This is a question for someone that has been playing star citizen for a long time. How close are we to an actually playable game? How good is what they have built so far?
Releasing the game costs money and their money making strategy remains the same after release
There is no incentive to deliver anything other than digital collectibles.
There's a good chance they sell more collectibles on the idea of the game than the dismal reality of whatever they finally release, assuming they do ever make a real release. Right now the game could still be anything. (Even though in reality, it's nothing but a buggy alpha.)
I feel like this is the right comparison, except that the gap between ambition and reality is even larger but it hasn't made anything like the cultural impact.
Take my answer for what it’s worth, never played the game although I am curious because of all the people calling it a scam and take a look on YouTube once every few month.
It looks like a game in alpha, very very buggy, very little content. I am amazed at the time it takes them to add stuff, with a budget of 65 million things should have been going steadily but every time there is an update they promise not much to start with and even then always cancel things.
Personally I am absolutely convinced it’s a scam, they have to improve the game for legal reason but do the bare minimum and focus more on adding new ship they can sell than actual gameplay feature.
It's definitely not a scam, just a highly ambitious project that spends more time on mechanics and infrastructure than content.
The ships by themselves are works of art. And their main funding apparatus, so of course the put an inordinate amount of effort towards this.
The bugs are definitely a problem, though they are migrating the entire infrastructure at the moment into a highly available cluster that is intended to keep all players on a single persistent universe like Eve online.
The combat is pretty good, but much of the game breaks down because of poorly performing code/servers.
I think their current clusters accumulate a lot leaks that eventually degrade the experience.
I'd honestly be very curious what their internal architecture looks like in more detail.
Cmon, I sure hope with 750 millions they managed to hire artist to make ships. That’s maybe a few dozen or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In 10 years with that amount of money surely they could hire very talented people to manage development of server backend. The state in which the game is currently is a disgrace. It should be done or close to the end, not still at the beginning where you’re trying to make everything persistent. The infrastructure is what takes the most time and what you build first, like a house foundation. Instead they made the roof and the wall, sold them with lots of promise and now are working on foundations. I sure wouldn’t trust or buy from a such a contractor.
I played Chris Robert's stuff starting with Wing Commander in the early 90s.
A lot of us did.
He's not a scammer, we know who he is, flaws and all.
The project might fail, though I don't think it will, but it really doesn't make sense that he would be running a scam.
He wants this game as much as anyone.
Technical mistakes and all that kind of stuff make sense and aligns much more with what I have seen over the course of my career.
I do agree that they could move faster on the backend infrastructure if they had the right talent, but they started off really small over 10 years ago. They basically bootstrapped all their knowledge and talent.
>It's definitely not a scam, just a highly ambitious project that spends more time on mechanics and infrastructure than content.
That's twice or perhaps triple the amount of money and time spent on Grand Theft Auto V. A great game that consistently scores 9 or 10 out of 10 on every single list you find it.
I found it easier to believe that is a scam that to believe they will put out a game twice as good than GTA V.
You can have just about any amount of inefficiency in game making before it's a scam. Some are both highly funded and effective, others only the former. Just look how little Zwift has achieved with a similar amount of funding. I mean sure, it's playable and and does what it's supposed to do, and played by thousands of paying users at any given moment, but the same was true when they had burnt through a tenth of that money.
I have no interest in Star Citizen or any other MMO, and parts of its funding and development are shamelessly dishonest, but GTA V is not a fair comparison for a number of reasons:
- In a broad sense GTA V has fewer gameplay features and smaller constructed playable areas: Star Citizen is a bigger game, it is natural that it is more expensive. Your comment doesn’t really refute the point that SC spends its money on mechanics and infrastructure (though it seems to me that they spend a stupid amount of money on cosmetics).
- Star Citizen has fancier graphics and more detailed assets - RDR2 is a more relevant comparison here and that game was $500m.
- The GTA V figure is for a single-player game and (on release) a fairly middling and empty online mode. It does not include ongoing development costs for GTA Online, which has grown substantially over the years. GTA V + Online would be a more appropriate comparison: the $750m for Star Citizen includes ships added in 2023, but the GTA figure doesn’t include cars in 2023.
I would add that the $2bn estimate for GTA VI is credible based on Take-Two’s financial reports.
> RDR2 is a more relevant comparison here and that game was $500m.
I feel that comparison is flawed, seeing as most of that was for advertising.
If we go purely by development funds, one would have to combine GTA V [0], RDR2 [1] and Cyberpunk 2077's [2] budget.
That would still be $100 million short of the $750 million that RSI has as yet received purely for development. Add to that, you are comparing finished (albeit in the case of CP77 at launch at most feature complete, which is why I also included Phantom Liberty) titles to something that only approaches pre alpha state, considering it only has a limited number of core features implemented. How everything they intend to offer will interact with eachother can't even be tested and I have my personal reservations that once we get to that alpha stage, it will be smooth sailing.
I also feel that while one can argue that GTA V by itself may not have had the same amount of features and scope that have been promised with Star Citizen, I feel one equally can argue that the latter definitely will have less scope than the three named games combined, should there ever be a full release.
> the $750m for Star Citizen includes ships added in 2023, but the GTA figure doesn’t include cars in 2023
Yeah, but RSI intends to sell ships and expand the game beyond the initial full release, so I don't see how that changes things.
Fully admitting that I personally inherently dislike this approach to development. I feel that not having a somewhat fixed budget, no matter whether from the community, an investor, or (in the case of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night) a mix of both, creates the inherent incentive to sell your most faithful supporters on an ever expanding vision, to the detriment of them, your development team, and your long-term reputation. I feel history has shown with cases such as Minecraft that a one-time sale during early development is far better at both keeping development focused and raining in overambition, as you are more interested in selling to new rather than existing customers, thus being incentivized to improve the experience for everyone by creating a finished, polished product.
I know that the community was asked each time about expansions and additional features, but emotional investment and the sunk cost fallacy always made that an unfair argument, in my opinion. Despite my misgivings, I also would not consider it a scam, at least not more so than any other (gacha or micro/macro transaction-laden) game that benefits from selling digital goods to players that dehumanizingly are called "whales". I do, however, consider this a reincarnation of DNF, the engine changes and consistent attempt to hit rapidly moving targets feels stricking, though mercifully, at least that didn't have seemingly infinite funding.
[0] estimated at $130 million to $150 million
[1] estimated at $170 million to $240 million
[2] estimated at $120 million to $140 million with an additional 275 million PLN (about $65 million) for Phantom Liberty and bug fixes
They have put a lot of work into their back end. They working on a really innovative server meshing system that can automatically and seamlessly balance the game world and entities across multiple servers. Your character can migrate to a different server and you will have no idea it happened and can still interact with characters on a different server.
I expect Star Citizen is going to be one of those games that won't get tons and tons of new players (maybe double its total count right now? Is that a lot?) But the people that play it are dedicated and very, very interested in the experience that it brings.
So, perhaps you (for example) will never, ever be interested in playing the game for anywhere near the amount of time that would justify the cost of entry, but for the specific space exploration / worldbuilding experience that Star Citizen provides, and for the people that want exactly that, it was and is a fantastic game.
Agree on the take except replace "space exploration/worldbuilding experience" with "ship model buying experience". The former is a very common desire and what one might take away from reading about the game, the latter is more akin to what has been delivered so far and what people still spending money on the game seem to care a lot about.
Pretty much at any point in their development they have had amazing visuals and disappointing game play compared to other games already on the market. As a concrete example, game play wise it has been chasing Elite Dangerous since it was released 10 years ago. I believe Eve Online too (but you can't get out of the cockpit there?). Even single player Starfield. I think the project has been taking so long because, when they release something, it needs not be a disappointment.
Supposedly, the single player Squadron 42 part of Star Citizen is feature complete, and if they can get that out of the door will be telling on what the MMO release would be like. Personally, I'm expecting Squadron 42 to be comparable to other releases that year, but better voice acting, more jank, PC only, and poor controller support. And given the focus on 'players making their own story', I'm expecting the MMO to suffer the same reception as Elite Dangerous with a shiny engine trying to hide tedious and repetitive game play (but many people like that, and it might remain a profitable niche game).
I play it sometimes. It feels truly "next gen", in that it feels like a very buggy, early-access version of Elite Dangerous 2.0. Overambitious, for good (it does things no other game does), or for worse (the time and budget required). Definitely mismanaged though, in the amount of repeated effort required (e.g. AAA-quality assets that would be replaced anyway, which should have been prototype-quality instead).
They have to file accurate statements with the UK government re some R&D tax incentives they claim; you can have a look at those filings on companies house. They lag the website but broadly align.
+ the $750m only includes ship sales. If you include other revenue (subscriptions) and investors, they are likely at $900m+ now.
they sell virtual spaceships for thousands of dollars, i know a guy who bought several of them like 8 years ago. if he represents the average star citizen supporter (in the sense of being willing and eager to pay more money into a game you've already paid for, for rewards that don't actually exist, in a game that shows absolutely zero promise of ever actually releasing), i believe it.
I think this really illustrates how the scale of the gaming community is hard to reason about. $750 million sounds like a lot but when there are individuals willing to spend thousands of dollars apiece that only needs a core community measured in the hundreds of thousands, whereas AAA games sell tens of millions of copies in a given quarter. That’s still far from easy to do, but it suggests that we’ll see this happen periodically when someone hits the right combination for an underserved niche.
I guess never underestimate the whales of a game. Reminds me of how virtual real estate in Linden Labs metaverse game of Second Life has sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Just absurd.
It walks the line of a scam imo. They have developed and released enough of a "game" to keep stringing people along and pulling the correct heart strings to keep getting new funds.
On the other hand we have the Asmodee Digital business model: release an (initially) broken game somewhat on schedule with tons of bugs (Terraforming Mars) and only start fixing a few of the bugs if you sell enough copies [0]. But don't fix enough of them to the level where the digital version is as playable as the physical version, not for 5 years at least... in all sincerity I don't know why it's not acceptable to call something a beta release, price it and set expectations accordingly - but with a defined timeline (or revenue goal) to when it should become fully playable.
I'm also reminded of the failed Mycroft AI voice assistant [1].
yeah i believe that it isn't an intentional scam, but from the POV of a customer, it would be totally indistinguishable from one and the end result is the same: taking money from gullible people for a promise that will never be fulfilled. i think it's just a poorly managed pipe dream product that won't ever get out of development hell.
if the people involved in the management were half decent at their jobs they would have stopped expanding the scope and shipped the originally promised game 5 years ago, and then carried on releasing expansions like elite does.
I occasionally check on Star Citizen "development" just to look at the drama, and some of the stuff they're selling is straight-up obscene. There are ship packs that cost literally tens of thousands of USD (IIRC the most expensive one (legatus pack) is ~50k USD), and you have to have already bought thousands of dollars worth before you're allowed to buy it.
Chris Roberts might be a huge con artist, but there's no doubt he's mastered the art of milking gullible whales for all of their cash.
Also, I always laugh when I see people talking about buying copies of Star Citizen for their kids so they can play together when the kid grows up. Seems pretty unlikely that the game will be out by then, given they've spent 10+ years with no meaningful progress.
I think it is idiotic, but I don't think it is outright scam. Just comparable to over funded start-up waste. Burning money on every possible feature or thing or detail sensesly.
Crowdfunding passed $150 million in 2017, and $300 million in 2020, $500 million in 2022. $750 million is believable.
I'm really surprised that they are still raising money this fast. I would have thought people lost interest. Most of the discussions online are negative. There was fans buying ships, but I can't see that generating that much money.
I don't think that's why people are giving them money at this point. They're paying for stuff in the game that happens to be rewards for "crowdfunding" the game. It's not a "Just 100 more bucks and maybe they'll deliver", it's folks already playing the content that's in the game and buying further ships or such for whatever reason.
They apparently found every whale gamer on the market willing to buy virtual ships and stuff like that. I think all expenditure towards the game is counted as "crowdfunding"
Yes, gullible, impulsive gamers are worth more than most people would imagine. According to an industry insider who I talked to recently, a casino-like mobile game sold its users for ~$300 a piece, and that’s counting the majority of non-whale users who don’t spend a dime.
I always assumed that people buying nft's fell into three categories: a) fomo with crypto and feeling like this night be the next one, or b) zero critical reasoning skills, or c) wanted to make someone else hold the bag after eating losses on crypto or stocks at some point.
Either way, real question; are nft's still being traded?
The community I grew up in could not accurately be described as poor, but money was tighter than in a lot of places. So people in this community prize getting good value for money, and not being tricked into wasting money.
I don't care if that Funko Pop plastic figurine or that Magic The Gathering card is actually an investment that will go up in value, I ain't collecting shit.
In my mind, the collectables market is only for a small fraction of the population - fools, and people with more money than sense.
I always get so happy when Passage and Rohrer is mentioned, when I first played Sleep is Death my life changed, creating a story with so little but still endless possibilities. I made a js-version of it but never polished it enough, my first coding project inspired by a true vision, I learned so much.
I share your appreciation of Passage, it is a poem by another shape and a truly _different_ thing. Thank you for even mentioning it, it made my day.
That's super reductive. There's a pretty obvious difference between playing a game that only requires a modest one time fee for the whole thing, versus a game that somehow gets people to drop hundreds, even thousands of dollars for repeated purchases of virtual spaceships.
I never said that I disapproved of it. In fact, I think the ambitious goals of Star Citizen are great. On the other hand, Roblox bothers me a lot. However, I know I also make purchases that others don't understand. I don't think there are any clear lines to be drawn; the gaming industry is generally exploitative. I wish it were easy to find solid games without all the cruft.
Nobody does. They pay for a unique service, not as a handout.
"Finally I can be at the forefront of a gaming community just how I dreamt of when I was a kid. And in this particular gaming community, I don't even have to waste a minute playing!" It's suspension of disbelief pushed ahead one more level, a simulation of a space ship sim game. Think virtual virtual skeeball in Futurama s01e02. Just how kids who dream of risking their lives in a space-Spitfire don't really want to risk their lives in a space-Spitfire, grown ups who dream of sinking countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires don't really want to sink countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires. Both just don't quite know it yet, and profoundly enjoy that.
You're assuming that they don't have their own disbelief properly suspended. The illusion works, against all objective signs of failure, because they are believing it themselves. It's like Dafoe's Schreck delivering a very convincing Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire.
People are playing this game and apparently deriving enjoyment from it, that's why they're paying for things in the game. I don't think it's fraud, it's just kind of weird from the outside.
Others have left the likely real answers here, but...
$750m is the right order of magnitude for this game. That's "only" ~400 employees for ~10 years. Games are hugely labour intensive, and in mainstream cases also hugely advertising intensive. The company currently have ~60 open roles. Your average Call of Duty game is $100-200m, and they come out with one every year or two, spending at a similar rate. The budget for GTA V was $265m, but has now made $8bn.
I don't think we can even say that it's "bad" or "unfinished" and therefore shouldn't cost this much... the game is finished in the truest of senses – it's available to buy and brings in revenue. Whether they are continuing development, whether it currently sucks, etc, are all somewhat irrelevant.
I think we can judge it for being a bad game, I think we can judge it for not being cash-flow positive like we would with any other startup, but the amount of money involved is seemingly in the right ballpark for the market.
I don't think comparing GTA, the most financially successful game of all time, to star citizen does star citizen any favors. Star citizen is a very niche game, even if they will do everything they plan I don't expect they will even approach 500m in sales.
They have already passed 100s of millions in sales. We can consider some of the earlier money inflows 'donations', but what's happening nowadays is de facto sales.
Cyberpunk 2077 needed like $100+ million on top of the original $300+ million budget to get Phantom Liberty out and to patch the game to a point where the general public stopped hating the game.
Still, even with all of the money sunk into Cyberpunk 2077, its ~$450 million budget pales in comparison to Star Citizen.
And it's still full of bugs (Cyberpunk 2077). I've just bought it on sale, it's annoying close to being bloody amazing but every so often you get someone T posing or just something else that ruins it.
I've completed the game start to finish 3 times now and I've only really seen any bugs on my first playthrough close to launch. Post DLC I honestly hand on heart don't recall any.
I could open my copy of the game right now and find a bug in 5 minutes. That has been a constant for me since the game released and until at least 3 months ago when I last played
Cyberpunk have a massive problems caused by success of Witcher 3 a lot and i mean A LOT of people move to western studios and they were best engineers in the company.
They still have people problem as pay in CDPR is pathetic compared to other studios and not much top talent want to work there.
Cyberpunk 2077 budget was overblown thanks to that + ~50% of that was spend on marketing I would assume there were also a lot of IP "costs" so overall "production" cost was probably about ~30-40% of the budget.
I funded this back on kickstarter when I was still in high school. I remember the excitement that came with every $1mil milestone, it really felt like an incredible movement that was going to produce something really special. I haven't been able to follow progress closely over the past decade, but the gameplay demos have been fun and there always seems to be a decent amount of progress so at this point I think I'm content waiting.
Out of curiosity, do you find the development story itself the worthwhile investment or are you holding out on the bet if you'll wait ${years} more then something like the promised feature set will eventually be delivered as the polished, complete, and functional package you've been looking forward to?
There is a lot of value in the development story for me. Over time they've almost entirely stopped talking about progress outside of major milestones which is disappointing but theres only so many years in a row you can say server meshing will be finished in 6 months before people get tired of hearing about it.
The team seems genuine, and donations aren't slowing down, so it seems likely that the game will materialize in some complete form eventually
The game focuses on the idea of the idea of a space game which turns out to be what people really pay for, ie space real estate, ie limited edition ships, ie works of art.
Another POV is that it would be much simpler to have waited 10 years and developed NFTs in 2021 instead.
If you have the skills to hype an aesthetic experience for a broad audience; and you’re so cynical as to not really do anything; just make a shitcoin. Make an NFT. Doing all this other work is a huge waste of time.
I backed Star Citizen in the first round (you may remember me from the Wing Commander Privateer remake) and... honestly the thing is, since I did, Space Engineers came out and scratched that itch better than any of this could.
Space Engineers is still to date my favourite space sim of all time. It has a steep learning curve and is ideally played with a few mods (encounters etc), but even stock standard it’s such an incredible game that only gets better the more you play it.
I don’t get how it keeps getting funding. It always comes off as a glorified tech demo, and makes me think people are just funding a leisurely game studio hobby for the developers instead of a story they can experience.
So it's like the lottery where a lottery ticket doesn't really buy you a chance at riches, but the possibility to dream about what you'd do with riches?
Im still a bit disappointed that they keep increasing the scope
instead of just getting the promised game out the door, and then creating some large free content updates as time progresses.
its getting a bit redicilous
i mean, they have motion capture and voice acting from mark hamill and Gary oldman (and probably more) and they're gonna die before the game is released
There was this space sim game a while back that was called HELLION, it had so much potential it was unreal. Sadly, some internal affairs and change in priority left it abandoned. You hate to see it.
Wow, what a ride. As a non-gamer, I clicked the link, saw a site that looks like it's Best Viewed In Internet Explorer, with a ticker of an obscenely high dollar amount. It took me a good 2 minutes to figure out this was about a video game.
I'm very impressed they managed to raise this kind of money with a site like this.
The website is a fun mix of ancient Vue that was written a decade ago alongside an ongoing overhaul that has replaced the menu and most main pages with React.
Regardless of Star Citizen being a huge scam, a Hackernews encountering a site that does not look like all the b2b SaaS sites and being surprised that it managed to raise money is extremely funny.
And when this all blows up everyone will walk away without a scratch. In a just society everybody involved in this mess would spend a double digit number of years in jail.
I think my biggest beef with the game is how unstable it is.
The game design is a bit grindy, whatever, lets grind away then, however any time I start to make any progress the game crashes. After two or three of these I loose interest. Only to try again in 6 months to much the same results.
They appear to be following a long term slow burn development plan, nothing wrong with this many of my favorite games follow this same pattern, factorio, valheim, however these games follow the cardinal rule of public development which is "keep it stable" it has been 10 years and star citizen still is a crashy mess.
They have a lot of neat tech in their engine, seamless space to surface to inside to instance is not trivial. But I wish they would just sit down for a quarter and stabilize the thing. I like to joke that the elevators in the game are probably some of their most advanced tech, the punchline is that if you have played the game you know that most of the crashes and other weirdness involve elevators. but I am only half-joking. because the elevators really are connecting zones and instances in a cool seamless way.
That's it, a lot of early access indie games are built using the lessons learned from agile methodology; Factorio recently released a video showcasing the ~6000 tests they have to verify all their complicated systems work as they should, and their velocity is incredible, fixing over 600 bugs in the span of a month (few of which were game-breaking btw, a lot of their bugfixes are fairly trivial).
But Star Citizen has all the hallmarks of too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management. They have over a thousand people working on it and have for a long time now. And that scale isn't the problem - Rockstar did the same with RDR 2 and will likely exceed it with GTA VI - but while the main guy has some games under his belt, they too had problems with development and actually finishing.
> too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management.
The main problem in this case was SC's game director. He was around for nine years and set the scope/goals/roadmap for the game before being abruptly fired 9 months ago and replaced. Through the grape vine I've heard he never provided a long-term vision for the project internally whilst constantly promising new things to the community (ie scope creep).
The new game director, Rich, is well liked within the development team and much of the recent CitizenCon event was spent cutting back scope and providing an actual goal for SC 1.0 to release as.
Yes and no. The same problems can exist in any org. If there isn't much money, it does and we don't hear about it. But if you have a lot of money, you can stay on the runway for a long time befoure you run out.
The problem with too much money is that it allows for lazy project management practices.
And at some scale, it's difficult to determine if you are actually making slow progress or deluding yourself and rebuilding the same system for the third time.
Similarly, infinite runway means you can infinitely postpone worrying about stability. "We're still working on features" etc.
money (payment for goods and services) is a good signal that you are doing good. If you don't need to pay attention or the money comes in regardless of the quality of the product, it's easy to go off the rails.
To this day the whole game feels like an FPS mod, and a poorly tested one at that.
Every so often, when a new update comes out, I check out some let's player who will, in a span of an hour, will run into some incredibly basic and fundamental bug, like clipping through an elevator and getting ejected into space, or being unable to get through a door that's supposed to open.
Honestly the whole game feels years away from release.
Doesn't it bother you that even if the game will be complete to the say, beta test levels, it would still be an insane pay2win product? Like not even "sense of pride and accomplishment" pay2win, there ingame stuff cost "only" tens of dollars per item. Here it costs hundreds and thousands of dollars per ship. If it was a EA or Ubisoft game, they would been eaten alive just for such monetization. While for SC it is ignored by the actual players.
Their monetization strategy appears to be largely modeled after flightsimulators. DCS specifically comes to mind. As in DCS you don't buy the game you buy the plane.
On the one hand I am fine with this. on the other I vaguely expect DCS levels of systems simulation from the ships and I don't see that ever happening.
I gave them USD 50 for pretty similar reasons plus the additional reason of thanking Roberts for the entertainment I had from his earlier games. Since, I have easily gotten that much entertainment value watching the development, so for me it was a great purchase. ANd they tell me there will be a full game someday, for icing on the cake.
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[ 975 ms ] story [ 4608 ms ] threadThough the incentive to release is definitely weaker due to them making so much money prior to official release.
I'm watching from a distance.
I'm probably missing your point, but it sounds like you've answered your own question.
It looks like a game in alpha, very very buggy, very little content. I am amazed at the time it takes them to add stuff, with a budget of 65 million things should have been going steadily but every time there is an update they promise not much to start with and even then always cancel things.
Personally I am absolutely convinced it’s a scam, they have to improve the game for legal reason but do the bare minimum and focus more on adding new ship they can sell than actual gameplay feature.
The ships by themselves are works of art. And their main funding apparatus, so of course the put an inordinate amount of effort towards this.
The bugs are definitely a problem, though they are migrating the entire infrastructure at the moment into a highly available cluster that is intended to keep all players on a single persistent universe like Eve online.
The combat is pretty good, but much of the game breaks down because of poorly performing code/servers.
I think their current clusters accumulate a lot leaks that eventually degrade the experience.
I'd honestly be very curious what their internal architecture looks like in more detail.
In 10 years with that amount of money surely they could hire very talented people to manage development of server backend. The state in which the game is currently is a disgrace. It should be done or close to the end, not still at the beginning where you’re trying to make everything persistent. The infrastructure is what takes the most time and what you build first, like a house foundation. Instead they made the roof and the wall, sold them with lots of promise and now are working on foundations. I sure wouldn’t trust or buy from a such a contractor.
A lot of us did.
He's not a scammer, we know who he is, flaws and all.
The project might fail, though I don't think it will, but it really doesn't make sense that he would be running a scam.
He wants this game as much as anyone.
Technical mistakes and all that kind of stuff make sense and aligns much more with what I have seen over the course of my career.
I do agree that they could move faster on the backend infrastructure if they had the right talent, but they started off really small over 10 years ago. They basically bootstrapped all their knowledge and talent.
And in the end, there was no game.
The community overwhelmingly voted for the scope screep. Myself included.
They could freeze the features now, fix the bugs, and finish the content and it'd be the best space game ever.
But the vision is bigger than that for better or for worse.
I really do have a lot of fun with it right now when it's not bugging out. Which changes like the seasons.
That's twice or perhaps triple the amount of money and time spent on Grand Theft Auto V. A great game that consistently scores 9 or 10 out of 10 on every single list you find it.
I found it easier to believe that is a scam that to believe they will put out a game twice as good than GTA V.
They keep reworking everything over and over and over again.
And at this point why wouldn't they? Their customers have pretty much shown they'll continue to pay for all of that rework in perpetuity.
- In a broad sense GTA V has fewer gameplay features and smaller constructed playable areas: Star Citizen is a bigger game, it is natural that it is more expensive. Your comment doesn’t really refute the point that SC spends its money on mechanics and infrastructure (though it seems to me that they spend a stupid amount of money on cosmetics).
- Star Citizen has fancier graphics and more detailed assets - RDR2 is a more relevant comparison here and that game was $500m.
- The GTA V figure is for a single-player game and (on release) a fairly middling and empty online mode. It does not include ongoing development costs for GTA Online, which has grown substantially over the years. GTA V + Online would be a more appropriate comparison: the $750m for Star Citizen includes ships added in 2023, but the GTA figure doesn’t include cars in 2023.
I would add that the $2bn estimate for GTA VI is credible based on Take-Two’s financial reports.
I feel that comparison is flawed, seeing as most of that was for advertising.
If we go purely by development funds, one would have to combine GTA V [0], RDR2 [1] and Cyberpunk 2077's [2] budget.
That would still be $100 million short of the $750 million that RSI has as yet received purely for development. Add to that, you are comparing finished (albeit in the case of CP77 at launch at most feature complete, which is why I also included Phantom Liberty) titles to something that only approaches pre alpha state, considering it only has a limited number of core features implemented. How everything they intend to offer will interact with eachother can't even be tested and I have my personal reservations that once we get to that alpha stage, it will be smooth sailing.
I also feel that while one can argue that GTA V by itself may not have had the same amount of features and scope that have been promised with Star Citizen, I feel one equally can argue that the latter definitely will have less scope than the three named games combined, should there ever be a full release.
> the $750m for Star Citizen includes ships added in 2023, but the GTA figure doesn’t include cars in 2023
Yeah, but RSI intends to sell ships and expand the game beyond the initial full release, so I don't see how that changes things.
Fully admitting that I personally inherently dislike this approach to development. I feel that not having a somewhat fixed budget, no matter whether from the community, an investor, or (in the case of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night) a mix of both, creates the inherent incentive to sell your most faithful supporters on an ever expanding vision, to the detriment of them, your development team, and your long-term reputation. I feel history has shown with cases such as Minecraft that a one-time sale during early development is far better at both keeping development focused and raining in overambition, as you are more interested in selling to new rather than existing customers, thus being incentivized to improve the experience for everyone by creating a finished, polished product.
I know that the community was asked each time about expansions and additional features, but emotional investment and the sunk cost fallacy always made that an unfair argument, in my opinion. Despite my misgivings, I also would not consider it a scam, at least not more so than any other (gacha or micro/macro transaction-laden) game that benefits from selling digital goods to players that dehumanizingly are called "whales". I do, however, consider this a reincarnation of DNF, the engine changes and consistent attempt to hit rapidly moving targets feels stricking, though mercifully, at least that didn't have seemingly infinite funding.
[0] estimated at $130 million to $150 million
[1] estimated at $170 million to $240 million
[2] estimated at $120 million to $140 million with an additional 275 million PLN (about $65 million) for Phantom Liberty and bug fixes
In 2015.
So, perhaps you (for example) will never, ever be interested in playing the game for anywhere near the amount of time that would justify the cost of entry, but for the specific space exploration / worldbuilding experience that Star Citizen provides, and for the people that want exactly that, it was and is a fantastic game.
Supposedly, the single player Squadron 42 part of Star Citizen is feature complete, and if they can get that out of the door will be telling on what the MMO release would be like. Personally, I'm expecting Squadron 42 to be comparable to other releases that year, but better voice acting, more jank, PC only, and poor controller support. And given the focus on 'players making their own story', I'm expecting the MMO to suffer the same reception as Elite Dangerous with a shiny engine trying to hide tedious and repetitive game play (but many people like that, and it might remain a profitable niche game).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWq8ynUq7wM
Although, $75 million is still impressive.
Edit: I stand corrected. I simply looked at the website which listed the stretch goals to $65 million and missed the $750 million total. Cowabunga.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-funded_crowd...
They also claim around 5 million backers which puts the average donation at around 150 dollars. That seems really high.
From the wikipedia article, the next highest game is Prison Architect at a comparatively paltry 20 million.
It's still possible. On the other hand, it could all be completely PR bull crap since there's no way to audit them.
+ the $750m only includes ship sales. If you include other revenue (subscriptions) and investors, they are likely at $900m+ now.
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
EDIT: From Companies House Next accounts made up to 31 December 2023 due by 31 December 2024.
So I guess we'll find out in roughly a month.
Check out the store, its absurd what they are able to charge for completely digital assets that don't even exist in game yet
10 years of development, 750 millions budget and people are still not convinced it’s a scam ? They want it so much, damn.
On the other hand we have the Asmodee Digital business model: release an (initially) broken game somewhat on schedule with tons of bugs (Terraforming Mars) and only start fixing a few of the bugs if you sell enough copies [0]. But don't fix enough of them to the level where the digital version is as playable as the physical version, not for 5 years at least... in all sincerity I don't know why it's not acceptable to call something a beta release, price it and set expectations accordingly - but with a defined timeline (or revenue goal) to when it should become fully playable.
I'm also reminded of the failed Mycroft AI voice assistant [1].
[0]: https://videogamegeek.com/thread/2206151/cthulhu-reviews-ter... [1]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mycroft+ai
if the people involved in the management were half decent at their jobs they would have stopped expanding the scope and shipped the originally promised game 5 years ago, and then carried on releasing expansions like elite does.
Chris Roberts might be a huge con artist, but there's no doubt he's mastered the art of milking gullible whales for all of their cash.
Also, I always laugh when I see people talking about buying copies of Star Citizen for their kids so they can play together when the kid grows up. Seems pretty unlikely that the game will be out by then, given they've spent 10+ years with no meaningful progress.
I'm really surprised that they are still raising money this fast. I would have thought people lost interest. Most of the discussions online are negative. There was fans buying ships, but I can't see that generating that much money.
It's a released game that is constantly evolving and getting money from in-game purchases, like Fortnite.
Either way, real question; are nft's still being traded?
The community I grew up in could not accurately be described as poor, but money was tighter than in a lot of places. So people in this community prize getting good value for money, and not being tricked into wasting money.
I don't care if that Funko Pop plastic figurine or that Magic The Gathering card is actually an investment that will go up in value, I ain't collecting shit.
In my mind, the collectables market is only for a small fraction of the population - fools, and people with more money than sense.
Play this game: http://passage.toolness.org/
It's 5 minutes long.
Read the creator's discussion on it: https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/statement.html
Hardly seems consumeristic. And there's a huge pile of games like this out there.
I share your appreciation of Passage, it is a poem by another shape and a truly _different_ thing. Thank you for even mentioning it, it made my day.
Sure. None of those are necessary.
If I sing a song to myself, is that consumerism?
If someone else hears my singing and enjoys it, with no discussion of payment or exchange from either side, is that consumerism?
"Finally I can be at the forefront of a gaming community just how I dreamt of when I was a kid. And in this particular gaming community, I don't even have to waste a minute playing!" It's suspension of disbelief pushed ahead one more level, a simulation of a space ship sim game. Think virtual virtual skeeball in Futurama s01e02. Just how kids who dream of risking their lives in a space-Spitfire don't really want to risk their lives in a space-Spitfire, grown ups who dream of sinking countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires don't really want to sink countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires. Both just don't quite know it yet, and profoundly enjoy that.
$750m is the right order of magnitude for this game. That's "only" ~400 employees for ~10 years. Games are hugely labour intensive, and in mainstream cases also hugely advertising intensive. The company currently have ~60 open roles. Your average Call of Duty game is $100-200m, and they come out with one every year or two, spending at a similar rate. The budget for GTA V was $265m, but has now made $8bn.
I don't think we can even say that it's "bad" or "unfinished" and therefore shouldn't cost this much... the game is finished in the truest of senses – it's available to buy and brings in revenue. Whether they are continuing development, whether it currently sucks, etc, are all somewhat irrelevant.
I think we can judge it for being a bad game, I think we can judge it for not being cash-flow positive like we would with any other startup, but the amount of money involved is seemingly in the right ballpark for the market.
So at least the EU and UK believe these transactions to be sales.
Still, even with all of the money sunk into Cyberpunk 2077, its ~$450 million budget pales in comparison to Star Citizen.
They still have people problem as pay in CDPR is pathetic compared to other studios and not much top talent want to work there.
Cyberpunk 2077 budget was overblown thanks to that + ~50% of that was spend on marketing I would assume there were also a lot of IP "costs" so overall "production" cost was probably about ~30-40% of the budget.
https://insider-gaming.com/cloud-imperium-games-layoffs-repo...
They don't have much in the bank. They burn over 100 mil a year on headcount.
The team seems genuine, and donations aren't slowing down, so it seems likely that the game will materialize in some complete form eventually
'Content' meaning 'stuff', or 'content' meaning 'happy? Or both?
Another POV is that it would be much simpler to have waited 10 years and developed NFTs in 2021 instead.
If you have the skills to hype an aesthetic experience for a broad audience; and you’re so cynical as to not really do anything; just make a shitcoin. Make an NFT. Doing all this other work is a huge waste of time.
Why’d you jump into these SC threads? There’s an interest, clearly.
It needs BEEF to run and macs are not capable of that much cow.
instead of just getting the promised game out the door, and then creating some large free content updates as time progresses.
its getting a bit redicilous
i mean, they have motion capture and voice acting from mark hamill and Gary oldman (and probably more) and they're gonna die before the game is released
https://store.steampowered.com/app/588210/HELLION/
I'm very impressed they managed to raise this kind of money with a site like this.
Golden the Ship Was - Oh! Oh! Oh!
In another 10 years I'll add "of old age" to the wonder
I can no longer remember a time where the internet wasn't waiting for Star Citizen haha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
The game design is a bit grindy, whatever, lets grind away then, however any time I start to make any progress the game crashes. After two or three of these I loose interest. Only to try again in 6 months to much the same results.
They appear to be following a long term slow burn development plan, nothing wrong with this many of my favorite games follow this same pattern, factorio, valheim, however these games follow the cardinal rule of public development which is "keep it stable" it has been 10 years and star citizen still is a crashy mess.
They have a lot of neat tech in their engine, seamless space to surface to inside to instance is not trivial. But I wish they would just sit down for a quarter and stabilize the thing. I like to joke that the elevators in the game are probably some of their most advanced tech, the punchline is that if you have played the game you know that most of the crashes and other weirdness involve elevators. but I am only half-joking. because the elevators really are connecting zones and instances in a cool seamless way.
But Star Citizen has all the hallmarks of too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management. They have over a thousand people working on it and have for a long time now. And that scale isn't the problem - Rockstar did the same with RDR 2 and will likely exceed it with GTA VI - but while the main guy has some games under his belt, they too had problems with development and actually finishing.
The main problem in this case was SC's game director. He was around for nine years and set the scope/goals/roadmap for the game before being abruptly fired 9 months ago and replaced. Through the grape vine I've heard he never provided a long-term vision for the project internally whilst constantly promising new things to the community (ie scope creep).
The new game director, Rich, is well liked within the development team and much of the recent CitizenCon event was spent cutting back scope and providing an actual goal for SC 1.0 to release as.
And at some scale, it's difficult to determine if you are actually making slow progress or deluding yourself and rebuilding the same system for the third time.
Similarly, infinite runway means you can infinitely postpone worrying about stability. "We're still working on features" etc.
Every so often, when a new update comes out, I check out some let's player who will, in a span of an hour, will run into some incredibly basic and fundamental bug, like clipping through an elevator and getting ejected into space, or being unable to get through a door that's supposed to open.
Honestly the whole game feels years away from release.
On the one hand I am fine with this. on the other I vaguely expect DCS levels of systems simulation from the ships and I don't see that ever happening.