Sunken Cost Citizen
Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
71–80 of 89 posts
Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
#72Ironically 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.
Inflation adjusted costs are more challenging when you measure dev time in decades.
Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
#73Somehow 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?
Take a look at this video. This is what sold me on it:
Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
#74Star Citizen is why I won't ever give money again for a game unless it's released and I am receiving it right then.
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.
Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
#75Star Citizen is why I won't ever give money again for a game unless it's released and I am receiving it right then. 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.
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.
Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
#7612 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…
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…
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.
Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
That entry for "Monopoly Go!" is unintentionally hilarious because of the incomplete information: "Marketing: $500m; Total: $500m" Yeah, that sounds about right.
> By March 2024, the game generated $2 billion in revenue just 10 months after launch and three months after hitting $1 billion. This is absolutely wild.
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.
Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
#78Star 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.
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.
Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 ha…
> 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.
Re: Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ha…
> 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…
> 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.
Okay, this is interesting.