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

nytimes.com

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

#91

Post by djsumdog »

giobox wrote: post #59
xxr wrote: post #45

Am I correct in my understanding that every dollar pledged essentially pushes the release further into the future since the developer is on the hook to add something extra with that dollar? Not that each dollar comes with a signed and sworn commitment, but more that the $500,000 game probably would have been out and actively enjoyed already.

I may be misunderstanding too, but every time I read another story on Star Citizen's development, it certainly seems that way, and Robert's own comments suggest he will keep spending every dollar to make "the best possible" game. It certainly suggests that even if he isn't legally on hook to spend it all, he will try. He's arguably painted himself into an unfortunate corner by not imposing a fund raising cap - morall…

But couldn't he have done iterative releases instead? Give all the backers more that just a little demo, but a real mini-game that demos the tech and can keep gamers occupied for a few days. Slowly add more onto it?

Or maybe release the game in 3 different parts?

I haven't played any of the demos but it does look like a really impressive game. I probably won't play it as I don't like MMORPGs, but I did really enjoy his earlier work in the Wing Commander series.

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

#94

Post by acemarke »

aeturnum wrote: post #54

The Star Citizen tech is really impressive looking. I love watching their demo videos because they just look amazing. Their development process seems inefficient from afar. They've switched engines at least once, maybe twice? They've announced titles that then kind of fade into the background. They build really detailed systems for simulating light / gravity / thrust in ways that seem impressive & unrelated to gamepl…

They never actually "switched engines".

They've been on CryEngine since the beginning. They've heavily customized large portions of it, to the point that I think one of the devs estimated it was only 50% original code left. They also actually bought a full license to the CryEngine source, and stopped taking any real updates from new versions of CryEngine as the codebases diverged.

They did recently announce that they were "switching" to Amazon's Lumberyard engine, but Lumberyard is itself a particular fork of CryEngine. The switch was primarily about branding and sponsorship. CryTek has been having serious financial issues, while Amazon is busy putting resources into Lumberyard. CIG also just switched all their backend cloud computing from GCE to AWS, and I'm sure they're getting a deal on AWS costs as part of the switch from "CryEngine" to "Lumberyard".

If by "titles that fade into the background" you mean the Squadron 42 single-player campaign... yes and no. Yes, they've been deliberately very quiet about that, because as a single-player game they'd like it to actually be meaningfully new and interesting on release. Also yes, backers are getting a bit antsy wondering where SQ42 progress actually stands at this point. However, it's not like they've abandoned development on SQ42.

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

#95

Post by fapjacks »

kelvin0 wrote: post #86
fapjacks wrote: post #69

I'm a High Admiral backer from November of 2012, and I feel like I've got my money's worth, and I'm not really concerned about the opinions of people that haven't put skin in the game. "This game is taking forever to be developed!" I suppose if your frame of reference is every blockbuster made by every enormous shitty studio conglomerate, sure. But saddle up or shut up as far as I'm concerned. Play what's available,…

As a High Admiral backer, you could also be a in High Commitment Bias? Not trying to be offensive. https://www.aqr.org.uk/glossary/commitment-bias

I thought about preempting your post specifically, because every time I mention that I've put investment into the game, someone mentions it. I think if you dig into my post history, you will find about six posts exactly like yours, link to more information included. Let me put it this way: I don't gamble with the rent money. That money is gone, and I'm not counting on a return. This is the way I think when it comes to this kind of thing, because any gains I see are a wonderful surprise. I started changing my psychology when I started going to war in my twenties: As I went out expecting to get hit, it was always a wonderful surprise when we didn't. It's pretty cool how that works for funding Kickstarter projects!

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

#96

Post by acemarke »

wavefunction wrote: post #43
tyingq wrote: post #30

If most of that $148M came in via KickStarter, their cut is 5%, so almost $7.5 million, on a single project. Really good ROI for a low-to-medium complexity website, and a company of 129 employees.

CIG raised about $6,000,000 on KickStarter if I recall correctly. Almost all of the crowdfunds came after they moved off KickStarter to their website: robertsspaceindustries.com

Off the top of my head, the initial month of crowdfunding raised approximately $6.5M, with roughly $2.5M via Kickstarter and $4M via the RSI website.

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

#97

Post by giobox »

fgonzag wrote: post #73
giobox wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big a 'cut' does Roberts himself take as well? Given this endeavor is built entirely on the charity of the backers, I would really hope he isn't taking a percentage, but sadly wouldn't be surprised either if he is.

Why wouldn't he? All you are doing is buying something unreleased for a discount because of the built in risk. He gets to do whatever he wants with the money left over as long as he meets the stated goals.

I think many people would argue that ethically/morally it's somewhat questionable - he's taken donations, not investment, and as such lacks any of the oversight/due diligence external investment usually attracts. Similarly, I doubt even a majority of backers actually understand the business/charity model they are putting money into - that we are now at 9 figures certainly suggests these are not "sophisticated investors".

Was keeping a large amount of the cash for himself a stated goal? probably not, hence my curiosity. His business occupies a grey area between business endeavor and charity. Me in his shoes, I'd sure as hell feel bad taking a chunk of the donations. I'd have no issue with him pocketing the profits of traditional sales, should he ever reach that point - no one who donated was under the illusion a return would occur, but they should perhaps quite rightly expect that their donation at least pay for development, not lining Robert's pockets.

I think it's also debatable the extent to which backers have "bought" anything, let alone received a discount.

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

#98

Post by jontro »

chc wrote: post #84
abritinthebay wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. That's actually a better metric in most cases if you a) trust the person saying it and b) trust their ability to review friends choices. Quite frankly I find Steam reviews to be one of the worst possible metrics and would trust the octopus that picked world cup winners more than Steam reviews.

> That's actually a better metric in most cases if you a) trust the person saying it and b) trust their ability to review friends choices. How so? Whether or not I trust someone has no obvious bearing on whether their opinion closely matches the general consensus. For example, I know someone who likes the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead better than the original. I absolutely believe her on this point. But it…

Feels like the conversation got pretty off topic. If a game is entertaining is a matter of personal preference of course.

It's another thing entirely to call a game a scam.

Looking at the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/ it looks like there is a healthy community playing a lot and game updates are released regularly.

My initial point was to give a different view and to try to stop the negative feedback loop this game always gets.

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

#99

Post by enraged_camel »

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 is understandable, but there are people who have spent hundreds, or even thousands of dollars buying various virtual goods in the yet-to-be-released game. I'm not so sure they will feel equally satisfied if (or, at this rate, when) the game goes kaput.

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

#100

Post by acemarke »

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 presentations have included employee counts over time, so you could dig up the exact numbers if you wanted to. I _think_ they had roughly 50 at the end of 2013, and maybe 150-ish at the end of 2014?

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