I just don't understand how a game that hasn't even been released yet can possibly be holding an anniversary sale. Or why on earth people would spend $900 on a single item in the sale itself.
can someone explain the logic behind Star Citizen's anniversary sale?
- Thread starter ResonanceSD
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As a matter of fact, I can explain it.
The shower is the fans of Star Citizen, who will throw money at the game until it is released, creating a bizarre situation where the most profitable move for Cloud Imperium is to drag their heels and find any excuse, no matter how bizarre or ridiculous, to ask for more money. Cloud Imperium is the crab, who is just fucking loving this.
Serious Explanation: The people who run Cloud Imperium games are obligated, like any company, to do what is most profitable. The people supporting Cloud Imperium are willing to shell out cash, so Cloud Imperium is taking it with both fist. Capitalism.
The shower is the fans of Star Citizen, who will throw money at the game until it is released, creating a bizarre situation where the most profitable move for Cloud Imperium is to drag their heels and find any excuse, no matter how bizarre or ridiculous, to ask for more money. Cloud Imperium is the crab, who is just fucking loving this.
Serious Explanation: The people who run Cloud Imperium games are obligated, like any company, to do what is most profitable. The people supporting Cloud Imperium are willing to shell out cash, so Cloud Imperium is taking it with both fist. Capitalism.
Well, this IS from the company who are currently being grilled for $900,000 going missing in what everyone watching suspects to be embezzlement, is it any surprise they'd try to milk more money out of the people foolish enough to buy into their snake oil that at this point no one should expect to ever see delivered on?
Oh well at least all this money is employing a lot of people.
I cant wait until it actually does release, since no matter how good it is somebody will be dissapointed and the internet will be a shitstorm. Hell imagine if its actually bad! Crashed servers ahoy!
I cant wait until it actually does release, since no matter how good it is somebody will be dissapointed and the internet will be a shitstorm. Hell imagine if its actually bad! Crashed servers ahoy!
AccursedTheory said:As a matter of fact, I can explain it.
The shower is the fans of Star Citizen, who will throw money at the game until it is released, creating a bizarre situation where the most profitable move for Cloud Imperium is to drag their heels and find any excuse, no matter how bizarre or ridiculous, to ask for more money. Cloud Imperium is the crab, who is just fucking loving this.
Serious Explanation: The people who run Cloud Imperium games are obligated, like any company, to do what is most profitable. The people supporting Cloud Imperium are willing to shell out cash, so Cloud Imperium is taking it with both fist. Capitalism.
Since waiting for SC was taking way too long, I started playing Elite: Dangerous instead. No need to wait for promised gameplay, or a whole lot of other stuff, it's all here. Horizons is even launching tomorrow.
Is that a new development or part of the original Escapist articles? I remember reading about accusations of embezzlement, but I don't remember any exact numbers. I kind of stopped paying attention after the initial furor died on the Escapist.Zontar said:
More on-topic: An anniversary sale for a game not yet released, so it's the anniversary of the kickstarter? I mean I guess that's an anniversary, not sure why you would want to celebrate it though. I really don't understand the appeal of paying for something like this, It's their money, but I'm just not impressed with what I've seen so far.
Seems silly, but if people want to throw their money into it, I'm not going to complain much about it. Given the amount of money, I'm torn between hoping it exceeds all expectations, and wanting it to crash and fail just to enjoy the schadenfreude of the fallout.
New development. I only heard about it yesterday and I think the whole thing has been within the past few days.EternallyBored said:
The Escapist articles stated that those within the company interviewed suspect finances had been misused, but this is the first time we've seen hard numbers of money disappearing.
There's only two possible scenarios for Star Citizen:
A) It's gonna actually deliver on the promises, but the gigantic feature bloat will create the most expensive game ever produced in the history of the industry
B) It's gonna dissapoint in a bombastic way
Either way, the developers don't need to sell a single copy of the game to make a profit, which is never a good thing in a capitalist society.
A) It's gonna actually deliver on the promises, but the gigantic feature bloat will create the most expensive game ever produced in the history of the industry
B) It's gonna dissapoint in a bombastic way
Either way, the developers don't need to sell a single copy of the game to make a profit, which is never a good thing in a capitalist society.
I keep shaking my head at the whole thing... I'll make no further comment because I've exhausted my opinions on the state of the game itself and the shady-seeming practices of CIG.
Because it's an excuse to have a sale?
It's the anniversary of the kickstarter.
Anyway, regardless of what you think of it, there'd be literally no point having a sale like this after development is finished, because you're not supposed to be able to buy the ships with real money in the final game.
So the basis for how a sale like this works would be impossible in that context.
Anyway, it is what it is.
The game has made some important progress in recent time, but, who knows?
The funding model looks inherently dubious, but that's crowd-funding in general isn't it?
Keeping in mind for the claimed scope of this game (or pair of games, considering Squadron 42 is technically an independent game), 3 years isn't enough time to finish a game.
This is MMO and open world game territory. - Closest analogy would be GTA 5 in terms of scale and cost. That took 5 years, I believe. Or perhaps 6...
It's the anniversary of the kickstarter.
Anyway, regardless of what you think of it, there'd be literally no point having a sale like this after development is finished, because you're not supposed to be able to buy the ships with real money in the final game.
So the basis for how a sale like this works would be impossible in that context.
Anyway, it is what it is.
The game has made some important progress in recent time, but, who knows?
The funding model looks inherently dubious, but that's crowd-funding in general isn't it?
Keeping in mind for the claimed scope of this game (or pair of games, considering Squadron 42 is technically an independent game), 3 years isn't enough time to finish a game.
This is MMO and open world game territory. - Closest analogy would be GTA 5 in terms of scale and cost. That took 5 years, I believe. Or perhaps 6...
That's Crowdfunding, you need the money from the player BEFORE the game is released.EternallyBored said:
Because the money is for the development, they have no Publisher or Investor which pays their bills.
The reason why the people believe in CIG is you can things play which was never possible before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC17567Zg8Y
The problem with that line of reasoning is that the company has hired more people then it needs to use a 5 or 6 year development cycle for a similarly sized game. The game is already one of the most expensive ever made, and unless they're massively underpaying their staff they've already burned through almost all the case they had on salaries alone. At this point the game ever seeing the light of day and the company surviving the next few years is itself an open question, to say nothing of the fact that the game delivering on what it has promised is unrealistic.CrystalShadow said:
Are you sure about that? I don't mean cost, I mean people.Zontar said:
http://www.gamechup.com/gta-5-dev-team-size-more-than-1000-manpower-dependent-on-game-detail/
GTA 5 - 1000 people is what they say they needed to make that.
CiG has about 350 employees at the moment? If anything they seem a little understaffed for the scope of their project.
But let's see if we can work out the cost factor. (just very roughly, to get a sense of things. This is far from accurate), let's say 6 years of development, with their funding being at about 100 million, they'd need to keep to about 16 million a year...
Leaving aside other expenses, they have enough to pay about $47,000 a year to 350 staff for 6 years...
If you look into typical industry pay, some people are paid much less, the highest end staff something like twice that...
It's not really that unreasonable honestly...
Not sure what it is you think game developers get paid. The pay for game developers in general has for ages hovered in the region of 70% of the industry norm for that field.
Those numbers seem plausible to me, in terms of what the pay rates would likely average out to.
Even if your lead programmer is being paid $80,000 - that could be balanced out by paying a junior artist something like $20,000
Or whatever.
Anyway, I'm not sure your claims about development team sizes or expenses really add up. Depending on what they spent, they may not have enough for 6 years, but they certainly shouldn't be in major financial trouble already, unless they have had some seriously extreme financial mismanagement...
A day after the cash runs out. Seriously this game will never be released, while the cash is rolling in the game will forever be stuck in a limbo of extended feature creep. The issue with all this is that it means what will eventually be released will not work very well as a whole since it will be pushed out of the door due to their being no more cash left to dedicate to actually testing and bug fixing all these 'modules' to make sure they work together to make a fully formed game.
Someone needs to sit the management down and tell them that all the door opening, running around, air lock, elevator moving bullshit looks nice in the presentation video but when the player has to do this task EVERY single time and perhaps is doing this task several times per gaming session it gets fucking tiresome. I am half expecting a stretch goal of a billion dollars where they will include a feature that lets you scrub your balls in a space shower. Mind you they will be the most realistically hairy balls scrubbed in the best ever looking space shower ever produced in a video game.
Oh and to answer the OP's question, greedy bastards will always be greedy bastards.
Stretch goals/feature creep ended 35 million dollars ago (Not that there isn't an impressive creep back log already).Laughing Man said:
At this point, what they're getting now is either straight up 'cash shop profit,' or 'we fucked up budgeting and need this cash' funding. Neither of those sound great, to be honest.
Yeah their website says that their 65mil stretch goals have been reached however you then read something like this
http://cliqist.com/2015/03/11/star-citizen-stretch-goals-what-where-are-they/
Which says that the team have hinted at future goals to be added.
They could do what Project Cars did and pay back the original investors, if the developers really do have the gamers best interest in mind then what better way to show that than focus the game, make it awesome give the folk the game they have paid for and then pay the folk who invested in the start up some of that cash back, like I said the Project Cars guys did that.
It won't happen because for that top happen you need someone to step up and say enough is enough we have the cash we need lets get this job done but and here's the funny thing, if ALL of their stretch goals have been achieved, what exactly are they paying for now, they have the money to pay for the goals already, that's the whole point of the goals yet the shop front is still selling stupidly overpriced ships for cash, so what's that cash being used for?
That's enough to tell me they're full of it, even if the feature creep and questions about continued funding hadn't come up. The fact they threatened the escapist over the story, then acted like it never happened.anthony87 said:
There was also talk of the escapist having an invitation to tour their studios and talk to the developers and I haven't heard anything of that either.
You see a lot of misunderstanding on the internet of what companies are "obligated to do" for the sake of profit, but this post is a particular bad example.AccursedTheory said:
First of all, Cloud Imperium isn't a publicly traded company. This means they don't have shareholders who can take legal action if they're perceived as not doing everything they can to "maximize profit". They're more likely to be sued by backers for continuing to accept money while never delivering on the game.
What's really grating is that the "obligation" you speak of is usually distorted to excuse any bad behavior on the part of comapanies, whether it be towards consumers, the environment, or what have you. Except there isn't actually any legal obligation to make every conceivable short term cash grab if it hurts the company in the long run.