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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, 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.