Star Citizen Goes to Kickstarter

[Andy Chalk]

Star Citizen Goes to Kickstarter

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Chris Roberts is taking his new game to Kickstarter.

Cloud Imperium Games is crowdfunding its ambitious new game Star Citizen but unlike most such projects, it eschewed Kickstarter in favor of a completely stand-alone financing campaign. "By building a crowd funding component directly into our site we can insure everyone who wants to back the game can - we provide multiple payment options to make sure that wherever in the world you are there is an option that can work for you," the Star Citizen FAQ says. "Kickstarter, as great as it is, can't deliver this experience."

The enthusiasm of long-suffering joystick jockeys quickly overwhelmed the RSI servers but even so, it's still managed to raise more than $1 million in a fairly short period of time. Yet even as that total continues to tick upwards, Roberts revealed yesterday that the team was giving Kickstarter another look [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/120162-Star-Citizen-Studio-Reconsiders-Kickstarter] - and it didn't take long for the decision to be made.

The Star Citizen Kickstarter launched earlier today with a relatively modest goal of $500,000. The pledge tiers appear to be largely the same as what's on offer at the Roberts Space Industries website, as is the Kickstarter pitch video, but that's not terribly surprising given the breadth of ground the Star Citizen site already covers. It's not "new" so much as it just another path to the same place, a path that will presumably expose the game to a much wider potential audience.

You certainly can't blame a guy for wanting to open up new revenue streams but given the success Star Citizen is having as a solo act, I can't really imagine what would prompt Roberts to make the move to Kickstarter now. Well, I can imagine one reason, but suggesting that RSI was simply trying to stay out of the way of the Project Eternity behemoth would be a little cynical, wouldn't it?

In any event, if you've been anxious to throw some money at this thing but nervous about doing it outside the warm, friendly confines of Kickstarter, your problems are now solved. It gives you a bit of a deadline extension, too: The Roberts Space Industries internal fundraising effort comes to an end in 22 days, but the Star Citizen Kickstarter [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen] runs for 31 days.

Permalink

 

[cerebus23]

I somewhat imagine that people might feel a tad more comfortable giving to ks vs a guy that has not made a game in forever. Seem to recall when he kicked it off people bashing the guy for not having done anything in recent memory.

mechwarrior online certainly seemed to have proven you can go it alone and do it just fine. granted it had a pretty solid base built into the games fan base, but then again i think space sims have an equal fan base, so 1 million raised on their own seems a tad lacking.

hope this game is as epic as it can be, lord knows that x3 is not for everyone, evochron mercinary is pretty amazing (especially considering how small it is. and people still pine over freelancer as a god among them all.

 

[VladG]

God I hope this game gets made and it's even half as good as the hype. I loved Starlancer and I loved Freelancer and there are aspects of EVE Online that I love... And Star Citizen feels like all of them.

 

[IrradiatedFish]

I'm glad you guys keep posting articles about this game here. Star Citizen needs to be known! It must be a success! I'm desperately craving for the game that this has the potential to be!

Either way, I already made my pledge a day after we were able to, and I'm eagerly following any and all news I come across regarding it.

I beg of you people, pledge your support!

Excuse my overwhelming enthusiasm.

 

[Mariner]

If they manage to reach 2mil from crowd funding, they will receive an additional 4mil from private investors.

 

[Jamous]

Tasty, very tasty. Wishing this project the best of luck.

 

[Quazimofo]

So from what i see, and im just asking to be absolutely certain, this is primarily a game where the player pilots fighter craft? and not larger vessels like frigates?

im just asking because i hear comparisons to wing commander, but also EVE Online to a lesser extent.

 

[Kahani]

I somewhat imagine that people might feel a tad more comfortable giving to ks vs a guy that has not made a game in forever.

That would be a bit odd, considering that paying via Kickstarter is still just giving money to the same guy. The only important difference is what happens is the minimum level of funding isn't achieved. With Kickstarter, absolutely nothing happens and no-one loses any money. But by giving directly, people rely on his promise to give the money back and will not get the full amount back because of processing fees (according to Roberts' own statements). How long it is since he made a game is irrelevant, since you're still going to be paying long before you know what the result will be.

So from what i see, and im just asking to be absolutely certain, this is primarily a game where the player pilots fighter craft? and not larger vessels like frigates?

According to the website and videos, you can pilot everything from small fighters to the kilometre long carriers that other players will be landing fighters on.

 

[Ishigami]

After reading thru their KS entry and watching the videos I'm really excited about this.
I just always wonder about the budgets.
Here we have Chris Robest telling me that he can deliver 10 times more visual details than any recent AAA game while still delivering a deep and complex simulation with semi MMO structure and open universe.
WTF?
I mean that is just mind boggling huge statement and how much money do they need? Apparently only 2,5 million dollar.
Wait what? - There are publisher who can't even compare the slightest to these claims and their games costs them up to 20 million dollars.
The same with Eternity.
If you compile the promises of Obsidian it simply amounts to the most gigantic RPG you probably know of and how much money did they want for that? 3,5 Million dollar for the damn whole thing.
Compare that to the budget of DA:O for example.
My guts are telling me that these deals are too good to be true.
I'm not saying these guys are out for scam, no. I'm saying they may miscalculate their budget needs?
Either that or the publishers doing something awfully wrong!

Anyway I'll think about maybe I feel risky and get myself such a 30$ scout pack.

 

[Adrian Herber]

Ishigami: The way that Project Eternity can pull it off is this:
1) The game they are building is isometric view 2D/3D hybrid graphics, which is orders of magnitude cheaper than full 3D first person or 3rd person view
2) They're doing occasional voice acting with most dialog text-only, which is also orders of magnitude cheaper
3) It's an all-star, veteran dev team who can hit the ground running and make the game quickly
4) They are starting with the Unity game engine to build on top of, which provides an awful lot of their technology needs already done, saving huge amounts of time and money
5) With funding up front, traditional project costs like huge marketing budgets and profit for investors are unnecessary
6) And finally, the budget for old isometric RPGs is not public knowledge, it is entirely possible that 3.5mil is comparable to the budgets of old.

I hope that makes sense I haven't looked into Star Citizen in detail yet, but I imagine it will have some similar ways of making money go further.

 

[Scars Unseen]

After reading thru their KS entry and watching the videos I'm really excited about this.
I just always wonder about the budgets.
Here we have Chris Robest telling me that he can deliver 10 times more visual details than any recent AAA game while still delivering a deep and complex simulation with semi MMO structure and open universe.
WTF?
I mean that is just mind boggling huge statement and how much money do they need? Apparently only 2,5 million dollar.
Wait what? - There are publisher who can't even compare the slightest to these claims and their games costs them up to 20 million dollars.
The same with Eternity.
If you compile the promises of Obsidian it simply amounts to the most gigantic RPG you probably know of and how much money did they want for that? 3,5 Million dollar for the damn whole thing.
Compare that to the budget of DA:O for example.
My guts are telling me that these deals are too good to be true.
I'm not saying these guys are out for scam, no. I'm saying they may miscalculate their budget needs?
Either that or the publishers doing something awfully wrong!

Anyway I'll think about maybe I feel risky and get myself such a 30$ scout pack.

A couple of things:

Space games are cheap, relatively speaking. For the purposes of a video game, space is pretty empty, especially when compared to the environments you would see in a game like Crysis or Skyrim. More focus can be put on the ships and stations because there's little else to worry about (asteroid fields, maybe).
-
They aren't starting from scratch. They are using CryEngine 3 as a starting point.
-
Modern technology aside, there is very little that Chris is attempting that he hasn't accomplished before. Mostly just the massive part. Freelancer had people running persistent servers(with one apparently running nonstop for nearly a decade now). This will be on a larger scale, sure, but built on a base that Chris helped shape.
-
Chris won't have to pay for a lot of things that most AAA games must, such as bloated administrative costs, multiplatform support, mass marketing(big one right there), retail distribution, etc...




So given that most of his budget will likely be spent on paying people to do work(well that and servers for the persistent universe), and given that he is unlikely to be commanding a Bioware Austin sized development team(which didn't help SWOTOR become a good game anyway), I'd say that 6 million(2 crowd sourced + 4 invested) is a reasonable sum to turn out the sort of game Chris is talking about.

 

[Wicky_42]

Ishigami: The way that Project Eternity can pull it off is this:
1) The game they are building is isometric view 2D/3D hybrid graphics, which is orders of magnitude cheaper than full 3D first person or 3rd person view
2) They're doing occasional voice acting with most dialog text-only, which is also orders of magnitude cheaper
3) It's an all-star, veteran dev team who can hit the ground running and make the game quickly
4) They are starting with the Unity game engine to build on top of, which provides an awful lot of their technology needs already done, saving huge amounts of time and money
5) With funding up front, traditional project costs like huge marketing budgets and profit for investors are unnecessary
6) And finally, the budget for old isometric RPGs is not public knowledge, it is entirely possible that 3.5mil is comparable to the budgets of old.

I hope that makes sense I haven't looked into Star Citizen in detail yet, but I imagine it will have some similar ways of making money go further.

The closes you got was the engine license - as was stated above, they've licensed Cryengine 3 (so no isometric bullshit for them!). Otherwise it's all completely insane in terms of proposed scale and quality. I'm going to have to assume that there's no single player and little voice acting, because it would be just too incredible to do what they are proposing in that budget... or at least, so one would assume...

 

[Quazimofo]

So from what i see, and im just asking to be absolutely certain, this is primarily a game where the player pilots fighter craft? and not larger vessels like frigates?

According to the website and videos, you can pilot everything from small fighters to the kilometre long carriers that other players will be landing fighters on.

In which case, allow me to go change my pants because it seems a white stain has appeared in the front.

I was intrigued by this from the beginning, but if it IS true that you can pilot from the small fighters to the big ships like in EVE, im sold. This ought to be one of the better games to come out whatever year it is released.

 

[Arakasi]

I'm gonna need a new computer.
A godly computer, made from the corpses of a 1000 other computers.

 

[IndieForever]

Folks, don't confuse the time required to make a 100,000 polygon model with the time to make a 10,000 poly model. It is actually quicker to make the former as that is needed for the latter.

Generally devs will make a high-poly model and then use UV-mapping to create a texture for a low poly model that, from a reasonable distance, emulates the detail of the high quality mesh. SWTOR, for all its faults for example, does this very well.

Most last-gen DX10 cards will handle this with ease, but forget your integrated laptop graphics or budget cards. This game will need some horsepower when it comes to the graphics engine. How they handle LODs, texture memory for the multi-player experience etc., is something I am very interested in.