'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)
Related Stories
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.
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
Back in 2012, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) launched a Kickstarter asking for money to fund Star Citizen—an ambitious space game in the mold of Wing Commander. It's 2018, and while parts of the game are playable in various forms, it's far from achieving what it set out to accomplish. So far, it's collected more than $200 million in funding from fans eager to play it.
Ken Lord was one of those fans, and an early backer of Star Citizen. He's got a Golden Ticket, a mark on his account that singles him out as an early member of the community. In April of 2013, Lord pledged $4,496 to the project. Five years later, the game still isn't out, and Lord wants his money back. RSI wouldn't refund it, so Lord took the developer to small-claims court in California.
It's a simple case of an investor who's upset he didn't get his money back, isn't it?
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @03:21PM (9 children)
Try to launch a crowdfunding campain to raise that kind of money for medical research on cancer or malaria, or environmental solutions, or science research and education, or space exploration, or peace efforts throughout the world, and you would fail miserably.
But for a stinking, worthless, mind-numbing fucking video game, no problem !
There is no hope for humanity. We are a horrible, horrible mistake of nature, a cancer, an evolutionary dead-end.
(Score: 5, Funny) by ikanreed on Monday November 19 2018, @03:49PM (2 children)
"Video game" implies you can play it. Right now it's a fucking "Fly around and show how much you spent on a 3d model" engine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @09:21AM (1 child)
Vegastrike has been beautiful looking, had multiplayer, and as far as I remember supported turrents for... 10+ years now.
I fucked around with the privateer fork of it, with the WCU assets added on top of it it around 2010. My GPU had a hard time keeping up, but it had multiplayer, including turrets, dozens of ships with customizable payloads and Privateer level econ (vegastrike got much better econ within a few years, although it was mostly list based, not 'shiny' 3d objects you could buy and sell.
What it didn't have at the time was customizable skinning or coloring, and there were only a few capital ships available. It also needed some sort of Armada/4X/RTS base or base ship building to be really compelling. Sadly I think interest got lost in it, especially after the main producer of the WCU content went away, right as vegastrike broke all the old data by changing formats.
Maybe someone here can find interested parties to look for the WCU content and privateer-remake sourcecode and finally update it to be compatible with newer vegastrike versions and update it to be graphically compelling, while still matching the original Wing Commander 2D art style (which most of the models did an admirable job of.)
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:24PM
I played Vegastrike in college, and, regardless of mechanics or art or fun, it was atrociously badly written. "%n fighters of faction %s are making trouble in system %s" badly written.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @04:14PM (2 children)
There are all sorts of charitable organizations that each raise hundreds of millions every year to (supposedly) address some medical issue. AHA is nearly a billion each year itself. Most of this goes to unnecessary or needlessly expensive administrative stuff and unreproducible in principle research rather than useful activities. Then there is, of course, the involuntary crowd funding of medical research to the tune of about $30 billion each year. The NIH itself estimates it wastes about $27 billion of that: https://nihrecord.nih.gov/newsletters/2016/07_01_2016/story3.htm [nih.gov]
So, I dont really see why people should give more money to medical research when they are already pissing away tens of billions of dollars of money on worthless stuff in the name of it. At least the video game is something new and nobuddy is being forced to pay into it, yet.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @04:21PM
Because the American Cancer Society has a better chance of curing cancer than Star Citizen has of releasing a game.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @05:22PM
Every company/ charity needs to be good at it or no matter how good their product/ service, they'll die. The only products excluded from this rule are viagra and the immortality pill (whenever it gets developed)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @05:44PM
in a global sense, probably. In more focused projects done by Really Rich People,, targeting other Really Rich People, not so much. Efforts like those done to set up the Knight Cancer Institute do work. ($1 billion or so raised, to match the $500 million given to it initially by Nile's Phil Knight). There are many others brsides this.
Sure, these are not purely altruistic efforts. In the US, you could even cynically say they are merely tax dodges that happen to have a social benefit and/or intent.
Every 3 months or so public broafcasting TV and radio stations in the US re-crowd source their funding...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @12:24AM
Medicine, maintaining the environment, science, education, space exploration, and peace all merely serve to facilitate pleasure.
inb4 a strawman misunderstanding of the word pleasure which excludes something you value, if you feel yourself going that way just read my comment again replacing "pleasure" with "utility".
I'm curious why you think those things you listed have value if you hate humanity so? Surely you should be saying "we can't raise that kind of money to extinct humans" if you truly feel that way.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Tuesday November 20 2018, @01:09PM
Yet it's done all the time. Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you have a clue.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @03:23PM (10 children)
I've never heard 6 years referred to as "several years" before. This is usually around the time that a game company is shipping a finished (or what AAA's consider finished) product. All I see are a few buggy proof of concept alpha builds, a terrible flight model, and lots of fundraising. I think at some point, they decided it was more lucrative to sell the idea of a space game than to actually build one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @04:03PM (1 child)
If they want respectability, they ought to put an end to the fundraising. As it is, they'll never put out a game, no matter how awesome it may be, that will live up anywhere close to the hype of this. "$200M-plus, and this is all they could put out???"
On the other hand, which game was fundraising a bunch of money and they basically said, "Nope, we tried real hard, but we can't do it. Thanks for all the money, though!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @09:26AM
They have shareholders or investors or whatever beyond the 200 million here. So someone else is profiting.
Really for 200 million dollars the game should be DLC/paid content free or even free outside of donation runs for operating costs yearly at the amount of donations they raised.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday November 19 2018, @05:10PM
> I think at some point, they decided it was more lucrative to sell the idea of $product than to actually build one.
A concept so old that even the ill-gotten patents have expired.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @06:57PM (2 children)
Call me an apologist if you like, but I see 6 years development for a major label as "6 years because we already have our infrastructure." Star Citizen started without that - they had to build everything from scratch except for the base engine (which they licensed and STILL had to customize almost beyond recognition... twice.) That includes getting equipment, office locations, hiring people... all those things which the major labels already had in place.
I'll give Chris Roberts and Company a couple more years before I start worrying. They suffer from near-terminal scope creep, but they've pulled off some interesting tricks already.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @10:57PM (1 child)
At some point you have to ship. They are nowhere near ready for that. This is DNF all over again.
What we wanted was another wing commander. What we are getting is privateer 5.0 and taking 6 years to do it. 6 years is an eternity in software development. Consider the rust language did not exist at that point. It now exists and has some fairly awesome tooling around it. That is but one small example of how fast software moves.
They suffer from near-terminal scope creep, but they've pulled off some interesting tricks already
They would have been better off with a small game and adding in expansions and selling those. They would have way more players willing to fork over money. I saw it when it first went up. I had been burned on a couple of other KS's from decent developers before so I took a 'wait and see'. Well I am still waiting. They have been scope creep from pretty much day 1.
This is strike commander and wc3 all over again.
That includes getting equipment, office locations, hiring people... all those things which the major labels already had in place.
Im sorry there are dozens of VC companies that have come and gone in that time. It does *not* in any way take 6 years to set that up. *maybe* a few months (and that is being slow at it).
This dude did a fairly expansive game all by himself. https://stardewvalley.net/ [stardewvalley.net] He did it in 4 years all by himself. With a staff he could have cranked it out faster.
We are being gaslighted that this is not a cluster fuck. A pretty one. But a rolling disaster. Maybe in a couple of years. Because at this point they already should have shipped at least 2 games. Esp with the crew they have had for a few years. Honestly, anyone who is working on it should probably run at this point. It is starting to look like a stain that will not come off their resume.
(Score: 2) by Weasley on Tuesday November 20 2018, @06:08AM
Well, the community did vote to vastly increase the scope of the game.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday November 19 2018, @07:56PM (3 children)
I've never heard 6 years referred to as "several years" before.
Several is more than 2 and less than many, although I personally tend to think more in the 6/7/8 range (where few would be 3/4/5), mainly because of the similarity to "seven".
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/kim-porter-diddys-ex-girlfriend-actress-model-is-dead-at-47/ [cbsnews.com] puts "several years" as about 13.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/grantfreeland/2018/11/19/want-to-get-promoted-when-youre-a-millennial-and-your-boss-is-not-heres-how/amp/ [forbes.com] states several years as being under 10.
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/olympics/winter-olympics/winter-olympic-games-2026-calgary-bid-vote-montreal-stockholm-milan-a8636511.html [independent.co.uk] says "several years" between 1970 and 1976, so about 7 years.
https://www.euronews.com/2018/11/16/batkid-five-years-later-miles-scott-cancer-free-make-wish-n936836 [euronews.com] seems to put several as about 5 years.
6 years being "several years" feels fine to me.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 19 2018, @08:31PM (2 children)
couple (2) < few (3-5) < several (6-9)
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by isostatic on Monday November 19 2018, @09:26PM (1 child)
Tends to be what I usually think. Although "a couple of beers" tends to be more than 2.
XKCD however have different views: https://www.xkcd.com/1070/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @01:40AM
Beer has its own number system and math. You can't just compare beer to real numbers. The number system of beer is so confusing, that it is impossible to make anything other than estimates, once you pass 10.
(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]
(Score: 2) by Revek on Monday November 19 2018, @05:39PM
release something playable.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @08:04PM (4 children)
I am seeing massive scope creep, bad regressions in every new build, half-assed gameplay, bad performance, and no resemblance of a release schedule. I am not sure if they ever will release a game close to what their current scope is.
On the other hand some of the technology that they are building is really good. Graphic fidelity is awesome (yeah performance sucks), they have a whole solar system all in one 'level' with dynamical lighting of planets and moons (in one of the demos a developer just grabbed the moon in the editor and moved it around, and the engine correct calculated lighting including lunar phase). Some of the planned technology is mind boggling (procedural content generation on a planetary level; contrary to Elite:Dangerous it is planned to include vegetation and cities). I hope that they manage to finish that technology.
In the end, even if they fail to produce a game and go insolvent, I hope that the technology and the most competent of the developers will be acquired by other companies and included in their games (which may be a wholly different genre). That would be a ok outcome for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @08:22PM
Fwiw, performance got a lot better with the recent 3.3 release ("Q3" even though it just recently went to the live universe/servers). Object container streaming (OCS) seems to be doing what it was promised to do.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday November 19 2018, @08:35PM (1 child)
The code and assets should be made open source and freely available.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday November 19 2018, @10:15PM
They will not be because it's a good way for devs to get paid twice for same thing. Nobody gonna pass a chance like that..
(Score: 2) by mth on Tuesday November 20 2018, @12:06AM
The usual problem with procedural generation isn't generating content, but generating interesting content. A game like No Man's Sky generates a galaxy full of planets including flora and fauna, but a lot of players found the planets to be dull and samey after playing for a while. Games that do generate interesting content procedurally, such as rogue-likes, typically do so by remixing manually crafted elements rather than generating everything down to the smallest possible building block.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @10:25PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 19 2018, @10:45PM
I am still waiting on the B5 game :(
(Score: 1) by Chromium_One on Tuesday November 20 2018, @01:58AM
Firefly MMO is assumed dead.
No status updates since March 2016
Official website [ https://keepflying.com [keepflying.com] ] has been offline for months now.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @09:21AM
That is a free software or free culture license.
Otherwise it's not an investment but a donation with no strings attached. Now it's almost a moral requirement these people who promised no license will blow it all on blow and hookers.