6 ms·

I don't understand all the talk about marketing there. If there is something those products doesn't need more of, then it's marketing. They've made millions s

I don't understand all the talk about marketing there. If there is something those products doesn't need more of, then it's marketing. They've made millions selling digital pictures. It was pretty much brilliant. However the product itself lacks...everything.

danso 8y ago
They've promised an ongoing persistent universe with Star Citizen, with no subscription fees and ongoing updates/upgrades after its official release (whenever that is). How many backers does SC/SQ42 actually have? Isn't it around or less than 2 million? That's a pretty low figure for an AAA game (one that features top acting talent, like Henry Cavill, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Gary Oldman). When SQ42 finally launches in 2020, they'll probably want to expand the userbase, and marketing is an effective way to do that. Even Rockstar, which is a current industry legend with unbeatable name recognition and hype around GTA and RDR, still spends hundreds of millions in advertising.
- zrobotics 8y ago
  They already have most of the market though. What will advertising really do for them, considering that anyone who will even remotely be interested in this game has already heard of it. The population of people who would be willing to play star citizen has to be smaller than the number of people interested in something like red dead or GTA, the original pitch focused on the fact that this game is niche enough to not attract AAA studios. Who will they advertise to, they've attracted enough attention that any potential players have already heard of this project?
  - erikpukinskis 8y ago
    Well, there's the whole market of "people who want the game to exist before they buy it".... seems like a pretty big group.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I am definitely curious how they'll manage to keep post-release funding afloat for all of the server costs and content development. I would expect a game with Star Citizen's server demands to be a subscription title, and I doubt they'll be able to keep selling ships at the rate they have once you can reasonably earn them in-game. (You can now buy ships in-game, but it takes a lot more money than people tend to make right now, and everything gets reset regularly anyways at the moment.)
iamdave 8y ago
However the product itself lacks...everything. I don't know if I, a frequent Star Citizen player and Day 1 backer would say it lacks "everything", and am unsure if your hyperbole was just for dramatic effect but from the first executable to where we are now in Alpha version 3.4 (soon to be 3.5), we have an impressive amount of content-all things considered, especially via in-game locales and systems that have facilitated some incredible emergent gameplay among the player base. The "Jumptown Wars" have been an amazing thing to watch and participate in, and I encourage you to go look through the Star Citizen subreddit to see some of the in-game coordination players are engaging in just to secure a static trading depot on a dead moon (diving deeper into the anecdote rabbit hole: I participated in a 12 ship assault on said depot when a pilot in the player "Organization"-SC's guild system-I'm a member of was shot down by a rival group and requested evac). It's light years from lacking "everything". It's not complete, but it's also not near as empty of an experience as you seem to be suggesting.
- Ralfp 8y ago
  I'm in "stand on the side and enjoy the show" camp myself, but looking at gameplays, the game is not that lacking. Its vertical slice that they can now build upon. I'm not aware if there's dynamic economy or sandbox wideopen yet, but I'm not losing anything holding out and bidding my time for final release.
  - iamdave 8y ago
    I'm not aware if there's dynamic economy Kiiiind of? As in, you can see the framework of how it could work, and to a certain extent, specific actions by one player at-for example-the Grim Hex Orbital station can affect trade for another player, but it's a level of detail I wont bore you with by typing out a gigantic wall of text. But again, it's not fully fleshed out, and lacks a few elements, but it's not nothing, and what it is, is enough to have spawned a trade war among players, which we are having loads of fun with.
- Krasnol 8y ago
  The only impressive thing about this is the exaggeration that is being played out here. Which is also a reason why I don't go to the related subreddit anymore. We are still talking about a absolute minimal part of what the end product is supposed to be and the cheering happening now is related to basic things that are not so bad anymore (FPS, server stability, etc.). Considering the time frame and the budget we're talking about here, its a joke...I wrote "everything" because it depends what the topic is with the fans the product is either not there "because it's Alpha" (even though with the PTU shouldn't it be pre Alpha?) or it's a great product because it's so fun now and so on. So maybe I should have rather said the product is in Shroedingers Box and we don't know what it is. In my opinion it's a terrible abomination and it reflects Roberts career and pretty much the worse things about the gaming industry today. I don't see a single good thing about what is happening there. I just hope nobody, ever will get the idea that this is a way of delivering a game or any kind of product.
bovermyer 8y ago
Saying the product lacks "everything" seems a little weird, considering how much there already is to do in the game. If I had to guess, I'd say you're either not a backer, or you haven't played recently.
- zamalek 8y ago
  Two minutes on YouTube would demonstrate that the game isn't a scam. SC being a scam has become a meme/echo chamber, it doesn't really matter whether or not it's true. The game could launch and people would still call it a scam.
  - iamdave 8y ago
    It's really unfortunate the amount of FUD and cruft being spread about Star citizen, because it's an amazing experience that straddles the line between Simulator and MMORPG incredibly well for the state the game is at currently in the dev lifecycle. I haven't even played Elite:Dangerous in ages since the Alpha 3.1 update came out and Elite is one of my favorite space series of all time
    - Laforet 8y ago
      >FUD I came into this thread looking for the acronym. Thanks for not letting me down. I mean, there are plenty of controversial topics being discussed on the internet, but I only see the F-word being used ad libtum when the topic is either cryptocurrency or Star Citizen. Perhaps these two have more in common than it looks?
wlesieutre 8y ago
They aren’t starting a giant marketing campaign today, but Squadron 42 will need to be advertised as the release approaches. And AAA game advertising budgets are not small. They’re frequently as large or larger than the game’s development costs. For some examples, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3 both had 35 million dollar marketing budgets. Grand Theft Auto V was 128 million. CoD: Modern Warfare 2 was 200 million. Since Roberts promised to only spend the crowdfunding money on game development, all that money has to come from somewhere. That means either signing on with a publisher, or taking outside investment.
- extrapickles 8y ago
  They are completely crowd funded, and with how much they have raised (>$200 million), it would be silly for them to sign with a publisher or seek investment. In the beginning they were looking at signing investors, but they raised enough to not need that. Also, with the 2 million people who have already backed the game, they do not need to do traditional advertisements. They do have a presence at game conferences, and produce quite a bit of video about the development of the game as pretty much their only form of advertising.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    They raised that money in part by saying "We're going to spend this money on game development." I don't think they could turn around and spend $50M of it on advertising without inviting lawsuits.
    - plopz 8y ago
      They also said they were going to raise that money to make a game by 2014. A few people have successfully sued to get refunds but I don't think they care much about the original terms they used when raising money.
      - Laforet 8y ago
        CIG's own legal argument is that they have already shipped the game in the form of 3.0 alpha, thus the ToS was amended to forbid any refund beyond the basic cooling off period following purchase. Challeges has so far not been successful.
13415 8y ago
They might need a lot of marketing to undo the damage that has already been done. I'm one of those who have been super interested in it during the past years but I wouldn't touch Star Citizen with a 10 foot pole now, after those "pay hundreds of dollars for alpha access" horror stories I've heard. And just for the record, despite liking space sims I'm also not planning to pay $27,000 for a starter pack.
- iamdave 8y ago
  I'm also not planning to pay $27,000 for a starter pack. Well the good news is a Star Citizen starter pack these days runs about the same cost as your average AAA game these days, give or take a few bucks.
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    If anyone's wondering, $45 gets you Star Citizen, optional $15 add-on to also get Squadron 42. $60 total for the MMO and the single player game. You can't add SQ42 at that price later, so if you're interested in single player be sure to hit that checkbox.
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  > And just for the record, despite liking space sims I'm also not planning to pay $27,000 for a starter pack. What are you talking about? You can get in for $35. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/game-packages https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/game-packages
  - kingaillas 8y ago
    OP is referring to the $27000 Legatus Pack (seemingly not on offer anymore) which had almost every ship in the game and some other stuff. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/the-legatus-pack/1199988 https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/for...
- munchbunny 8y ago
  I've been following Star Citizen loosely since the first day the original crowdfunding campaign was launched, but I never backed it. The reason is this: at the time, it looked impossibly ambitious. Budget an order of magnitude larger than others, studio without a history, and too many promises of really ambitious game mechanics wrapped into a single package. I think you can't really blame anyone for smelling another Peter Molyneux style story brewing. Since then, I've spent time watching and the main problem is the same one I had with games like Destiny 2 at launch or Elite: Dangerous (played both, wish I had waited two more years). There's a kernel of fun in there, but that's where it ends, and there are plenty of other games out there that have both the kernel of fun and a fleshed out execution. Star Citizen doesn't look bad, it just looks incomplete against its ridiculous ambitions, and I'm lumping this in among games that will probably become complete a few iterations after release. I would much rather have the game as promised, but I've seen this pattern too many times before and there are too many other great games in the meantime for me to hold my breath for it.
otachack 8y ago
I have a free key I received with a graphics card...back in 2010/11 :/
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  One of the AMD ones with the branded Mustang version? If you're not interested in using it, you could probably sell that for around $100. EDIT: this one https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Mustang_Omega https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Mustang_Omega
  - fivefive55 8y ago
    Is that ship really worth that much? I also have an AMD Mustang Omega. I knew it would be special someday!
    - wlesieutre 8y ago
      That seems to be the going price recently, yeah. https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_trades/search?q=Omega https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_trades/search?q=Omega No idea how people handle escrow on those gray market transactions, maybe there are trusted middlemen who will do it for a cut. I’d be iffy on trading a limited edition ship to some random person online.
      - fivefive55 8y ago
        Wow, that's pretty wild, I figured they would be pretty common. I probably would never sell it anyway, but maybe it'll be worth even more by the time the game actually comes out. lol
    - fapjacks 8y ago
      Yes, that is the price that it fetches in the open market! Because enough people feel it provides them with at least that much value in return. For all the weird detractors (who seem hell-bent on telling other people what they should or should not enjoy), Star Citizen is a great game with a great future providing value to a thriving community.
gamblor956 8y ago
It's more of a game than the abomination that is Fallout 76.
mgazzer 8y ago
I am unsure what you mean by everything. The early demos can certainly do more than anything currently on the market...

danso 8y ago

They've promised an ongoing persistent universe with Star Citizen, with no subscription fees and ongoing updates/upgrades after its official release (whenever that is). How many backers does SC/SQ42 actually have? Isn't it around or less than 2 million? That's a pretty low figure for an AAA game (one that features top acting talent, like Henry Cavill, Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, Gary Oldman). When SQ42 finally launches in 2020, they'll probably want to expand the userbase, and marketing is an effective way to do that. Even Rockstar, which is a current industry legend with unbeatable name recognition and hype around GTA and RDR, still spends hundreds of millions in advertising.

zrobotics 8y ago
They already have most of the market though. What will advertising really do for them, considering that anyone who will even remotely be interested in this game has already heard of it. The population of people who would be willing to play star citizen has to be smaller than the number of people interested in something like red dead or GTA, the original pitch focused on the fact that this game is niche enough to not attract AAA studios. Who will they advertise to, they've attracted enough attention that any potential players have already heard of this project?
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  Well, there's the whole market of "people who want the game to exist before they buy it".... seems like a pretty big group.
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
I am definitely curious how they'll manage to keep post-release funding afloat for all of the server costs and content development. I would expect a game with Star Citizen's server demands to be a subscription title, and I doubt they'll be able to keep selling ships at the rate they have once you can reasonably earn them in-game. (You can now buy ships in-game, but it takes a lot more money than people tend to make right now, and everything gets reset regularly anyways at the moment.)

iamdave 8y ago

However the product itself lacks...everything. I don't know if I, a frequent Star Citizen player and Day 1 backer would say it lacks "everything", and am unsure if your hyperbole was just for dramatic effect but from the first executable to where we are now in Alpha version 3.4 (soon to be 3.5), we have an impressive amount of content-all things considered, especially via in-game locales and systems that have facilitated some incredible emergent gameplay among the player base. The "Jumptown Wars" have been an amazing thing to watch and participate in, and I encourage you to go look through the Star Citizen subreddit to see some of the in-game coordination players are engaging in just to secure a static trading depot on a dead moon (diving deeper into the anecdote rabbit hole: I participated in a 12 ship assault on said depot when a pilot in the player "Organization"-SC's guild system-I'm a member of was shot down by a rival group and requested evac). It's light years from lacking "everything". It's not complete, but it's also not near as empty of an experience as you seem to be suggesting.

Ralfp 8y ago
I'm in "stand on the side and enjoy the show" camp myself, but looking at gameplays, the game is not that lacking. Its vertical slice that they can now build upon. I'm not aware if there's dynamic economy or sandbox wideopen yet, but I'm not losing anything holding out and bidding my time for final release.
- iamdave 8y ago
  I'm not aware if there's dynamic economy Kiiiind of? As in, you can see the framework of how it could work, and to a certain extent, specific actions by one player at-for example-the Grim Hex Orbital station can affect trade for another player, but it's a level of detail I wont bore you with by typing out a gigantic wall of text. But again, it's not fully fleshed out, and lacks a few elements, but it's not nothing, and what it is, is enough to have spawned a trade war among players, which we are having loads of fun with.
Krasnol 8y ago
The only impressive thing about this is the exaggeration that is being played out here. Which is also a reason why I don't go to the related subreddit anymore. We are still talking about a absolute minimal part of what the end product is supposed to be and the cheering happening now is related to basic things that are not so bad anymore (FPS, server stability, etc.). Considering the time frame and the budget we're talking about here, its a joke...I wrote "everything" because it depends what the topic is with the fans the product is either not there "because it's Alpha" (even though with the PTU shouldn't it be pre Alpha?) or it's a great product because it's so fun now and so on. So maybe I should have rather said the product is in Shroedingers Box and we don't know what it is. In my opinion it's a terrible abomination and it reflects Roberts career and pretty much the worse things about the gaming industry today. I don't see a single good thing about what is happening there. I just hope nobody, ever will get the idea that this is a way of delivering a game or any kind of product.

bovermyer 8y ago

Saying the product lacks "everything" seems a little weird, considering how much there already is to do in the game. If I had to guess, I'd say you're either not a backer, or you haven't played recently.

zamalek 8y ago
Two minutes on YouTube would demonstrate that the game isn't a scam. SC being a scam has become a meme/echo chamber, it doesn't really matter whether or not it's true. The game could launch and people would still call it a scam.
- iamdave 8y ago
  It's really unfortunate the amount of FUD and cruft being spread about Star citizen, because it's an amazing experience that straddles the line between Simulator and MMORPG incredibly well for the state the game is at currently in the dev lifecycle. I haven't even played Elite:Dangerous in ages since the Alpha 3.1 update came out and Elite is one of my favorite space series of all time
  - Laforet 8y ago
    >FUD I came into this thread looking for the acronym. Thanks for not letting me down. I mean, there are plenty of controversial topics being discussed on the internet, but I only see the F-word being used ad libtum when the topic is either cryptocurrency or Star Citizen. Perhaps these two have more in common than it looks?

wlesieutre 8y ago

They aren’t starting a giant marketing campaign today, but Squadron 42 will need to be advertised as the release approaches. And AAA game advertising budgets are not small. They’re frequently as large or larger than the game’s development costs. For some examples, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3 both had 35 million dollar marketing budgets. Grand Theft Auto V was 128 million. CoD: Modern Warfare 2 was 200 million. Since Roberts promised to only spend the crowdfunding money on game development, all that money has to come from somewhere. That means either signing on with a publisher, or taking outside investment.

extrapickles 8y ago
They are completely crowd funded, and with how much they have raised (>$200 million), it would be silly for them to sign with a publisher or seek investment. In the beginning they were looking at signing investors, but they raised enough to not need that. Also, with the 2 million people who have already backed the game, they do not need to do traditional advertisements. They do have a presence at game conferences, and produce quite a bit of video about the development of the game as pretty much their only form of advertising.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  They raised that money in part by saying "We're going to spend this money on game development." I don't think they could turn around and spend $50M of it on advertising without inviting lawsuits.
  - plopz 8y ago
    They also said they were going to raise that money to make a game by 2014. A few people have successfully sued to get refunds but I don't think they care much about the original terms they used when raising money.
    - Laforet 8y ago
      CIG's own legal argument is that they have already shipped the game in the form of 3.0 alpha, thus the ToS was amended to forbid any refund beyond the basic cooling off period following purchase. Challeges has so far not been successful.

13415 8y ago

They might need a lot of marketing to undo the damage that has already been done. I'm one of those who have been super interested in it during the past years but I wouldn't touch Star Citizen with a 10 foot pole now, after those "pay hundreds of dollars for alpha access" horror stories I've heard. And just for the record, despite liking space sims I'm also not planning to pay $27,000 for a starter pack.

iamdave 8y ago
I'm also not planning to pay $27,000 for a starter pack. Well the good news is a Star Citizen starter pack these days runs about the same cost as your average AAA game these days, give or take a few bucks.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  If anyone's wondering, $45 gets you Star Citizen, optional $15 add-on to also get Squadron 42. $60 total for the MMO and the single player game. You can't add SQ42 at that price later, so if you're interested in single player be sure to hit that checkbox.
theandrewbailey 8y ago
> And just for the record, despite liking space sims I'm also not planning to pay $27,000 for a starter pack. What are you talking about? You can get in for $35. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/game-packages https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/game-packages
- kingaillas 8y ago
  OP is referring to the $27000 Legatus Pack (seemingly not on offer anymore) which had almost every ship in the game and some other stuff. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/forum/3/thread/the-legatus-pack/1199988 https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/for...
munchbunny 8y ago
I've been following Star Citizen loosely since the first day the original crowdfunding campaign was launched, but I never backed it. The reason is this: at the time, it looked impossibly ambitious. Budget an order of magnitude larger than others, studio without a history, and too many promises of really ambitious game mechanics wrapped into a single package. I think you can't really blame anyone for smelling another Peter Molyneux style story brewing. Since then, I've spent time watching and the main problem is the same one I had with games like Destiny 2 at launch or Elite: Dangerous (played both, wish I had waited two more years). There's a kernel of fun in there, but that's where it ends, and there are plenty of other games out there that have both the kernel of fun and a fleshed out execution. Star Citizen doesn't look bad, it just looks incomplete against its ridiculous ambitions, and I'm lumping this in among games that will probably become complete a few iterations after release. I would much rather have the game as promised, but I've seen this pattern too many times before and there are too many other great games in the meantime for me to hold my breath for it.

otachack 8y ago

I have a free key I received with a graphics card...back in 2010/11 :/

wlesieutre 8y ago
One of the AMD ones with the branded Mustang version? If you're not interested in using it, you could probably sell that for around $100. EDIT: this one https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Mustang_Omega https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Mustang_Omega
- fivefive55 8y ago
  Is that ship really worth that much? I also have an AMD Mustang Omega. I knew it would be special someday!
  - wlesieutre 8y ago
    That seems to be the going price recently, yeah. https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_trades/search?q=Omega https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_trades/search?q=Omega No idea how people handle escrow on those gray market transactions, maybe there are trusted middlemen who will do it for a cut. I’d be iffy on trading a limited edition ship to some random person online.
    - fivefive55 8y ago
      Wow, that's pretty wild, I figured they would be pretty common. I probably would never sell it anyway, but maybe it'll be worth even more by the time the game actually comes out. lol
  - fapjacks 8y ago
    Yes, that is the price that it fetches in the open market! Because enough people feel it provides them with at least that much value in return. For all the weird detractors (who seem hell-bent on telling other people what they should or should not enjoy), Star Citizen is a great game with a great future providing value to a thriving community.

gamblor956 8y ago

It's more of a game than the abomination that is Fallout 76.

mgazzer 8y ago

I am unsure what you mean by everything. The early demos can certainly do more than anything currently on the market...