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Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

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Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

#21

Post by eximius »

aeturnum wrote: post #14
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #9

12 years and $700M later, they're on Alpha 3.23. 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 ridiculo…

I think most estimates place the budget of GTA 6 at well north of $1000M. That said, based on public data, it's #2 on wikipedia[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

Yes, but a _significant_ portion of those are marketing. If you look only at development costs, nothing comes close to Star Citizen.

Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

#22

Post by nprateem »

bhouston wrote: post #13

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.

This. Selling hopes and dreams is far more profitable.

Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

#23

Post by sithadmin »

superb_dev wrote: post #8
jszymborski wrote: post #5

Say what you will of Star Citizen, there is actual gameplay... more than other crowd-funded games like Chronicles of Elyria or Earth2 can claim. Not that I'm going to bat for Star Citizen.

Is there any gameplay? I’ve tried playing it but the performance issues made it near impossible. I’ve got a decent rig so it wasn’t a hardware issue

Stability and bugginess varies wildly from patch to patch.

Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

#24

Post by paulryanrogers »

bhouston wrote: post #13

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.

Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

#26

Post by jcranmer »

RGamma wrote: post #6

It's a heated race with HL3. Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years, so I wouldn't call this dead quite yet.

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.

Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

#27

Post by AlexandrB »

wongarsu wrote: post #12
sambazi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The gig is just too good to miss out on. the compensation required to keep the boat from rocking must be staggering

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…

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.

Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

#29

Post by slashtom »

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.

Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

#30

Post by paulryanrogers »

GenerWork wrote: post #25

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?

CEO yachts don't pay for themselves!
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