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Crowdfunded Developer of Star Citizen Takes on $46M in Funding at Nearly $500M Valuation

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 25 2018, @04:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the mo-money dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

The story of the game Star Citizen and Cloud Imperium, the company developing it, is almost too ludicrous to believe: a crowdfunding effort to create a space sim of unparalleled size and realism, raising hundreds of millions, with backers paying thousands for ships and gear in a game that's years from release. Yet it's real enough that it just pulled in $42 million in private funding to help bring it closer to release.

[...] A huge amount of work has been done on the game, so this isn't just a colossal con, though there are plenty who think the game, and its first-person shooter counterpart Squadron 42, can't possibly ever fulfill its ambitions and justify the money people have put into it.

That doesn't seem to be the opinion of Clive Calder, founder of Zomba and producer in a variety of entertainment formats, whom Roberts met during a clandestine campaign to solicit funding.

[...] Calder's family office agreed to invest $46 million for a 10 percent stake in Cloud Imperium, which all told puts it near a half-billion valuation. One may very well question the sanity of such a valuation for a company that has not yet shipped an actual product — working prototypes, sure, but not a completed game — but hell, at least they're making something people are excited about. That's got to be worth a couple bucks.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/21/crowdfunded-developer-of-space-sim-star-citizen-takes-on-46m-in-funding-at-nearly-500m-valuation/

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  • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday December 25 2018, @07:43PM (1 child)

    by richtopia (3160) on Tuesday December 25 2018, @07:43PM (#778393) Homepage Journal

    I suspect this may be a good thing. You comment that Roberts is a perfectionist, and while that creates beautiful tech demos it also results in games that are released well past their expected release date. Maybe a new voice in the upper management will push the software to something releasable.

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  • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Tuesday December 25 2018, @09:35PM

    by zocalo (302) on Tuesday December 25 2018, @09:35PM (#778416)
    In terms of getting something out of the door, probably. In terms of the community, I think it's a little more complex. For many the mantras to place placate themselves in the light of ever extending delays are "perfection takes time" and some version of "Chris as Project Dictator is a good thing". Chris relinquishing some control and CIG shipping a less than perfect product as "final" don't exactly gel with that. Then again, another mantra is "Chris is always right", so if Chris say this is a good thing then some will lap it up and any naysayers will get moderated into oblivion, just like happened with all the other significant changes of project direction/management/whatever.
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