from the this-game-cost-how-much-to-make? dept.
The space simulation game Star Citizen has reached $100 million in crowdfunding:
Star Citizen continues its reputation as one of the most highly-anticipated, yet controversial games around, mainly because the ambitious space-based game has a large amount of crowdfunding but no final release date. Even with many uncertainties for the game's future, people are still giving the developers money. This past weekend, another milestone was reached as the total funding for Star Citizen passed $100 million.
The timing worked out perfectly, as the game's alpha was updated to version 2.0 this weekend. The latest version finally included some features that early backers thought would come earlier, such as first-person shooting, multi-crew ships (which also means new ships specifically for multiple players), and a new planet to explore (along with some moons and space stations).
[...] The funding for the game started in September 2012. One month later, backers raised $2 million. Since then, the developers put stretch goals if various levels of funding were successful, such as a facial capture system at $22 million, or a new salvage ship at $32 million. However, the goals stopped after the $65 million mark. The last reward allowed developers to work on a modular feature for "any suitable ships" in the game, so that pilots can swap interior and exterior parts to build a spacecraft suitable for combat, mining, bounty hunting, or whatever hobby they wish to partake in the large in-game universe.
The seemingly endless amount of money also allowed the developers to enhance the game's single-player campaign, titled Squadron 42 , with a cast of celebrities such as Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson and Andy Serkis.
Related Stories
As if Star Citizen didn't have enough problems, now its developers are being sued by Crytek:
Star Citizen's lengthy and heavily crowd-funded development has been marked by numerous changes to the project's direction and scope, including a move from Crytek's CryEngine to Amazon's Lumberyard in late 2016. That change is now the focus of a lawsuit from Crytek, which accuses Star Citizen developers Roberts Space Industries (RSI) and Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) of copyright infringement and breach of contract.
The complaint, filed in the US District Court for Central California, lays out how RSI agreed to work exclusively with CryEngine in a 2012 agreement, an agreement it says was broken when RSI moved to Amazon's Lumberyard engine in late 2016.
In a blog post following that transition, RSI's Chris Roberts explained that Lumberyard was essentially a more promising fork of an earlier CryEngine build that fit better as a base for "StarEngine," his name for the "heavily modified" version of CryEngine the developers were then using. "Crytek doesn't have the resources to compete with this level of investment and have never been focused on the network or online aspects of the engine in the way we or Amazon are," Roberts wrote.
Previously: Star Citizen Reaches $100 Million in Crowdfunding, Alpha 2.0 Released
The space simulation game Star Citizen has found a new way to extract money from the crowd:
Crowdfunded space simulation game Star Citizen has launched its $27,000 (£20,000) Legatus Pack, which includes nearly all its spacecraft plus extras.
Only players who have already spent $1,000 in the game can access the pack.
Cloud Imperium, the creators of Star Citizen, has received more than $200m in crowdfunding since launching a Kickstarter campaign for it in 2012.
According to its website it has more than two million players, although the game itself is still in development.
Previously: Star Citizen Reaches $100 Million in Crowdfunding, Alpha 2.0 Released
Star Citizen Developers Sued by Crytek
'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: 3, Insightful) by Dunbal on Tuesday December 15 2015, @11:46AM
Only another $100 million till beta!
(Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Tuesday December 15 2015, @12:35PM
Not because I dislike the game or devs, but because the fanbase is insane.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by beardedchimp on Tuesday December 15 2015, @12:43PM
I find the whole thing quite amusing. I'm pretty much the ideal customer for this game, Wing Commander was my favourite game (along side monkey island and populous) growing up. I played freelancer for years with mods up to my eyeballs.
Yet I'm content to be patient with this and accept it's done when it's done. No need to pay now, they have more than enough money. Maybe it's just a sign of age but I really can't understand why everyone is frothing at the mouth over progress, making games isn't simple.
My ex has been working on their facial animation, does seem like they are a very disorganised bunch.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @01:26PM
"The assault begins Christmas 1991" Strike commander didnt ship until 1993.
He has a history of over ambitious games that ship 1-2 years late.
He almost always delivers a decent product though. From the screenshots and in game play vids it does look amazing. But like you I am going to wait. Also the 'is/isnt an MMO' makes me stand back and think they are trying to do too much. They do not have a clear definition of what they want to do. If it falls on the side of 'is MMO' they will not get any money from me. I do not have that amount of time to devote to a game.
Not sure would this bad boy be the most expensive game ever?
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday December 15 2015, @02:34PM
Not sure would this bad boy be the most expensive game ever?
Well Wikipedia has a list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop [wikipedia.org]
Contenders for "costing more than this", even without inflation:
Star Wars: The Old Republic ($200m)
Destiny ($140m)
Grand Theft Auto V ($137m)
Max Payne 3 ($105m)
GTA 4 ($100m)
Also remember $100m is how much they've raised, not how much it's cost
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @02:44PM
It defiantly is up there. Unfortunately they do not break out marketing and dev costs on all of those.
Good point on cost vs income. Fair point.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday December 15 2015, @03:54PM
This is worrying to me. Chris Roberts is a veteran in the industry and he has hired a lot of talent, but I can imagine that managing a project of this size is difficult for even the large studios, much more so for the Star Citizen team.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Kilo110 on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:08PM
Those numbers are final amounts for AAA released games.
SC is only on alpha 2 and we've no idea what the number will be at release. Assuming it ever gets there.
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:19PM
Squadron 42 is the module to watch for then. I have a feeling the persistent universe will be heavily MMO-oriented.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday December 16 2015, @01:28AM
because the fanbase is insane
In what way? I'm not being a troll, I'm genuinely curious. (Anyway, we all know how mad fanbois of all types can be).
(Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Wednesday December 16 2015, @03:31AM
This Forbes post from yesterday sums it up well. http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/12/14/with-100m-in-crowdfunding-star-citizen-may-not-be-a-scam-but-it-feels-like-a-cult/ [forbes.com]
(Score: 2) by ticho on Tuesday December 15 2015, @01:47PM
I keep wondering whether Roberts wants Star Citizen to be something like OASIS from Ready Player One [wikipedia.org] book.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday December 15 2015, @02:45PM
I've been following this story out of interest. It seems like the massive amount of money went to their heads. They really should have stuck to their original goals, met them, and then gone on to plan more and more features. Had the money stopped at their stretch goals, the project would almost certainly have failed. However, it kept rolling in, and it looks like that may save the project.
I'll grant that the video clips look amazing. What they can't show, of course, is the gameplay. Is it an interesting universe? Do the game mechanics "work"? Is it challenging without being impossible? Is it fun? Time will tell...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 15 2015, @03:08PM
Yeah, but that's boring! Why not do the really cool thing we really wanted to do, and beg people (who are already financially invested in the outcome) for more money, taking advantage of the fact that almost everybody ignores the Sunk Cost Fallacy?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Informative) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:04PM
I haven't given 2.0 quality time yet since I'm not quite done with Fallout. The universe is fairly interesting. There's an entire timeline from the 2000s up through when the game starts in the 30th century. There's been some work fleshing out the general feel of the politics happening in the senate, particularly the Polo initiative, the big recent event being the attack on New Corvo on Aremis/Vega II [wikia.com] and the call for war. There was also a transmission [robertsspaceindustries.com] I read that indicated that the government allowed the attacks to happen or perhaps even conspired with the Vanduul to arrange it.
Also check out the starmap [robertsspaceindustries.com]. There are also regular transmissions describing the different systems in moderate details along with random crap like a transmission that went out to employees of a major mining corporation about safety first.
Gameplay wise it's too early to tell. One problem that players have noticed is that attempting to fly, at least in the earlier releases, with a HOTAS is a non-starter. Unless something major has changed with that, mouse users will dominate ship-to-ship combat (and probably FPS, because, well, everybody knows mouse+keyboard is the only way to play an FPS). I can also confirm. I found myself unable to actually hit any other ships until I switched from HOTAS to mouse. HOTAS is still fun for racing.
A bit of Squadron 42 presumably, a tutorial, was in place before this release. I would say it was moderately buggy, but hey. Look at Fallout 4! I'd say about the same level of bugginess, and integrating custom control mapping into the dialog wasn't quite working correctly.
The space physics is top notch. In fact, that's been one thing so far that has consistently blown me away. When flying, it's clear you're not flying an airplane. Each thruster is simulated, and you can tell when one's been destroyed. I don't know if there's much more to be said here. Head over here [robertsspaceindustries.com] and scroll down to the intelligent flight control system overview.
In general, things were looking shakey there for a while, but everything that's happened over the past few months has made me very excited that this thing really will come together and will be what Freelancer was hyped to be.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Tuesday December 15 2015, @03:49PM
... I hear that station is under quarantine due to an outbreak of Ludus Incompletivus.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:38PM
> with a cast of celebrities such as Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson and Andy Serkis
Seriously, that's where they spend crowdfunding money?
It'd better have the best acting and gameplay ever, to dissipate this impression I get that someone is pulling all the stops just because crowdfunding doesn't usually result in broken kneecaps if money is wasted.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:53PM
Personally, I think it's a perfectly valid place to spend some of that $100M that they got. Gameplay / Mechanics is only Part of the equation when making a fantastic game. Acting / Voice Acting by professionals especially ones that have a huge fan base can certainly be a plus. Story is also a very awesome thing to have. Not necessarily needed in sand box kind of games, but who doesn't love a good story?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 16 2015, @01:39PM
glad we are all here to witness the shark jump for crowd funding.
so many overfunded projects have failed and burned their backers already, but this one will become the classic example of why crowdfunding doesn't work.
Freelancer did everything this game aspires to do and had no fat whatsoever.
>inb4 episodic freelancer reboot