6 ms·

Star Citizen has officially reached half a billion in funding

37 points by mdotk 4y ago

marcooliv 4y ago
I aways wanted to play this AMAZING GAME. But it seems that they CANNOT deliver something. This is really weird. Is this game playable?
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  There's videos of it being playable online but it's not complete yet.
- gdulli 4y ago
  If they have an audience already willing to give them money, why wouldn't they keep that going indefinitely? What changes if they release a game? The reviews will inevitably not live up to inflated expectations. And the other change would be that they'd have to start giving a relatively predatory cut to Steam. Compared to their payment processor or crowdfunding platform fees now.
  - klipt 4y ago
    Yeah, reminds me of the Silicon Valley quote about how revenue is never enough and it's better to be a "pre-revenue" pure play. Star Citizen is a "pre-product" pure play.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- everyone 4y ago
  I'm a game dev and have been following this since the idea for this game was 1st publicized. It's like the ultimate case study in the sunken cost fallacy. Roberts was 100% in charge and made some utterly boneheaded technical decisions at the beginning (the main one being use cry-engine). And despite having many opportunities and many years they've just kept going. More details. So Roberts initially funded a visual demo, which was made in cry-engine. He hired a bunch of 3d-artists to make cool models. Using this visual-demo he got a shittonne of crowdfunding in 2012. It was at this point that he should have dumped the demo and hired an amazing lead-dev who would figure out how they would build this game for real. Instead Roberts kept this cryengine visual demo, and hired a tonne of people who started haphazardly adding more stuff on top of the demo. So, it was really at that point the project became doomed, its been walking dead for ten years.
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    >It's like the ultimate case study in the sunken cost fallacy If you have 5 or so hours to kill, there's actually a great video series about the game called Sunk Cost Galaxy: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCcJKZHHY0E https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCc...
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    I know this doesn't always scale, but in my experience it's best to get a game to the playable state before you can really know if it's going to in fact be fun. Otherwise you're just a pitchman trying to sell/hype an idea. And ideas as we know are easy.
  - noahtallen 4y ago
    An important bit of color is that the people who funded the game wanted CIG to go the route of more scope but taking a long time, rather than getting a lesser game more quickly. And this continues to be the general feeling of the community as I understand it. (Including myself for that matter!) Doomed is also strong language — the company has clearly grown significantly and crowdfunding is clearly working to sustain it financially until they release the single player game. The alpha is bigger and better performing than ever. It’s not exactly dying :) Certainly, I won’t disagree that the project has suffered from severe management, planning, and communication issues over the years. I chalk that partly up to CIG being a new company without established processes working in a unique environment (it’s rare for a big MMO to have to support a live environment while gamedev isn’t close to complete), and partly up to massive scope creep. Anyways, I’ve easily gotten my $45 back in enjoyment of the alpha, so I’m not salty about it.
    - throwaway743 4y ago
      Dude, it's a dysfunctional pile of shit that requires a high-end gpu and connection. If they focused on improving the game's initial loading times, cutting down on a hate inducing amount of lag, and making the elevators actually render reliably for everyone at any time, instead of bullshit like focusing on making bed sheets have realistic physics, then alright. Until then, it's a barely playable piece of shit of a digital paper weight. It boils my blood just thinking about how shitty the experience they provide is.
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  Well you can sort of play it, it just doesn't feel like a half billion budget game. Of course, since they are constantly moving the goalposts and making the scope of that game bigger, they will never actually deliver everything they promised.
- ehnto 4y ago
  They had to build a company from scratch and are making two games in parallel. The open development nature of the game also slows it down a lot. They were idiots to promise anything deliverable within 5 years, but I am not surprised at how long it is taking. Big games are hard, big companies are slow.
- throwaway743 4y ago
  Barely playable. Forget the name of the location, but when I tried playing again about a month or two ago, I tried moving from the wake up point to the elevator to head out to the lobby. The elevator never rendered and it's the only way out. This has been going on since first playing it some years ago, and it requires reloading the game which takes ~10-15 minutes. When the game works and you're not experiencing lag, it's fun, but yeah it's still essentially a digital paper weight unless you have a rtx 20 or 30 series and a gigabit connection... Oh and rather than putting focus on making the game actually playable, one of their recent dev goals was making bed sheets have more realistic physics... this kind of shit is a joke.
  - JeremyReimer 4y ago
    I had even less luck than this with the elevator. I couldn't open the door! Apparently it's unlike every other video game in existence, where door opening is a matter of a) walking up to the door, or at worst b) walking up to the door and hitting a button. But in Star Citizen, someone apparently coded an elaborate "door opening simulator" that requires you to switch modes and active your arm and do something complicated. I tried reading all the button prompts, and hit all the buttons, and I was able to open the door once, but then I was sent to another lobby with another elevator door and that one I couldn't open. I was an original backer. Years ago I was able to get to the hangar and fly my basic ship around and shoot aliens and asteroids. Today I'm confounded by doors. I expect that when I try the game again in a few years, I'll probably have to read tutorials about how to make my character breathe and blink his eyelids.
    - cool_dude85 4y ago
      This is fake right? You enter a minigame to move your digital index finger around on the keypad sim and punch in the right opening code for the class of ship you're on and its commanding officer? And people paid 500 million bucks for this?
      - JeremyReimer 4y ago
        EDIT: It looks so easy in that video! I'm not sure why I had so many problems opening the door, but I did. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just wait a few more years to see if the game gets better first, though. I suspect that the rationale for adding more and more complicated systems is to increase the sunk cost fallacy for existing players, who will have invested increasing amounts of time into learning how they all work. (And perhaps, to make everything seem less like a video game and more like a "real life simulation"). There is no way that a new player would do anything but bounce right off this game, but perhaps that is by design.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I'm waiting for Star Citizen II. In my mind it is even more amazing still.
Multicomp 4y ago
What a colossal waste of money. Thor: Love and Thunder had a budget of half that, and that film is a classic contender for 'Big Blockbuster Budget Franchise Film' fame. I could build an entire theme park for that amount of money, from scratch. 10+ Roller coasters, footpaths, restrooms, in-park IT offices, the works! Why spend so much but not complete the game? Because the gravy train keeps rolling. Game studios are motivated to ship the game because until they ship, they don't get paid as a company, yet the employees keep drawing paychecks, etc. But this studio has no motivation to do that, they are getting the pay out now.
- ehnto 4y ago
  Edit: to be clear, I am implying SC stands to make much more than 50mil a year, much like GTAV and COD make multiples of their development cost year over year. /edit They still have that incentive, because SQ42 is a standalone game they intend to sell to a broader market and SC is an MMO "forever game" they intend to monetize. If you think 500m is a lot, go look at how much money games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto Online make year over year. 500m over 10 years is 50m a year, and not in profit. Blockbuster games are making much more than that much more quickly. To say nothing of the billions in scummy phone game microtransactions. Cloud Imperium Games is multiple offices and 700+ employees, if the intent really was to not release they definitely don't need that many people sucking down wages. It's not like a VC scam where they can trick investors with headcount growth.
  - lelandfe 4y ago
    > If you think 500m is a lot, go look at how much money games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto Online make GTA V had production costs of $265 million and was the world’s most expensive video game when it was released.[0] GTA budget vs cities’ operating costs quiz at the time: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevintang/gta-vs-production-budget-vs-a-real-citys-budget https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevintang/gta-vs-produc... $500 million in funding is, yes, a lot of money. [0] https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/1466/most-expensive-video-games-of-all-time/ https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/1466/most-expensive-video...
mwnivek 4y ago
Bigger discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32916496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32916496
extesy 4y ago
It's a different development model now. They've long passed the single payment kickstarter-style model and are monetizing existing players. For comparison, Clash of Clans gets over a billion/year revenue [1] but nobody calls it "funding" despite that money being used for further development of the game. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/clash-of-clans-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/clash-of-clans-statistic...
ppeetteerr 4y ago
It’s going to be the Hagia Sophia of video games
- throwaway743 4y ago
  So a relic of the past?
stephc_int13 4y ago
I see this project as an experiment. Despite what some people are feeling, this is not a scam, they really are building something. It is difficult to predict if it will reach 1.0 status one day, or if it will be any good, but the whole process is extremely interesting. This is much more ambitious than a simple game, the goal is not to build a few hours of entertainment, but a much more permanent space-sim "metaverse". I could see them being bought by Microsoft of Nvidia at some point.
shmerl 4y ago
Huge amount of money for a game. I'm waiting for Vulkan renderer and Linux version. I wonder if they'll reach it before a billion.
throwaway743 4y ago
*yells to sky* Fix the god damn elevators already!
Fomite 4y ago
My usual conversion - 267 full modular budget NIH R01 equivalent grants, including 50% overhead.
cabaalis 4y ago
> Star Citizen gathers its funding from players by selling in-game space ships. How is this called "funding" and not just "sales" or "dlc?"
- cool_dude85 4y ago
  My understanding - second hand, to be fair - is that the space ships do not actually exist in game. It's more like a promise that they will make you a badass space ship when the game's done.
  - autoconfig 4y ago
    This is incorrect. There may be exceptions but ships that are bought exist in game and can be used right away.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    I would say most of them exist now, not all though. Another misconception is that there's nothing "to show" for all this money yet, but they have been maintaining a playable alpha for years now and the development has been very open, detractors love to neglect the huge body of information that's available on the game's development to understand the situation better. It's one of the best multiplayer space games to play already, more content than some fully released games.
duped 4y ago
At a certain point we'll realize if Star Citizen is the Notre Dame or La Sagrada of video games.
reindeerer 4y ago
You could actually go to space several times for this cash
magic_hamster 4y ago
I backed this game when the original Kickstarter happened. That was ten years ago. A whole decade! The game is a victim of its own successful funding campaign. I wonder who it's even for anymore. Is anyone actually playing the early demos they put out?
ehnto 4y ago
I honestly thought that HN of all places could appreciate the two big factors of this project: A) It's a moonshot by an unproven company. B) Software development is hard, it's two massive software projects, to say nothing of all the creative disciplines involved I'm also surprised people here, in Venture Capital land, are worried over 500m being "wasted" to wages to produce the game, something that people can already play and have gotten returns for their money from. Maybe if we could be half as grass-roots down to earth individuals when evaluating startup ideas we wouldn't have a bright future in NFT powered Metaverse Real Estate salesmen knocking down our virtual doors.

37 points by mdotk 4y ago

I aways wanted to play this AMAZING GAME. But it seems that they CANNOT deliver something. This is really weird. Is this game playable?

edmcnulty101 4y ago
There's videos of it being playable online but it's not complete yet.
gdulli 4y ago
If they have an audience already willing to give them money, why wouldn't they keep that going indefinitely? What changes if they release a game? The reviews will inevitably not live up to inflated expectations. And the other change would be that they'd have to start giving a relatively predatory cut to Steam. Compared to their payment processor or crowdfunding platform fees now.
- klipt 4y ago
  Yeah, reminds me of the Silicon Valley quote about how revenue is never enough and it's better to be a "pre-revenue" pure play. Star Citizen is a "pre-product" pure play.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
everyone 4y ago
I'm a game dev and have been following this since the idea for this game was 1st publicized. It's like the ultimate case study in the sunken cost fallacy. Roberts was 100% in charge and made some utterly boneheaded technical decisions at the beginning (the main one being use cry-engine). And despite having many opportunities and many years they've just kept going. More details. So Roberts initially funded a visual demo, which was made in cry-engine. He hired a bunch of 3d-artists to make cool models. Using this visual-demo he got a shittonne of crowdfunding in 2012. It was at this point that he should have dumped the demo and hired an amazing lead-dev who would figure out how they would build this game for real. Instead Roberts kept this cryengine visual demo, and hired a tonne of people who started haphazardly adding more stuff on top of the demo. So, it was really at that point the project became doomed, its been walking dead for ten years.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  >It's like the ultimate case study in the sunken cost fallacy If you have 5 or so hours to kill, there's actually a great video series about the game called Sunk Cost Galaxy: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCcJKZHHY0E https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCc...
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  I know this doesn't always scale, but in my experience it's best to get a game to the playable state before you can really know if it's going to in fact be fun. Otherwise you're just a pitchman trying to sell/hype an idea. And ideas as we know are easy.
- noahtallen 4y ago
  An important bit of color is that the people who funded the game wanted CIG to go the route of more scope but taking a long time, rather than getting a lesser game more quickly. And this continues to be the general feeling of the community as I understand it. (Including myself for that matter!) Doomed is also strong language — the company has clearly grown significantly and crowdfunding is clearly working to sustain it financially until they release the single player game. The alpha is bigger and better performing than ever. It’s not exactly dying :) Certainly, I won’t disagree that the project has suffered from severe management, planning, and communication issues over the years. I chalk that partly up to CIG being a new company without established processes working in a unique environment (it’s rare for a big MMO to have to support a live environment while gamedev isn’t close to complete), and partly up to massive scope creep. Anyways, I’ve easily gotten my $45 back in enjoyment of the alpha, so I’m not salty about it.
  - throwaway743 4y ago
    Dude, it's a dysfunctional pile of shit that requires a high-end gpu and connection. If they focused on improving the game's initial loading times, cutting down on a hate inducing amount of lag, and making the elevators actually render reliably for everyone at any time, instead of bullshit like focusing on making bed sheets have realistic physics, then alright. Until then, it's a barely playable piece of shit of a digital paper weight. It boils my blood just thinking about how shitty the experience they provide is.
throw_m239339 4y ago
Well you can sort of play it, it just doesn't feel like a half billion budget game. Of course, since they are constantly moving the goalposts and making the scope of that game bigger, they will never actually deliver everything they promised.
ehnto 4y ago
They had to build a company from scratch and are making two games in parallel. The open development nature of the game also slows it down a lot. They were idiots to promise anything deliverable within 5 years, but I am not surprised at how long it is taking. Big games are hard, big companies are slow.
throwaway743 4y ago
Barely playable. Forget the name of the location, but when I tried playing again about a month or two ago, I tried moving from the wake up point to the elevator to head out to the lobby. The elevator never rendered and it's the only way out. This has been going on since first playing it some years ago, and it requires reloading the game which takes ~10-15 minutes. When the game works and you're not experiencing lag, it's fun, but yeah it's still essentially a digital paper weight unless you have a rtx 20 or 30 series and a gigabit connection... Oh and rather than putting focus on making the game actually playable, one of their recent dev goals was making bed sheets have more realistic physics... this kind of shit is a joke.
- JeremyReimer 4y ago
  I had even less luck than this with the elevator. I couldn't open the door! Apparently it's unlike every other video game in existence, where door opening is a matter of a) walking up to the door, or at worst b) walking up to the door and hitting a button. But in Star Citizen, someone apparently coded an elaborate "door opening simulator" that requires you to switch modes and active your arm and do something complicated. I tried reading all the button prompts, and hit all the buttons, and I was able to open the door once, but then I was sent to another lobby with another elevator door and that one I couldn't open. I was an original backer. Years ago I was able to get to the hangar and fly my basic ship around and shoot aliens and asteroids. Today I'm confounded by doors. I expect that when I try the game again in a few years, I'll probably have to read tutorials about how to make my character breathe and blink his eyelids.
  - cool_dude85 4y ago
    This is fake right? You enter a minigame to move your digital index finger around on the keypad sim and punch in the right opening code for the class of ship you're on and its commanding officer? And people paid 500 million bucks for this?
    - JeremyReimer 4y ago
      EDIT: It looks so easy in that video! I'm not sure why I had so many problems opening the door, but I did. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just wait a few more years to see if the game gets better first, though. I suspect that the rationale for adding more and more complicated systems is to increase the sunk cost fallacy for existing players, who will have invested increasing amounts of time into learning how they all work. (And perhaps, to make everything seem less like a video game and more like a "real life simulation"). There is no way that a new player would do anything but bounce right off this game, but perhaps that is by design.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I'm waiting for Star Citizen II. In my mind it is even more amazing still.

Multicomp 4y ago

What a colossal waste of money. Thor: Love and Thunder had a budget of half that, and that film is a classic contender for 'Big Blockbuster Budget Franchise Film' fame. I could build an entire theme park for that amount of money, from scratch. 10+ Roller coasters, footpaths, restrooms, in-park IT offices, the works! Why spend so much but not complete the game? Because the gravy train keeps rolling. Game studios are motivated to ship the game because until they ship, they don't get paid as a company, yet the employees keep drawing paychecks, etc. But this studio has no motivation to do that, they are getting the pay out now.

ehnto 4y ago
Edit: to be clear, I am implying SC stands to make much more than 50mil a year, much like GTAV and COD make multiples of their development cost year over year. /edit They still have that incentive, because SQ42 is a standalone game they intend to sell to a broader market and SC is an MMO "forever game" they intend to monetize. If you think 500m is a lot, go look at how much money games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto Online make year over year. 500m over 10 years is 50m a year, and not in profit. Blockbuster games are making much more than that much more quickly. To say nothing of the billions in scummy phone game microtransactions. Cloud Imperium Games is multiple offices and 700+ employees, if the intent really was to not release they definitely don't need that many people sucking down wages. It's not like a VC scam where they can trick investors with headcount growth.
- lelandfe 4y ago
  > If you think 500m is a lot, go look at how much money games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto Online make GTA V had production costs of $265 million and was the world’s most expensive video game when it was released.[0] GTA budget vs cities’ operating costs quiz at the time: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevintang/gta-vs-production-budget-vs-a-real-citys-budget https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevintang/gta-vs-produc... $500 million in funding is, yes, a lot of money. [0] https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/1466/most-expensive-video-games-of-all-time/ https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/1466/most-expensive-video...

mwnivek 4y ago

Bigger discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32916496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32916496

extesy 4y ago

It's a different development model now. They've long passed the single payment kickstarter-style model and are monetizing existing players. For comparison, Clash of Clans gets over a billion/year revenue [1] but nobody calls it "funding" despite that money being used for further development of the game. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/clash-of-clans-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/clash-of-clans-statistic...

ppeetteerr 4y ago

It’s going to be the Hagia Sophia of video games

throwaway743 4y ago
So a relic of the past?

stephc_int13 4y ago

I see this project as an experiment. Despite what some people are feeling, this is not a scam, they really are building something. It is difficult to predict if it will reach 1.0 status one day, or if it will be any good, but the whole process is extremely interesting. This is much more ambitious than a simple game, the goal is not to build a few hours of entertainment, but a much more permanent space-sim "metaverse". I could see them being bought by Microsoft of Nvidia at some point.

shmerl 4y ago

Huge amount of money for a game. I'm waiting for Vulkan renderer and Linux version. I wonder if they'll reach it before a billion.

throwaway743 4y ago

*yells to sky* Fix the god damn elevators already!

Fomite 4y ago

My usual conversion - 267 full modular budget NIH R01 equivalent grants, including 50% overhead.

cabaalis 4y ago

> Star Citizen gathers its funding from players by selling in-game space ships. How is this called "funding" and not just "sales" or "dlc?"

cool_dude85 4y ago
My understanding - second hand, to be fair - is that the space ships do not actually exist in game. It's more like a promise that they will make you a badass space ship when the game's done.
- autoconfig 4y ago
  This is incorrect. There may be exceptions but ships that are bought exist in game and can be used right away.
- ehnto 4y ago
  I would say most of them exist now, not all though. Another misconception is that there's nothing "to show" for all this money yet, but they have been maintaining a playable alpha for years now and the development has been very open, detractors love to neglect the huge body of information that's available on the game's development to understand the situation better. It's one of the best multiplayer space games to play already, more content than some fully released games.

duped 4y ago

At a certain point we'll realize if Star Citizen is the Notre Dame or La Sagrada of video games.

reindeerer 4y ago

You could actually go to space several times for this cash

magic_hamster 4y ago

I backed this game when the original Kickstarter happened. That was ten years ago. A whole decade! The game is a victim of its own successful funding campaign. I wonder who it's even for anymore. Is anyone actually playing the early demos they put out?

ehnto 4y ago

I honestly thought that HN of all places could appreciate the two big factors of this project: A) It's a moonshot by an unproven company. B) Software development is hard, it's two massive software projects, to say nothing of all the creative disciplines involved I'm also surprised people here, in Venture Capital land, are worried over 500m being "wasted" to wages to produce the game, something that people can already play and have gotten returns for their money from. Maybe if we could be half as grass-roots down to earth individuals when evaluating startup ideas we wouldn't have a bright future in NFT powered Metaverse Real Estate salesmen knocking down our virtual doors.