Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 185 posts

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#111

Post by sanderjd »

locust101 wrote: post #25
thesuitonym wrote: post #24

This will probably not be a well-liked response but I'm going to post it anyway. I preordered Star Citizen back in 2012 or 2013. Whenever the original Kickstarter was. I've kind of forgotten about it. I've never preordered another game--or anything really. And I don't think this was a bad experience. I haven't received a game yet, but I have played some demos that were really fun. I've seen hours of content (Sure, th…

This might be true for this particular game but the lack of checks and balances on kickstarter is troubling.

This attitude makes no sense to me. This is what kickstarter is for: you back high-risk projects, get some goofy schwag, and sometimes the project actually works, and how cool is that?

Why does there seem to be a horde of people who think kickstarter is for pre-ordering finished products and getting pissed when they don't receive them? That's just not what it is!

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#112

Post by stonemetal »

locust101 wrote: post #25
thesuitonym wrote: post #24

This will probably not be a well-liked response but I'm going to post it anyway. I preordered Star Citizen back in 2012 or 2013. Whenever the original Kickstarter was. I've kind of forgotten about it. I've never preordered another game--or anything really. And I don't think this was a bad experience. I haven't received a game yet, but I have played some demos that were really fun. I've seen hours of content (Sure, th…

This might be true for this particular game but the lack of checks and balances on kickstarter is troubling.

Yeah I am surprised they haven't added a rule that you can't give backers something that doesn't exist.

Being able to back something to get that thing seems to confuse to many people into believing it is a shop where you buy things rather than an investing in something you would like to exist, but may never actually exist.

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#113

Post by al_chemist »

ungzd wrote: post #2

"Space exploration" games have strange tendency for hyper-hype and scams, for example recently released No Man's Sky.

That's why they should never release Star Citizen. If they do, everybody will be disappointed. If they continue to release alpha previews, they can live on donations forever and all the fans will be still happy.

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#114

Post by [deleted] »

acemarke wrote: post #100
gavanwoolery wrote: post #90

The original Wing Commander: Privateer had about 20 core team members and cost (guesstimating) around $3 million to make, inflation adjusted. To put that in perspective, Fallout 4 cost around $150m to make (IIRC), and that was an amazingly frugal budget for such a large game (Several AAA titles have budgets twice that large). To be honest, I would have been happy with something along the budget of the original Privat…

I would say that Chris Roberts has always had a very good idea of the game he _wanted_ to build, but but the original plan was to only build part of what he really wanted. When the crowdfunding kept coming in, it enabled him to go straight for building the game as he envisioned it, rather than iterating after release. It's also worth noting that CIG only hit 400 employees fairly recently. I know some of their major p…

[deleted]

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#115

Post by gavanwoolery »

acemarke wrote: post #100
gavanwoolery wrote: post #90

The original Wing Commander: Privateer had about 20 core team members and cost (guesstimating) around $3 million to make, inflation adjusted. To put that in perspective, Fallout 4 cost around $150m to make (IIRC), and that was an amazingly frugal budget for such a large game (Several AAA titles have budgets twice that large). To be honest, I would have been happy with something along the budget of the original Privat…

I would say that Chris Roberts has always had a very good idea of the game he _wanted_ to build, but but the original plan was to only build part of what he really wanted. When the crowdfunding kept coming in, it enabled him to go straight for building the game as he envisioned it, rather than iterating after release. It's also worth noting that CIG only hit 400 employees fairly recently. I know some of their major p…

good points :)

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#116

Post by megablast »

wlesieutre wrote: post #50
thesuitonym wrote: post #24

This will probably not be a well-liked response but I'm going to post it anyway. I preordered Star Citizen back in 2012 or 2013. Whenever the original Kickstarter was. I've kind of forgotten about it. I've never preordered another game--or anything really. And I don't think this was a bad experience. I haven't received a game yet, but I have played some demos that were really fun. I've seen hours of content (Sure, th…

They've fairly recently published a schedule for the alpha 3.0 release (first public access to the procedural planet tech, among other things), along with a video about estimating timelines for the project. The folks who develop software for a living might not find it as interesting as I did, but it's a decent look at where the project is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOjXfNnhxf0 I've gotten some fun out of the al…

I am not sure if that video is meant to be impressive. The first guy talking about how hard it is having to work with designers, developers, audio etc, um ok. Like every single game out there.

I just see so much cruft, so many useless people such as producers, talking a lot but not doing a lot. Taking all the credit, but not actually working apart from meetings.

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#117

Post by jhanschoo »

I'm not a backer, but it seems to me that Star Citizen is progressing well. There's still active development and progress to the actual game, there's been several demos released, there's been constant communication.

As long as they continually scheduling and releasing new Alpha builds incorporating their growing world as they flesh it out, I don't see cause for concern.

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#118

Post by mustacheemperor »

raesene9 wrote: post #40

IIRC Star citizen got started in funding around the same time as Elite:Dangerous. It seems that the E:D approach has worked out rather better, in that they delivered an initial playable game that was rather lacking in some areas , and have been incrementally adding to that game over time in terms of both features and platforms supported.

I own elite dangerous and after visiting the subreddit after the last patch I really don't have much confidence in frontier anymore. It's becoming clear the game's codebase will never be able to support some of its ambitious promises (like not being your ship) and the features that are being implemented are shallow and broken, and then never further developed by frontier.

I think E:D succeeded at initially playable but is failing to scale. It's a really fun experience in VR but I'd much rather it had stayed in closed development a year or two longer if that's what it would have taken for it to have real depth.

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#119

Post by megablast »

manarth wrote: post #58
sbov wrote: post #20

It seems like a safer use of extra funding is for free expansions. It may seem unfair to take $140 million and build a $10 million game, but people funded you with your $10 million game, deadlines included, in mind.

It may seem unfair to take $140 million and build a $10 million game If a film spent $10M, and turned $140M at the box office, it would be seen as a success, rather than a con. Should a game be any different?

Good point, except they are promising more to reach each funding goal.

Re: Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns

#120

Post by arglebarnacle »

sanderjd wrote: post #111
locust101 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be true for this particular game but the lack of checks and balances on kickstarter is troubling.

This attitude makes no sense to me. This is what kickstarter is for : you back high-risk projects, get some goofy schwag, and sometimes the project actually works, and how cool is that? Why does there seem to be a horde of people who think kickstarter is for pre-ordering finished products and getting pissed when they don't receive them? That's just not what it is!

I'm sure this horde exists because kickstarter creators market themselves as if they're selling pre-orders of finished products.

In some cases they have no choice, because some kickstarters are really expensive. It might make sense to pre-order Ubuntu's $700 smartphone for example, but nobody would ever throw Canonical $700 for some "goofy schwag" and just hope they might or might not get a phone later.

Post reply on HN