Star Citizen Hits $49 Million, Still Needs Crowdfunding Support

[Talaris]

The main downside is more funds will push back the final release date. I'm a backer since the kickstarter in 2012, and whilst I'm enjoying the Arena Commander module now most of the bugs have been removed, I'm also wishing I had backed Elite Dangerous back in 2012 too as that's on schedule to release in a few months.

There are people in my guild who paid $1000 for an Idris corvette, which to be honest I think is way too much of a risk to invest if they end up disliking the game, I mean all that gives you is one big ship to pilot.

 

[Karadalis]

so released on most profitable platform, where the space fighter userbase mainly resides. they know which market to pick, the question is only how big is that market.

Yup.. thats the big question. Star citizen is filling up a niche that has been left empty for a while and it could become something akin to the WoW of space sims.. but i wonder how many sales are left out there. How many of the people interested in the game havent allready invested into it?

I cant imagine that the market for space sims is that huge or else the big publishers would jump onto the oportunity.. And it is fact that they will be "missing" out of 50 mil in sales.. that money was allready paid.

Personally i dont believe that there are many sales left... "many" in sales numbers mind you, it could still reach 600k - 1 mil+ sales after release.

 

[Rawbeard]

STOP MAKING GAMES THAT NEED HIGHER BUDGET THAN BLOCKBUSTER MOVIES!

You do not have the audience, you will never have the audience, to make that work. all you do is kill your industry. *sigh*

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

So long as it keeps ALL publishers far the fuck away from this game, I care not. Let them make their own game, no need to complain about them funding themselves when PEOPLE WANT THIS GAME TO HAPPEN. Let it go folks, let the devs dev, and let us all enjoy a good space sim in a couple years.

I could not agree more. This game is everything I could personally hope for. A genre I like but which other publishers don't care about. The dev completely owns the IP and everything associated with the game. A PC exclusive designed to make full use of the cutting edge graphics, PC UI and controls, AAA budget, a thorough single player experience but with the option of multiplayer. I'm very excited about SC and am a proud backer. One of my perks is a lifetime-insured ship (albeit presumably a low-level one) so I have a nice safety net to look forward to. Maybe some suicide ganking....*evil grin*

I can't for the life of me understand why they would still need yet more money however. Surely what they have is enough to get the game finished, whether it is released in a year or two.

 

[RoonMian]

Ok so I only just looked up this game and it piqued my interest.

However, there is one thing I don't quite understand...in what way do you actually purchase the game? It looks like there are different packages to purchase (from $40 US up to a mega-fucking-whopping-omgwtfbbq $15000 US! Seriously!). So does actually buying a particular package limit you to how much of the game is available to you? I am confused.

To me it sounds like buying the $40 package gets you 1 shitty ship to fly around in while those who spend the $15K are the only ones who actually own the full game? Or are they just 'paying to win' and by spending $15k they are basically given the end-game? If so, then WTF so confusing! Why would you even play the game if you have unlocked everything straight away with your fat wallet?

All you need is a package with the game included. One of these.

To play in the current module Arena Commander you're also gonna need this.

That is all you need to start playing. If you wanna spend more to help the development you can also pledge more and get more ships but this is not pay2win because everything you can pledge for right now will be available in the game for ingame money as well. the 15.000US package just has all the ships they have revealed thus far for you to start the game with, it is by no means necessary. Those who bought that package did so to support the game, not pay2win.

 

[lacktheknack]

STOP MAKING GAMES THAT NEED HIGHER BUDGET THAN BLOCKBUSTER MOVIES!

You do not have the audience, you will never have the audience, to make that work. all you do is kill your industry. *sigh*

"You don't have the audience"

Do you even know what "crowdfunding" is?

 

[Excludos]

The amount of Dunning-Kruger effect in this thread is staggering. People who have no idea of how to develop a game or why they need money to do it. "ooh, but the original asked for 500 000, and now they want more? lol fail!". No. For $500 000, you can make a $500 000 game (ignoring the fact that 500 000 was never the goal to begin with as they had investors lined up). Now they have $50 million, and guess what? Now they're making a $50 mill game. Stop commenting on shit you clearly don't have an inkling of understanding... meh, who am I kidding? This is the internet, where everyone are experts in all fields.

(not directed at one individual in particular, but a large amount of commenters in this thread)

 

[drakonz]

If you hire a full time 3d artist , their salary is 60,000 US dollar a year and that is already on the high side. That means 1 ship in SC will have had 2.5 years of 1 person's time to draw. 2 and a half years ! Which of course is just not true. Even a lazy artist with a complex design would be done in 3 months with a minimum of supervision, making the design of the first ship to cost 15k dollars, not a tenfold of that..

The second ship would take a lot shorter because of being able to reuse elements of the fist one.

thats not how it works. you hire artists to do ships, as in, you pay them per ship. and how much they ask depends on polycount. supposedly, the poly count in this game is through the roof.

and yeah, you dont know space games if you think reusing ship assets is a thing.

Not that im saying they arent making thing up, just that your calculating it wrong to begin with.

im sorry but 150k dollars for single ship (unless its suposed to be map size of skyrim with similar atention to detail) dosent make any sense regardess of how you calculate it. Grand Palais turned into 3d model costs 3500 dollars its fully mapped and got 3,4 million polygons and 3.9 million vertices. there is limit how many polygons game can have on screen before it stats slowing down computer so going for insane numbers of polygons on single objects simply makes no sense (+ for this kind of project you hire artist itself and do contract work only on smaller things. simply because hiring artist and paying monthly salary ends up being cheaper) and every single game including space games reuse assets because it makes no sense to remake assets for everything just to make them look sligly different (not to forget you usualy just edit aready done assets most of the time instead of making compledly new ones expelialy for smaller objects)

 

[briankoontz]

The amount of Dunning-Kruger effect in this thread is staggering. People who have no idea of how to develop a game or why they need money to do it. "ooh, but the original asked for 500 000, and now they want more? lol fail!". No. For $500 000, you can make a $500 000 game (ignoring the fact that 500 000 was never the goal to begin with as they had investors lined up). Now they have $50 million, and guess what? Now they're making a $50 mill game. Stop commenting on shit you clearly don't have an inkling of understanding... meh, who am I kidding? This is the internet, where everyone are experts in all fields.

(not directed at one individual in particular, but a large amount of commenters in this thread)

Wow - your faith in the sustained quality of a game which is constantly changing aspects of it's design to accommodate an ever-increasing budget is remarkable.

In what other artform is this a good idea? Should Picasso have worked by this model? So he has a vision for a $1,000 painting and if he gets $10,000 then he has another vision for what that means? What if he gets $100,000 - he then imports rare paint?

How about the closest comparison - film. So during the production of a film that film gets an ever increasing budget. What a clusterfuck that would result in. Actors could be swapped out for more expensive ones, additional editors could be hired, more expensive shooting locations could be used, etc. While this in some cases makes the film better, it's terribly inefficient at best and deeply artistically corrupting at worst. Artists have a *single* vision for the outcome of their art - it's insane to expect them to have multiple visions depending on their funding level.

We should be asking whether taking Star Citizen from $20 Million to $50 Million makes it $30 Million BETTER.

Just because there's no single thing to blame as in the case of big publishers doesn't mean this situation is good. Chris Roberts and all the developers along with all the recent funders share the responsibility for this.

Instead of Spider-man's recommendation of "With great power comes great responsibility" this game is operating more on "with endless money comes endless ambition".

Art needs constraints, and it needs to understand what those constraints are. Star Citizen is laboring under the terrible situation of not knowing the parameters for it's own creation.

 

[Rawbeard]

STOP MAKING GAMES THAT NEED HIGHER BUDGET THAN BLOCKBUSTER MOVIES!

You do not have the audience, you will never have the audience, to make that work. all you do is kill your industry. *sigh*

"You don't have the audience"

Do you even know what "crowdfunding" is?

Did you even read the part where the crowdfunded money is not enough?

 

[Coruptin]

Sounds like lot of hoopla

 

[Glaice]

49 mil and you still NEED more? What are you burning all that cash on?

 

[lacktheknack]

STOP MAKING GAMES THAT NEED HIGHER BUDGET THAN BLOCKBUSTER MOVIES!

You do not have the audience, you will never have the audience, to make that work. all you do is kill your industry. *sigh*

"You don't have the audience"

Do you even know what "crowdfunding" is?

Did you even read the part where the crowdfunded money is not enough?

Yeah, but they're still pulling in a million every month (over $3M in June) and there's no reason to believe it's going to stop right away.

 

[Apostheum]

The amount of Dunning-Kruger effect in this thread is staggering. People who have no idea of how to develop a game or why they need money to do it. "ooh, but the original asked for 500 000, and now they want more? lol fail!". No. For $500 000, you can make a $500 000 game (ignoring the fact that 500 000 was never the goal to begin with as they had investors lined up). Now they have $50 million, and guess what? Now they're making a $50 mill game. Stop commenting on shit you clearly don't have an inkling of understanding... meh, who am I kidding? This is the internet, where everyone are experts in all fields.

(not directed at one individual in particular, but a large amount of commenters in this thread)

Yes. It's staggering how you embody it so perfectly with your post.

 

[pearcinator]

All you need is a package with the game included. One of these.

To play in the current module Arena Commander you're also gonna need this.

That is all you need to start playing. If you wanna spend more to help the development you can also pledge more and get more ships but this is not pay2win because everything you can pledge for right now will be available in the game for ingame money as well. the 15.000US package just has all the ships they have revealed thus far for you to start the game with, it is by no means necessary. Those who bought that package did so to support the game, not pay2win.

Right ok. I don't really buy into the whole alpha/beta phase of games. Is there a release date for it yet? Will there be physical copies of the game sold in retailers or will it be on Steam (or some other online distributor)? Is it an MMO-like game? What does the 'insurance' mean on the package plans (are they like subscription fees?). Is there a story/goal of the game or do you just explore space/raid shit etc. (i.e. is it like a sci-fi space-sim version of DayZ? Or is there an RPG-like story behind it all?)

I have too many questions about this game...it looks really cool but I don't fully understand what the game is like.

 

[RedDeadFred]

The more I hear about this game, the more I have a feeling that people are getting screwed over...

I don't care how much you've added, going from needing 500 thousand to over 49 million is ridiculous and I don't understand how they're still getting money. Then again, I would never fund ANY kickstarter, let alone one that's already made a ludicrous amount of money.

~$20M original budget*

They've doubled their budget, not multiplied it by a hundred. They just don't need investors anymore. The Kickstarter was one quarter of their original fundraiser (run from their website), which was mostly meant to attract investors/publishers, but the response was so great that they're going indie instead.

Really? I didn't actually look it up but people earlier in the thread were saying it was 500K. It's not nearly as bad the way you're putting it.

 

[lacktheknack]

The more I hear about this game, the more I have a feeling that people are getting screwed over...

I don't care how much you've added, going from needing 500 thousand to over 49 million is ridiculous and I don't understand how they're still getting money. Then again, I would never fund ANY kickstarter, let alone one that's already made a ludicrous amount of money.

~$20M original budget*

They've doubled their budget, not multiplied it by a hundred. They just don't need investors anymore. The Kickstarter was one quarter of their original fundraiser (run from their website), which was mostly meant to attract investors/publishers, but the response was so great that they're going indie instead.

Really? I didn't actually look it up but people earlier in the thread were saying it was 500K. It's not nearly as bad the way you're putting it.

They saw the $500k Kickstarter, and incorrectly assume it was literally the only funding the game had at the time.

In reality, they had about $18M-$20M worth of investors lined up, and were running a $2M crowdfunding campaign outside of Kickstarter (Kickstarter was a backer idea, actually) just to prove that the investment was sound, to avoid investors getting cold feet at the last second.

It worked too well. So well that they ended up dumping the investors.

 

[RedDeadFred]

The more I hear about this game, the more I have a feeling that people are getting screwed over...

I don't care how much you've added, going from needing 500 thousand to over 49 million is ridiculous and I don't understand how they're still getting money. Then again, I would never fund ANY kickstarter, let alone one that's already made a ludicrous amount of money.

~$20M original budget*

They've doubled their budget, not multiplied it by a hundred. They just don't need investors anymore. The Kickstarter was one quarter of their original fundraiser (run from their website), which was mostly meant to attract investors/publishers, but the response was so great that they're going indie instead.

Really? I didn't actually look it up but people earlier in the thread were saying it was 500K. It's not nearly as bad the way you're putting it.

They saw the $500k Kickstarter, and incorrectly assume it was literally the only funding the game had at the time.

In reality, they had about $18M-$20M worth of investors lined up, and were running a $2M crowdfunding campaign outside of Kickstarter (Kickstarter was a backer idea, actually) just to prove that the investment was sound, to avoid investors getting cold feet at the last second.

It worked too well. So well that they ended up dumping the investors.

Ah well that's much better. This sounds a great deal more promising than I had originally thought. Thanks for the clarification!

 

[Nikolaz72]

The more I hear about this game, the more I have a feeling that people are getting screwed over...

I don't care how much you've added, going from needing 500 thousand to over 49 million is ridiculous and I don't understand how they're still getting money. Then again, I would never fund ANY kickstarter, let alone one that's already made a ludicrous amount of money.

~$20M original budget*

They've doubled their budget, not multiplied it by a hundred. They just don't need investors anymore. The Kickstarter was one quarter of their original fundraiser (run from their website), which was mostly meant to attract investors/publishers, but the response was so great that they're going indie instead.

Really? I didn't actually look it up but people earlier in the thread were saying it was 500K. It's not nearly as bad the way you're putting it.

They saw the $500k Kickstarter, and incorrectly assume it was literally the only funding the game had at the time.

In reality, they had about $18M-$20M worth of investors lined up, and were running a $2M crowdfunding campaign outside of Kickstarter (Kickstarter was a backer idea, actually) just to prove that the investment was sound, to avoid investors getting cold feet at the last second.

It worked too well. So well that they ended up dumping the investors.

Ah well that's much better. This sounds a great deal more promising than I had originally thought. Thanks for the clarification!

Articles like this are made for viewcounts, not informing the readership xD.