testing/QC alone must have been pretty arduous!
You say it, as if Star Citizen isn't doing the same, and more.
> And they did all of that to AAA standards, across multiple platforms.
Just as a reminder, Mass Effect is using a Unreal Engine, meaning the vast work is done from someone else. Assets are dead content and a solved problem, they run on whatever platform your engine is working on. But as another Metric, Mass Effect 1-3 had still 9-10 Years of development-time, not including remakes and ports. Because it seems you forgot that Mass Effect 1 had also some years of development before its release, which was 3-4 years. That the other games then could release so fast is no surprise, they build on each other and mostly add dead assets.
> Say what you will about Bioware botching the ending, they didn't leave their customers hanging.
Nobody is saying that Bioware is a bad Company, or that Mass Effect wasn't a good and innovative game. But it's a different game and situation from Star Citizen, and it's company. Bioware did only a little bit of innovation, mostly transferring solved problems from movie-creators to gaming. The rest is just a regular story-game, using the regular old tools and experience they had. Star Citizen on the other side is a constant research, they build a high level simulation, went through several engines and fixed problems in areas which Mass Effect has not even touched upon. This is just not the same.
> As for Minecraft, version 0.0.1 Alpha was released in May 2009, and Minecraft 1.0.0 was released in Nov 2011.
Minecraft wasn't done with 1.0. It's constantly being improved in the last 15 years. This is the point where Minecraft and Star Citizen are the same, the constant research for more and better mechanics. This is very different from adding just dead asset-content.
If there there was too much of a good thing, this project seems to be a poster child for why you shouldn't get over-funded. Maybe one day it'll be a thing, until then o7
All the incentives are aligned against actually releasing something. As long as it's in "alpha" all the backers can dream of what might be. As soon as you release it, you have to face the cold reality of what the game is.
Disclosure: I bought a ~$75 supporter pack back in 2012.
Star Citizen is a financial success as is, everyone making it is getting paid. Would they really make more money by releasing it?
There is a phenomenon in the start-up world where wildly pre-revenue fast growing startups are overvalued until they decide they want to make money and then they are judged on their profitability, which often kills their valuation.
At this point it's nostalgia as a service where you pay for feels and to be a ~beta~ alpha tester of a game-like sim.
Ships are 'sold' to individuals before they've ever integrated those models into the game. Doubtful there is any way it can be made a balanced and fun MP experience without some major walking back.
It's the same dynamic as crypto games. It's the hype that people are buying into, not the actual lame/incomplete/broken gameplay underneath it. The video game is just a MacGuffin in a findom ARG.
People say this a lot, but why wouldn't they? It's not like live service games struggle from a weak business model.
On top of that, each year CIG make money, it happens because more and more stuff becomes playable in the game. If they stopped developing new features or content, they'd stop making money. And since they release new patches frequently (or at least, several times a year), when (if they ever) "finish" the game feels less important - it's already a fun enough experience with enough content that many players enthusiastic about the space (whether you came from EvE, ED, NMS or somewhere else) can spend enough hours in it regularly for it to be more than worthwhile.
Putting all the cash drama aside, it's kinda wild seeing tech finally catch up to it. Even though it hasn't dropped release yet, it's already starting to look like old news.
Ironically with inflation these past few years and enormous AAA flops (halo infinite reportedly cost 500mil), this doesn't even seem like all that much, especially since there's loads of content currently released as we type.
Doesn't seem like that much? It must be one of the most expensive games ever developed. Can you name any games that cost more than this one, except for the unreleased GTA 6?
According to Wikipedia[1], only Genshin Impact is known to be more expensive. But the list is of course lacking. Long-running service like most MMOs are missing from the list.
would be very interesting if they followed the Unreal -> Unreal Engine playbook and eventually productized some amazing game engine (not making a comment on whether their stuff is likely to be good or not)
Can they do that? I thought their engine was built around CryEngine. At one point I think there was a Lumberyard[1] (also CryEngine) transition. Would they be able to sell a modified version of someone else's engine?
I think when CryTek died they gobbled up most/a lot of their engine engineering team and some crazy licensing. The Amazon Lumberyard "transition" seemed more like corporate partnership marketing to me considering how they've basically rewritten most CryEngine modules multiple times over by now.
IIRC at one point CryTek tried suing StarCitizen for some kind of violation of their license (something about releasing 2 games - StarCitizen and Squadron 54 - instead of one I think). There were some rumours that the Lumberyard thing was an attempt to get a more favourable license for basically the same engine.
There's so much history with this project it's hard to remember it all.
All of the nonsense around the game engine is because they decided to build a galaxy scale MMO on top of a game engine who's entire pitch is "The single player shooter you make will look cutting edge. What, multiplayer? Who the hell wants that?"
I'd love to know their finances in greater depth. They can't have burned through $700 million, can they? If they haven't, how are they storing this money? Is it just in a savings account? Bonds? Stocks?
By the latest count they have ~1300 employees. That's a lot of salaries.
They recently released financials up to 2022. Back then they had 860 employees, spent $130 million in a year and earned about the same from pledges, subscriptions, etc. It looks like they have some cash on hand but mostly always just spent what they received rather than building large reserves. Which implies they have indeed now burned though just shy of $700 million in 12 years.
3.23 is smooth, performance is great, a lot of gameplay loops are in. 4.0 is around the corner. It's disappointing that they split the development between Squadron 42 (single player) and Star Citizen, but now that SQ42 is feature complete, the pace at which Star Citizen is being developed has been very nice. A lot of the features from SQ42 is being released/polished for the MMO and has already seen many features ported/implemented.
4.0 is going to be by end of year which will have server meshing, at which point, all of the difficult tech behind the scenes will be finished.
I think CIG is going to license the engine once this is completed.
Mining lasers still don't line up with crosshairs, and rock charge level doesn't even update while charging up a rock to break, so you can't even do the main grind gameplay loop. Your ship will randomly refuse to take off. The first door to let you out of the hab room you spawn in doesn't even work sometimes. NPCs still stand on top of chairs. The "game" is just as broken as it was years ago, if not more broken. It's nothing short of space-themed masochism to try to "play" the "game".
Even if Star Citizen released tomorrow, exactly as Chris Roberts envisioned, everything was flawless, how many players could they realistically attract? It feels like most people who will ever want to play Star Citizen has played it. I'm worried what's left for Star Citizen is to keep monetizing their existing playerbase, not that their current playerbase is going to run dry of funds anytime soon.
When it first was announced, I thought "that sounds super neat, but I'm a broke college student so I'll wait and see".
12 years of headlines like this later, I've given them no money. But I would still absolutely pay for a game like the originally-described Star Citizen.
People are having fun, so what? I'll never understand the hateboner against it. For Tesla it's at least explainable: They hate Elon. But Star Citizen people just hate for the sake of it. Strange
Somehow I have literally never heard of this game. Does anybody here happen to have a video saved that offers one of those excellent “here’s why newcomers might fall in love with this game” videos that YouTubers sometimes put together?
You might have made the mistake of actually expecting something for that $20.
In my mind, giving money for a game (or any sort of kick-started concept) is literally a donation. And if you happen to get anything out of it at the end, even better.
Granted, the developer also told you that your $20 would come to mean something. So that's on the borderline of being fraudulent (though, innocent because it was their intention to fulfill).
The $20 has totally tainted your view of the product. So that's the bad part in all this, that you would not give another $20 to another fledgling video game kickstart.
Critics of this game have moved the goal posts so many times they are out of the stadium. Face it - Star Citizen exists. People play it, enjoy it, and pay for it. The devs are trying to make something crazy and huge. It is entirely on brand with Chris Roberts’s history. He made Wing Commander which only ran on computers that nobody could afford at the time.
Yes, they pulled a lot of fake it till you make it, but what they’ve done is undeniably grand and impressive, no matter how buggy it still is.
When elite dangerous was new I asked a friend if they wanted to join me in playing it.
They said no, they were waiting for star citizen (why either-or?)
Anyway, that was 2 US presidents ago. Still waiting huh?
88 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadthe compensation required to keep the boat from rocking must be staggering
For everyone else it's a passion or an unusually steady job. Many studios have layoffs as they finish games, but with Star Citizen never getting finished their jobs are pretty secure.
Edit: Oops, how embarrassing. Gary Oldman is not, in fact, dead. Not sure who I was thinking of.
Not that I'm going to bat for Star Citizen.
When this game started accepting donations, it was 2012. Mass Effect 3 was released in March of that year. Mass Effect 2 was released just two years previous, in 2010, and the first game in the series was released in late 2007. Less than four and a half years from start to finish.
I know that development cycles have been growing quite a lot longer, but this is ridiculous...
Aside, does $700M make this the most expensive (or, rather, well-funded) video game of all time?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
"Marketing: $500m; Total: $500m"
Yeah, that sounds about right.
This is absolutely wild.
> Aside, does $700M make this the most expensive (or, rather, well-funded) video game of all time?
World of Warcraft and similar long-running service-games could be in the same range, but it's again a different type, and it's usually not known how much money went into their development.
And they did all of that to AAA standards, across multiple platforms.
Say what you will about Bioware botching the ending, they didn't leave their customers hanging. They worked quick. I guess that when customers pay for finished products, that incentivizes a studio to finish the job; when customers pay for pre-release trinkets, and pay dearly, a studio may suffer from a perverse incentive problem.
As for Minecraft, version 0.0.1 Alpha was released in May 2009, and Minecraft 1.0.0 was released in Nov 2011. Not much more than two years. And imagine how small their budget and team must have been compared to Star Citizen's $700M warchest.
This isn't really the way to measure the work required to build a product. A series of books that takes 80 hours to read doesn't cost twice to make as much as Mass Effect. Complexity and uncertainty is a huge factor. Mass Effect was a game principally composed of components that everyone involved has built many times before, and where most of the difficult problems are already solved. It's a complex project by some standards, but it pales in comparison to even what is already playable in Star Citizen.
A single feature of "being a person who walks into a ship, sits in a pilot seat, flies up into space, lands on a space station, gets out of ship and into the station, without clumsy transition screens in which you just magically become the ship" is a promise that many games (including EvE, Elite Dangerous) have promised and spent money trying to build for many years, and eventually given up on. Only Star Citizen has actually managed to deliver on this.
It's certainly the case that Star Citizen has lots of very annoying bugs, and doesn't have nearly the number of game loops it wants to have, even after this level of spend. However, it's also very intuitive to me that if someone is solving a novel engineering problem that the other leading experts have attempted to solve and failed at great expense, that this project that actually has managed to get further than anyone else is probably not going to be able to be cheap.
This is emphatically not the case. In its time, Mass Effect was considered very innovative -- one of the first "cinematic" game experiences, if not the first. (e.g., https://www.wired.com/2007/07/preview-mass-ef/ )
They did a lot of stuff with in-game cinematography and character face/voice acting that seemed extremely advanced at the time. Don't forget we were just a few years removed from 2D RPGs.
> A single feature of "being a person who walks into a ship, sits in a pilot seat, flies up into space, lands on a space station, gets out of ship and into the station, without clumsy transition screens in which you just magically become the ship" is a promise that many games (including EvE, Elite Dangerous) have promised and spent money trying to build for many years, and eventually given up on. Only Star Citizen has actually managed to deliver on this.
Okay, this is interesting.
But,
> they [bioware] did all of that to AAA standards
What do you mean by 'AAA standards'? You seem to imply it as a good thing but I can only think of it as a bad thing. AAA originally defines a budget not a standard, but when I think of what AAA has become, to me it means microtransactions, incredibly bloated games (100gb?), exclusivity, always-online, DRM, unnecessary accounts, and pretty much missing the point on that games are supposed to be fun.
A positive for 'AAA standards' must be accessibility features & internationalization, but that's all that comes to mind.
I've realized with video games being creative efforts, turning it into office work sucks all the fun out and lets 1-person creations (such as minecraft) run circles around businesses.
Anyway, neither applies to star citizen, which seems to be selling a dream rather than a product, and if it ever got to product stage the reality that people blew their money would set in.
40 Hours is not much, especially for the complete run, which usually contains grind and secrets. Going by that logic, Stardew Valley would be a better game, with 200 hours of content. Star Citizen should be even massivly better game, with 300 to 1950 Hours of content. Playtime is a useless metric if you ignore quality, complexity and game-type.
> And each game in the series utilized different systems, art assets, and mechanics. Testing/QC alone must have been pretty arduous!
You say it, as if Star Citizen isn't doing the same, and more.
> And they did all of that to AAA standards, across multiple platforms.
Just as a reminder, Mass Effect is using a Unreal Engine, meaning the vast work is done from someone else. Assets are dead content and a solved problem, they run on whatever platform your engine is working on. But as another Metric, Mass Effect 1-3 had still 9-10 Years of development-time, not including remakes and ports. Because it seems you forgot that Mass Effect 1 had also some years of development before its release, which was 3-4 years. That the other games then could release so fast is no surprise, they build on each other and mostly add dead assets.
> Say what you will about Bioware botching the ending, they didn't leave their customers hanging.
Nobody is saying that Bioware is a bad Company, or that Mass Effect wasn't a good and innovative game. But it's a different game and situation from Star Citizen, and it's company. Bioware did only a little bit of innovation, mostly transferring solved problems from movie-creators to gaming. The rest is just a regular story-game, using the regular old tools and experience they had. Star Citizen on the other side is a constant research, they build a high level simulation, went through several engines and fixed problems in areas which Mass Effect has not even touched upon. This is just not the same.
> As for Minecraft, version 0.0.1 Alpha was released in May 2009, and Minecraft 1.0.0 was released in Nov 2011.
Minecraft wasn't done with 1.0. It's constantly being improved in the last 15 years. This is the point where Minecraft and Star Citizen are the same, the constant research for more and better mechanics. This is very different from adding just dead asset-content.
Disclosure: I bought a ~$75 supporter pack back in 2012.
There is a phenomenon in the start-up world where wildly pre-revenue fast growing startups are overvalued until they decide they want to make money and then they are judged on their profitability, which often kills their valuation.
Ships are 'sold' to individuals before they've ever integrated those models into the game. Doubtful there is any way it can be made a balanced and fun MP experience without some major walking back.
On top of that, each year CIG make money, it happens because more and more stuff becomes playable in the game. If they stopped developing new features or content, they'd stop making money. And since they release new patches frequently (or at least, several times a year), when (if they ever) "finish" the game feels less important - it's already a fun enough experience with enough content that many players enthusiastic about the space (whether you came from EvE, ED, NMS or somewhere else) can spend enough hours in it regularly for it to be more than worthwhile.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Lumberyard
There's so much history with this project it's hard to remember it all.
They recently released financials up to 2022. Back then they had 860 employees, spent $130 million in a year and earned about the same from pledges, subscriptions, etc. It looks like they have some cash on hand but mostly always just spent what they received rather than building large reserves. Which implies they have indeed now burned though just shy of $700 million in 12 years.
https://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/corporate/cloud-imperium...
Which means a lot of torched developer-hours.
4.0 is going to be by end of year which will have server meshing, at which point, all of the difficult tech behind the scenes will be finished.
I think CIG is going to license the engine once this is completed.
A proper Star Citizen conversation would be:
When it first was announced, I thought "that sounds super neat, but I'm a broke college student so I'll wait and see".
12 years of headlines like this later, I've given them no money. But I would still absolutely pay for a game like the originally-described Star Citizen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31v7sSGfTm8
I've felt scammed for almost a decade now.
But to be fair, I think it was only $20 or something. Can't really remember.
In my mind, giving money for a game (or any sort of kick-started concept) is literally a donation. And if you happen to get anything out of it at the end, even better.
Granted, the developer also told you that your $20 would come to mean something. So that's on the borderline of being fraudulent (though, innocent because it was their intention to fulfill).
The $20 has totally tainted your view of the product. So that's the bad part in all this, that you would not give another $20 to another fledgling video game kickstart.
Yes, they pulled a lot of fake it till you make it, but what they’ve done is undeniably grand and impressive, no matter how buggy it still is.
It is grand and impressive, but very much not in a good way.
Anyway, that was 2 US presidents ago. Still waiting huh?