3 ms·
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 ar
by 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 agoThey 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 agoThey 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 agoThey 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 agoCIG'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.
- fapjacks 8y agoI really enjoy their Bugsmashers series on Youtube, where they walk through fixing code. It's great in its own right, and I'd watch it even if it wasn't about Star Citizen.
- EamonnMR 8y agoThey do have a paid subscription service that pays for promo materials. I suppose it depends on how much you trust the organization to firewall different money sources.