…because this doesn’t sound very good.
The company [Chris] Roberts cofounded, Cloud Imperium Games, has raised $288 million to bring the PC game [Star Citizen] to life along with its companion, an offline single-player action game called Squadron 42. Of this haul, $242 million has been contributed by about 1.1 million fans, who have either bought digital toys like the Kraken or given cash online. Excluding cryptocurrencies, that makes Star Citizen far and away the biggest crowdfunded project ever.
Rough playable modes—alphas, not betas—are used to raise hopes and illustrate work being done. And Roberts has enticed gamers with a steady stream of hype, including promising a vast, playable universe with “100 star systems.” But most of the money is gone, and the game is still far from finished. At the end of 2017, for example, Roberts was down to just $14 million in the bank. He has since raised more money. Those 100 star systems? He has not completed a single one. So far he has two mostly finished planets, nine moons and an asteroid.
To give you an idea: 242 million is what you’d expect to spend in the process of making a top-level AAA multiplayer game title, including marketing. Now, I hesitate to opine on whether the money being spent so far has been spent wisely, so I will merely note that apparently some folks might need bookkeepers in the gaming industry after all. Or simply somebody with a rolled-up newspaper, and a talent for saying NO.
Moe Lane
I’m an original backer, and the article is blowing things entirely out of proportion.
The existing alpha is entirely playable (both in the sense of “there is something resembling gameplay” and “frame rate”), and they’ve been fairly consistent with releases since they switched to a quarterly release approach.
Yes, it’s absolutely taking way longer than we’d hoped, but I’m content to sit back and let them keep cranking away on it.
It’s clearly been a fiasco for years.
But things that can’t go on forever, won’t.
.
For perspective, we know that Anthem was thrown together in a matter of months amidst bureaucratic turf wars.
And it shows.
Compared to everything known about Star Citizen, it’s a GotY contender, and a shining example of proper managerial practices.
Only Duke Nukem Forever is even in the same league.
Eh. SC got so much money in the Kickstater so that feature creep showed up big time. That being said, I expect a working game to show up eventually. They’ve got the bankroll to keep them working on it for a while. And in full disclosure, I’ve not spent a dime on it so I have no personal investment on whether is fails or not.
I’ve got a starter and a couple of small ships with my name on them. I used to pop into the Alpha periodically. But it’s been a while since the last time I did so.
As Compound notes, the kickstarter might have been *too* successful. Sometimes I’ve seen CIG articles talking about some planned game element and wondered why people would bother with it. The original game was just supposed to be space flight, but the kickstarter was successful enough to convince CIG to add an out of vehicle first person element. And they’ve continued to add things.
So yeah, it’s ambitious – probably too ambitious.
Having said that, don’t trust that we’re seeing all of what’s done. A while back someone managed to get their hands on a large number of unreleased elements for the game that the public at large had never heard of. Players know a lot about the civilian ships that will appear in the game (‘civilian’ in this case includes fighters specifically built for the in-game civilian market). But the unreleased stuff was largely military vessels that the developers had never unveiled.
The point is, CIG isn’t showing off everything that they’ve got. So we can’t exactly trust that what we’re seeing is what’s complete.