Star Citizen Hits $49 Million, Still Needs Crowdfunding Support

[Strazdas]

Polygon count can be easily upped to impressive numbers by any 3d package without actually adding workload, to make curves smoother for example. And like in any game, space games too , assets are reused. Think about things like textures, external weapons, little ship details, windows, tailgates, exhausts. After designing a few ship you will end up with a nice part bin that makes building each next ship less and less time intensive.

Ok so they don't use full time hired designers but pay per project, that will reduce the costs even more because you can fish in a larger pool and save on things like medical plans, pensions plans and so on. My calculations might be wrong but they are a lot closer to the truth than the 150,000 dollars per ship quote from Roberts.

Of course it can, but thats not real modeling, rather just using smoothing algorythms and they dont even come close to actual handcrafted polygons. yep, some companies cut corners doing that and the models end up looking bad. they however are making it the right way.

Some assets are reused, sure, but ship designs vary grealty. cant just take a unit and reskin it.

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.

you dont.... yet. its not released yet. this is a kickstarted-like funding project and the game is still in developement. there is a small demo for large pledges but thats it.

ALso if you pledge enough to get the game copy on release you get full game. the extras are tacked on acessories that do not affect your gameplay at all.

the 15000 donations and the like mostly come from famouse people/companies that support ir rather than regular individuals. For example i believe Notch pledged a huge sum.

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.

cant answer you how many, obviuosly. i know im not one of them. i prefer my flying eve style - telling the ship where to go - rather than SC style - piloting on your own and i dont plan to play this game. still it is interesting to see how the market i like (space sims) gets reignited with such passion.

ech, big publishers were blind before. just look how square enix was "surprised" by a game in abandoned market selling millions of copies, even though the fans were saying it will sell for years but bigt publishers just didnt want to try it. just look how they abandoned horror genre - one of the most profitable right now. big publishers arent always right.

thing is, it does not matter if there are sales left. since the budget was crowdunded, even if they sell exactly 0 copies they still broke even. they dont have to repay loans or investors. So i wouldnt be too worried about that. and games like these, especially ones oriented into still looking good a few years down the line, tend to pick up steady pace later in thier lifestyle.

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*

except that this game is 100% audience funded so they do have the audience.

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)

first of all, what Robert said was:
"That cost includes the time used to make the model as well as to model realistic functions; it includes a number of moving parts and animated dashboards."

So its more than 3D model. Its basically getting the ship ready to be playable.

Secondly, a carrier/drednaught class ships ARE the size of skyrim. the smallest ship in thge game - fighter, will have 300,000 polygons. the large ones have 10 or more times that.

And yes, large polycount requires more graphic power, hence the high system requirements for the game. also why the game will have low quality settings for people with older GPUs/CPUs.

These statements should concern the ever-loving shit out of the current backers. They should be asking, "Forget stretch goals. Is there enough left in the bank to even finish this thing?" Because if the "continued development" of Star Citizen is dependent upon additional and continuous crowdfunding, then this thing is doomed to fail once that funding source dries up.

And it will dry up.

The base game is not even on the table now. the base game+stretch goals is the question. they want to release with all the extra features at once since they got the money they didnt expect and was planning to put these features later after sales.

Also the game IS A MMO. all MMOs do continuous developement, which costs money.

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.

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.

you answered your own question - importing better paint is a good example for painter. for the film - making better props and buying better CGI is a good example - both has been done by the way. and it didnt result in clusterfuck, for example the second hobbit film wasnt a clusterfuck (at least in my opinion).

movies get re-edited ALL THE TIME. thats why you have cinema cut, directors cut, ect.

Btw, AVGN movie did afford mroe expensive shooting locations and changed a lot of CGI into practica effects only after it got over-funded too.

this model WORKS in other industries.

No, the LAST thing art needs is constraints.

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.

I dont do beta either so i can understand perfectly. No release date is set as far as i know. Not sure about physical distribution. It is a MMO-like game, however they claim there will be singleplayer mode and you could host your own servers, meaning you could run your own server and be the only player too or just invite a few friends. Sorry, i cannot answer the rest, hopefully somone with more info will.

 

[Rozalia1]

I can only assume they can wrap up the game up and push it out at anytime and are just using this to milk some more money from the marks. I didn't actually know their were that many marks who'd fall for his cheap pops/heat, but some people just have "it" I suppose.

This is actually something that may well come in handy in the future so I look forward to reading on how this ends.

 

[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)

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

Says the guy who's too lazy to even bother arguing his opinion.

I didn't mention anything about their development cycle or internal decisionmaking, because I have no fucking clue. All I said was that the reason they might want more money while at more than twice their initial target is because they are now making a game thats worth more than twice as much. They're not failing to produce the game they promised for $500 000. They're working on a game that's worth ten times as much.

 

[weirdee]

i don't think anybody's ever going to be able to comprehend the dollar value of each pixel they are staring at on the ship to be worth more than any other pixel they've seen before

 

[Ishigami]

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*

except that this game is 100% audience funded so they do have the audience.

Actually no they don't.
These funds are reached by increasing the purchase cost of the average buyer. The average pledge lies at something of around 100$.
That is about twice as much as an ordinary person would pay for a video game on PC these days.
This game would never sell as many copies under normal circumstances to recoup such a budget.
It sends out wrong signals in all sorts of directions.

 

[SecondPrize]

Looks like someone should have put actual work into budgeting instead of pulling numbers out of their ass. There is no excuse for this. People treating kickstarter like they're not just as accountable as if they had a contract with a developer will go a long way to fucking crowdsourcing up for everyone.

 

[Strazdas]

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*

except that this game is 100% audience funded so they do have the audience.

Actually no they don't.
These funds are reached by increasing the purchase cost of the average buyer. The average pledge lies at something of around 100$.
That is about twice as much as an ordinary person would pay for a video game on PC these days.
This game would never sell as many copies under normal circumstances to recoup such a budget.
It sends out wrong signals in all sorts of directions.

only if you take pure average. This is because there is a couple very large donations that brings the average up. the median donation is i think something around 40 dollars. and thats cheaper than most AAA titles at launch. Also even at 100 dollars, they have 49 million, which would mean 490.000 players willing to pay in advance to play. Thats quite an audience id say. Yes, its not the tomb raider 4 million sales, but for a crowdunded niche genre game thats quite a lot.

 

[Ishigami]

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*

except that this game is 100% audience funded so they do have the audience.

Actually no they don't.
These funds are reached by increasing the purchase cost of the average buyer. The average pledge lies at something of around 100$.
That is about twice as much as an ordinary person would pay for a video game on PC these days.
This game would never sell as many copies under normal circumstances to recoup such a budget.
It sends out wrong signals in all sorts of directions.

only if you take pure average. This is because there is a couple very large donations that brings the average up. the median donation is i think something around 40 dollars. and thats cheaper than most AAA titles at launch. Also even at 100 dollars, they have 49 million, which would mean 490.000 players willing to pay in advance to play. Thats quite an audience id say. Yes, its not the tomb raider 4 million sales, but for a crowdunded niche genre game thats quite a lot.

A couple of is a nice way to ignore the issue. If you read the boards then you know that there are thousands of people which are in for roughly about 300$.
The average pledge is a nice way to illustrate that CR managed to increase the game price for the consumer in general without being called out for by concealing it cleverly as pledges which the consumer purchases "on their own will".
Yes you only need to pay 30$ to actually get access but case and point is many don't stay at that reasonable entry level as they are persuaded by exploitive business practices to spend more and more.
Want to know which other games use similar practices to exploit their players? - F2P MMOs.
Under normal circumstances (CIG raising the funds and producing the game on their own BEFORE selling it) SC would not be viable with the budget it has as chances are pretty slim that it would be able to recoup it and make a profit.
I have nothing against crowdfunding in general as it makes "games unattractive for regular publishers" possible. But there is something wrong when a game reaches more than it estimated, more than it ever hopped for and still keeps collecting "pledges to secure the funds".
People are so blind they want CIG to keep the shop after release selling stuff and currency at the current rate... yea fuck those rippoff 5$ DLC crap planes by Bandi/Namco for Ace Combat but please give me the option to shell 125$ for a Honret in SC!!!!

... yea... no!

 

[Chaos Isaac]

I'm waiting for them to shut down the project and say, "Thanks for 20m."

 

[Strazdas]

A couple of is a nice way to ignore the issue. If you read the boards then you know that there are thousands of people which are in for roughly about 300$.
The average pledge is a nice way to illustrate that CR managed to increase the game price for the consumer in general without being called out for by concealing it cleverly as pledges which the consumer purchases "on their own will".
Yes you only need to pay 30$ to actually get access but case and point is many don't stay at that reasonable entry level as they are persuaded by exploitive business practices to spend more and more.
Want to know which other games use similar practices to exploit their players? - F2P MMOs.
Under normal circumstances (CIG raising the funds and producing the game on their own BEFORE selling it) SC would not be viable with the budget it has as chances are pretty slim that it would be able to recoup it and make a profit.
I have nothing against crowdfunding in general as it makes "games unattractive for regular publishers" possible. But there is something wrong when a game reaches more than it estimated, more than it ever hopped for and still keeps collecting "pledges to secure the funds".
People are so blind they want CIG to keep the shop after release selling stuff and currency at the current rate... yea fuck those rippoff 5$ DLC crap planes by Bandi/Namco for Ace Combat but please give me the option to shell 125$ for a Honret in SC!!!!

... yea... no!

Just because somone takes and dumps a million into a project does not mean that all other pledgers are dumping 100 dolalrs each. when calcualting averages such extremities should be ruled out or your just making poor statistics. Of course often this requires human decision thus most automated systems dont, like the kickstarter one.

majority of pledges DOES stay at the bellow regualr game at lauch price range. its just that there are a few that did more thna just buy a game but rather went to fund the project with large dumps, which brought the average up.

i never felt persuaded to buy anyone from star citizen, so im not sure what you mean here.

This is not normal circumstances. the costs are already recouped by crowdfunding. so there already is an audience there and theres nothing left to prove here - SC already proved it would ahve had a huge audience.

I do agree that the ship shop is a P2W tactics here though.

 

[Augustine]

STOP MAKING GAMES THAT NEED HIGHER BUDGET THAN BLOCKBUSTER MOVIES!

We are not making a game, we are building a dream. Dream shared by the backers of the project. The rest can leave.

This dream already has an audience. And it will not damage gaming at large because it is completely separate from it. Even if not a single person will buy SC after the release, it will still be more or less alright.

 

[Vikingr]

These articles about the funding of Star Citizen is always making lots of people jump to false conclusions because they don't have the facts straight. And that is the Escapist's fault in this case.

For instance, I read comments about "They asked for $500,000 at Kickstarter and now they have $49M and still need more?" - which clearly shows people have no idea what they're talking about. Maybe that'd be clearer if Escapist tell people that the original Kickstarter goal was only to convince CIG's investors to invest, and now that CIG has gotten more than they asked for they've decided not to use their investors after all?

Another false statement is the "feature creep" slander. Uninformed people make that statement all the time, even people who have pledged and are visiting the RSI site daily. It's not hard to google what CR says about this, for those who are interested.

 

[RoonMian]

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.

There is not a release date, yet. The release is modular, the devs give us each bit of the game as soon as it (more or less) works. Nobody has ever done a game release like this. We get stuff other companies would never release in such an early state. For example, just last weekend there was a big CIG event in Cologne, Germany, where among other things the racing module was unveiled. After each race the server crashed, it didn't work with the Warthog, it still has a lot of trouble. Still the racing module will be on backer PCs in about two weeks. If you'd rather wait for the finished game, that's is totally okay. Official release with everything they want at launch finished will be late 2015, early 2016.

Until now I haven't read anything about Steam. That might happen, I don't know. Same with physical copies. Sorry, can't tell you any details here.

It's a three-pronged game. First there is a branching single player campaign called Squadron 42. It's gonna have drop-in/drop-out multi player a bit like dark souls. Then there is the persistent universe, that will be an MMO, a little bit like EvE online with parts of the game world highly policed and other parts with free for all PvP. And lastly the devs are gonna release pretty much a complete array of mod tools. People can build their own campaigns, their own ships, their own galaxies, everything. I'm pretty sure there will be a star trek server, a star wars server, a battlestar galactica server, a babylon 5 server etc.

Insurance is an ingame thing. You insure your ship with a bit of ingame money and when it gets blown up you get back the ship hull with the basic gear you bought it with. Under certain conditions you can also insure equipment and cargo. Right now when you pledge for a ship you get insurance for the duration indicated. The first backers up until a year ago got an unlimited insurance for their pledged ships. Insurance is just a minor gameplay feature, though. It has nothing to do with subscription fees, SC won't have those.

Last question: There is a story-based single player campaign. The persistent universe is all about the emergent gameplay though I am sure the devs are gonna hold some events now and then to keep us entertained.

Edit: On the latest 10 for the chairman Chris Roberts said the single player story would have elements of Gladiator and Heart of Darkness. In space.

Edit Edit: Oh and by the way, if you wonder what they need the 50 million for... They need it to fly a hairdresser back and forth between Los Angeles and Manchester obviously because Chris and Erin Roberts have exactly the same astroboy hairstyle.