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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: 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.