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'Star Citizen' Reaches $200 Million in Funding
Dedicated Star Citizen fans have pushed the game's crowdfunding revenue to a new milestone with the game now having raised over $200,000,000.
Currently playable in an alpha version that's available after purchasing one of the various game packs, the most common starter packs totaling around $45, Star Citizen and its developer and publisher Cloud Imperium Games have been raising money for the game for several years. According to the live stats for Star Citizen's crowdfunding progress, the game has raised $200,024,490 at the time of publishing with exactly 2,121,588 "Star Citizens" contributing to the game. That equates to just over $94 spent on the game per person.
[...] Star Citizen is currently in development and has a playable alpha with no official release date announced for the full game.
It'll come out of Beta around the $1 billion mark.
Also at Wccftech.
Previously: Star Citizen Reaches $100 Million in Crowdfunding, Alpha 2.0 Released
Star Citizen Developers Sued by Crytek
Star Citizen Begins Selling a $27,000 DLC Pack
'Star Citizen' Court Documents Reveal the Messy Reality of Crowdfunding a $200 Million Game (the story was updated with a correction stating that the actual number was a little over $190 million)
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday November 19 2018, @04:19PM (4 children)
Waiting for the flood of Star Citizen apologists of their sunk-costs fallacy "purchase".
I am not calling SC a pyramid scheme yet; but what do you think would happen if people stop paying for more virtual ships? Do you think Roberts would keep developing the game, or would he call it "done" and release it in whatever state it is in?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @05:17PM (3 children)
They're on the forums yet. The scope of the game has grown massive, not to mention people justifying 10+ minute travel times between Crusader and Hurston (which amount to a loading screen that may or may not be randomly interrupted by pirates or a stray asteroid or whatever) with "butbut muh immersion!" and the blind faith that there will be sufficient gameplay surrounding each planet that travel between planets will be rare. (Also the people proclaiming that we'll be spending that travel time performing repairs on our ship or browsing the 30th century blagosphere or engaged in some dumb minigame.) Seems kind of cheesy to me.
All I wanted was Freelancer 2.0 with a dynamic economy, but instead it's like they're trying to build Microsoft Spaceflight Simulator.
Current Star Citizen Roadmap [robertsspaceindustries.com]
Hurston, the first major populated planet (the gas giant Crusader doesn't count, especially since gas mining won't drop until some time next year), along with its major landing zone, Lorville, is finally in the test universe (testing servers), even though we were supposed to get this at the beginning of the year, then it was Q3, and now maybe it'll go to the live servers (the "persistent" universe) after Thanksgiving. Most of the features that were supposed to be in the year-end Q4 release such as the female player, were pushed to Q1 2019. Right now it looks like the only addition to Q4, if there is a Q4 release, will be the Lorville business district, whatever gameplay value that is supposed to have.
Speaking of the Microsoft Spaceflight Simulator approach, I've heard that from the point you spawn in Lorville in the test universe until you can actually fly your ship off the planet is like 5 or 10 minutes or so involving waiting for a train and then riding it. I'll probably log on at some point over the Thanksgiving weekend here and take a look, but honestly it just seems like a pile of meh and introducing needless gameplay delays all because of "muh immersion!".
So yeah, it's a clusterfuck.
Maybe, just maybe, we might get jump point navigation and a second star system some time in 2020, but I'm not keeping my hopes up. It seems like they want to flesh out all the game mechanics in the Stanton system first before at least giving us a bigger universe to putter around in.
I've got $100 sunk in the project, and I realize that even that's way too much. Then I'm left boggling at people who have sunk over a grand in the damned thing or have subscriptions (monthly donations).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @06:48PM
So what is it actually supposed to be in the end? Some kind of souped-up version of Elite?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @07:07PM
The problem is that Star Citizen used crowd-funding, which means they don't just have to please most players, they have to please all funders, by order of funding amount. If a funder wants something you need to provide it. So, they have to have a proper space-flight simulator for that crew, RP elements for those, plenty of exploration opportunities, ships, etc. The problem is that each new thing you add makes the whole thing bigger and complex, which slows development because there are more things to interact properly, to refactor for performance, QA, etc. Then Brooke's law will kick in, and feature creep will only accelerate due to the more manpower. Someone needs to sit Star Citizen down and explain slowly that they cannot please everyone, and then they can do the same to their funders. In many ways, Star Citizen is the poster child for how not to do crowdfunded software. It will be enshrined between Solar "Freakin'" Roadways and Elio Motors, which if they survive, will never be what was promised.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @12:43AM
Maybe the servers are the problem: https://xaya.io/ [xaya.io]