$265M was an estimate for both development and marketing, the estimate for the development alone was a bit over half, at $140M. So SC should already be over GTA V in terms of funding for development, as long as they're not forced to refund what they raised [1].
SC will likely rank (easily) as one of the most expensive video games of all time should a completed version ship.
Elsewhere they boast of a dev team of well over 400 members and 5 international studios... hard not to argue that's AAA studio development sized like a product from EA or Activision.
They were referring to their marketing/launch budget, which is what the recent investment was for. At $46 million, it's substantial, but less than some tentpole games have gotten.
Robert is an industry veteran. And his business hired most of Crytek staff in Europe, did you play Crysis series? Do you really believe its developers lack "experience"?
GTA involves a completely different kind of game play experience. Look one direction, then look behind you, then look back and what you see may be completely different and regenerated. Star Citizen uses various methods to implement a virtual generated world so that what you see is what is there and you can carry around, drop, pick up, and trade items. The Star Citizen simulated world is far more detailed and consistent than anything in GTA.
The quoted number is actually the entire budget, including marketing.
> Media analyst Arvind Bhatia estimated the game's development budget exceeded US$137 million,[7] and The Scotsman reporter Marty McLaughlin estimated that the combined development and marketing efforts exceeded GB£170 million (US$265 million), making it the most expensive video game ever made at its time
It's interesting reading this thread as one of the founders of Star Sonata, a space MMO that launched in 2004. Star Citizen has a lot of hype and a lot of money, but people seem to hate the game/results. Our players for the most part love our game and keep playing and subscribing even after more than a decade, but I can't for the life of me get the marketing right, so have been unable to bring in new players in any kind of numbers. I just wish 1% of the players who paid for Star Citizen even knew about Star Sonata.
For a while back in 2007-ish Google ads were working really well and bringing in paying players at about $35 cost to acquire each and they were worth more than $200 over their lifetime, but something changed almost over night and Google ads got more competitive and almost no amount of money would bring people in. I'm sitting here with a game that people like and will pay for but can't figure out anymore how to acquire them.
The "something" that changed is that private equity (and even banks) figured out how to financially model MMOs just like SAAS.
I think Tomasz Tunguz illustrates this concept beautifully in considering SAAS / MMOs as annuities (1)
With little incremental cost to each additional user, and predictable revenue over time, the customer acquisition cost becomes highly flexible if you can finance it (or leverage it).
As a result it's become an arms race and a common VC model today is to spend 2 - 3x total annual revenue in marketing spend to land grab new channels while the "annuity" cost is low.
If you're open to sharing more details you may spark somebody's attention on HN :) - I personally invest in SAAS / MMO / CRE + bring customer acquisition expertise (and a team) for cases exactly like this - although we try to target some minimum scale ($5m+ ARR / ASR)
Happy to share more information but don't want to hijack the thread too much. Would love to talk to you about this stuff sometime if you'd be interested. My email is in my profile.
Is not the same person who is just looking for a modern update of Wing Commander.
I think you need to focus those ads on the True NERD crowd. Like I bet the ROAS for an ad against "Terragenisis" search queries might be positive for you.
Also you need to go a little more modern in some of your design choices.
But you are 99% crushing it. I really hope Star Sonata 2 breaks through!
Interesting to hear, because what you've said really reflects my short contact with Star Sonata. I found it through ads at about 2007, because at the time, my way of finding games was through ads. I played a bit, joined a team, had fun with base building, and stopped because it wasn't really my thing. Fast forward... Nowadays my go-to places for games are basically: Steam and web games. With both, you literally just navigate to the game and hit play. I think that's a big thing: if I have to download and install executables myself it feels less sleek, less secure and trustworthy even. I can't imagine finding games through ads anymore.
Not to be harsh, but suppose I was a new player and I knew that Star Sonata 2 was a thing. (I do now because I Googled it.) I still probably will not take the effort to download it, simply because of the work and trust investment it represents today, an investment which I would not have thought twice about ten years back.
As a layperson, I visited the Star Sonata web site and there doesn't seem to be a page telling me about the game. I guess a screenshot tells a thousand words, but I always look for words before trying out a game. As a newcomer I don't necessarily look for news and that seems to be the main thrust of the home page.
I hate how so many MMO game homepages are basically 100% oriented towards current players with news and community features...meanwhile the "marketing" side is a generic "photos" and "videos" with no context or summary of the game. And the videos tend to have no context and are often also oriented towards experienced players, as they show advanced game play.
Or worse the "about" page is some fiction storyline from the game with no indication of what game play is like, or how it compares to other games.
Some major games do this and it's shocking. Must be nice having such good word of mouth and press coverage (ie, written reviews, youtube videos) that you don't even need to bother making a nice marketing page.
I wonder if any of those have proper marketing "funnels", landing pages, analytics, elsewhere etc and just don't care much about using their homepage for sales. At last Star Sonata has a nice big CTA at the top of the homepage but otherwise is lacking a true central landing page.
Wow, what a throwback. I played Star Sonata, Astro Empires, and Pardus in the mid-2000's timeframe. And Eve Online later in early 2010's. Only Pardus and Eve stuck with me because of the persistent sandboxes. They're the only ones I remember and therefore talk about.
I've been very interested in following the divergant paths of Star Citizen and Elite:Dangerous which are similar projects which started at roughly the same time (both kickstarted in 2012)
E:D seem to have taken the route of getting an MVP out and functional and have been iterating on that base since then adding new content, play modes, platforms etc. As a result they had a playable game out in 2014.
SC seems to have gone more for a big bang approach of only launching once they've got more in place with, from the blog post, an alpha in 2020.
I agree. E:D is a classic example of an iterative MVP. It's been criticized as being "wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle." People have also complained about subsequent for-pay expansions being "money grabs," and "why don't they finish the game before asking me to shell out more money."
Star Citizen took a more traditional "big-bang release" approach, complete with the (also traditional) wildly incorrect release predictions. Its funding model is based on selling spaceships, particularly concept sales for ships that aren't available in game yet, which has been criticized for "selling jpegs" and "pay-to-win."
Braben and Roberts' games were both very famous in their day. They're theoretically equally capable of generating a fervent following. It's interesting to see such diametrically opposed approaches. It seems to me that Star Citizen is much more successful, which is surprising, because the E:D approach is more in line with modern startup advice. Despite the complaints about SC's funding model, it's been amazingly consistent at bringing in about $34 million in pledges a year. [1]
(The real moral of the story: people on the Internet, and particularly gamers, will complain about everything. But those complaints aren't necessarily correlated with success.)
To be honest as a person who played Elite and Elite 2 ( Frontier I think was its full name) extensively in my childhood and adolescent years they were always "wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle". And speaking of Elite 2, it wasn't kidding. I still marvel at how 500kb of a game (I distinctly remember it was only a single disk and a disk to hold save files) contained entire galaxies and planets not only you can land but traverse with your ship. Sure they were procgen but still it was really breathtaking to see all those vistas I would never see - barring a wormhole
They were all about creating your own story, I think there wasn't a base storyline. It was like "here you have a kestrel with some equipment including atmospheric shielding and some pulse lasers. Now do whatever you want" But because I knew the trick trading route between Barnard's Star and Sol carrying Luxury goods and industrial stuff to and fro I could amass a huge amount of money in no time to buy me a Cobra MkIII and do military and imperial missions. And this was my story, a lot of people have different experiences with it. And even though it doesn't have any deep, life changing experiences it was fun and I think current iteration of E:D is faithful to that legacy. It is you who make the game deep with your experience I think. I don't play it, because me and internet-is-required games don't get along but from what I've seen I can make that claim.
Wing Commander and to an extent Freelancer can be seen more deep compared to Elite. But it lacked that free spirit Elite conveyed. Also on an unrelated tangent I still think a game with Freelancer controls (actiony rather than simulationy) with X-universe freedom can be a thing still.
> It seems to me that Star Citizen is much more successful, which is surprising, because the E:D approach is more in line with modern startup advice.
That advice is predicated on getting some amount of money from an investor who wants a return on their investment, rather than getting that amount of money as pre-purchases that from consumers who expect a game at the end of the process.
You cannot define "the game" as MVP, make it as good as possible, and then be sad about not making money.
You go there without a game(!) and put different stuff in front of people's faces that they can pay for. Simple things that you can produce in a few hours. A kickstarter page, game_object.jpgs, planning schedules that you move up one year each year, engine demos, and then you look what brings in most cash.
And only if it's "engine demo" that brings in most cash, and only if it seems that the paying customers of that "engine demo" want "more gameplay" then you start building a game. If they pay more for schedules or for kickstarter pages, then you do more of that.
So I would argue SC follows much more closely the MVP+iteration principle than ED, and that IS(!) why it is financially more successful.
All that said I would not fall into the trap of defining "financial success" as only success. Financing the building of a game that is mostly there for people to enjoy a space simulation is also a succss! And in that regard X4 and ED are much more successful than SC will ever be.
At the risk of over-simplifying, it just seems like SC needed/needs a good project manager or producer, someone who is solely focused on shipping something. So many software projects end up in this perpetual alpha state because nobody has an actual step-by-step plan to ship it and is cracking the whip on it.
I always got the impression they needed a lead programmer.. After Roberts initial crowdfunding round (based on the visual demo he made in Cryengine with contractor art assets)
The 1st thing he should have done is hire one really good programmer who could have planned out how to make this, what engine / technology stack to use.. The core architecture for its main features, and then slowly build up a team to work towards that plan.
Instead he just seems to go on a mad hiring spree of artists, throwing more and more complete AAA assets on top of the POS visual demo he had made in Cryengine..
What boggles my mind is that it seems they never veered from this strategy, 100's of millions of dollars and 8+ years later, and it appears they are still throwing stuff willy nilly onto that original dumpster fire.
Seems like one of the best examples of the sunken cost fallacy in action that Ive ever seen.
This is only partially accurate. Elite: Dangerous definitely focused on getting that "release" 1.0 version ASAP. But Star Citizen has been playable for years as well, it just doesn't presume to call itself "done". Star Citizen is currently on version 3.3.7, and a decent amount of playable features have been around a long time.
They're not that dissimilar, just the labels of what they've chosen to state of their status. Elite: Dangerous added planetary landing more or less around the same time Star Citizen did, for instance, but E:D called it an expansion and Star Citizen called it a new version for their alpha.
Also, you are confused Squadron 42, a single-player game, which has an alpha in 2020, and Star Citizen, which is more analogous to Elite: Dangerous, which is ongoingly available.
Sure, it's a playable demo but it's barely a full fledged game.
Don't get me wrong, their development cycle is fine if they can keep with it and releasing content is awesome from them. However, I wouldn't recommend anyone that isn't a Space Citizen enthusiast to get their hands on Squadron 42.
I don't understand the appeal of space opera games like this. They will mostly be empty zones of players.
I also have ideas to make an ambitious video game, with persistence and an open world. But I would rather start small and humble by releasing something that is playable, add cool features as the development progresses, but still providing basic features and playability at first, that would be slowly replaced by the more advanced features of the game. Making a game attractive quickly from the beginning is important, especially if you're using the crowdfunding model. Today it's possible to have a continuous evolution of a game, to constantly change and improve it.
The hardest will always be to track player locations in realtime, on a large world, while keeping the game smooth enough. Once that is done, the sky is the limit. I don't understand why so many games focus on the content (because that can be an real time and money sink), while the only things that are attractive for such games are the gameplay and the multiplayer.
As far as I can tell, this game is still an utter clusterfuck. From a basic technical point of view, there have been fundamental flaws that have been there from its inception in 2011, that have never been fixed. They just keep throwing more crap on top of it making it buggier and buggier. Its the poster child for the sunken cost fallacy.
From a gameplay perspective, it hasnt gotten to a point where Ive been been able to even speculate on that. Their gameplay concept seems to be: build a big online sandbox and then... fun will magically appear, and they've iterated on this less than 1 time so far, so my expectations are about as low as possible. Also any time I've played it, every kind of interaction (flying, walking, UI, everything) is a mess, and feels terrible.
I dearly want this to be my dream game, but my professional opinion is that if it ends up being any kind of decently playable game at all it would be a miracle.
This story was a wash. A guy put a shit ton of money into a kickerstarter product and was expecting a fully fledged polished product. It's not a pre-order, buddy.
If Kickstarter is a license to take millions of dollars then deliver something different four years late, why does anyone ever contribute to Kickstarter projects?
Personally I think even if they fail (though I prefer they succeed!), they've still done a wonderful thing. They are pushing boundaries far beyond what I thought was possible in modern games and that in itself is a great accomplishment. It's going to push more game developers to do the same and given the success of Red Dead Redemption 2 - which also pushed boundaries beyond what I expected - it seems we're going to be getting some really massive and immersive games in the not too distant future.
As an early Star Citizen backer, I don't fully get how they pushed the boundaries of gaming. They seem to have to just wasted backer money, wasted hours of developer time that could have been used to make other games, and broke promises.
The scale of the art is the biggest thing for me. The ship designs are incredibly detailed, but then you zoom out and there’s a whole planet and several moons and it’ll only get bigger from there.
When I fire it up occasionally I honestly don’t even do missions, I just go see what new places have been added and go chasing alien sunsets.
If you want more technical stuff, the panels from Citizen Con are a good watch, but individually I’m sure there are other games doing some of the same things.
Speaking only for myself, I contributed Kickstarter funds to get a working game, not to advance the state of the art. I realize different funders have different takes on this.
EDIT: I should mention that I haven't actually tried playing the game in quite a while. I've been waiting for the developers to stamp it as "released" before I take another look.
So perhaps in its current form, it's playable enough to satisfy what I signed up for. It's a little hard to tell from the varied characterizations of its current playability.
about RD2 , what do you mean it pushed boundaries? if are you referring at programming I want to know what you mean since I did not see anything new in it(just asking not want to contradict you).
The graphics and animations are good but I seen similar on other games.
Fair question. It was a combination of several things put together that I think qualifies as pushing boundaries for me. On their own these things may not be a big deal, but altogether and especially on relatively outdated hardware(console) they're great accomplishments.
The game is seamless - and I think God of War does this well also - basically there's really no "loading" once you're in the game; you go from gameplay to cutscene to gameplay without any interruption. The graphics are high quality and that's amazing for how huge the game is and how extremely dynamic it is (e.g. how animals interact with the environment, the weather).
Considering the lag I get on the PS4 with games like Witcher 3 that try to balance high quality graphics with scale, RDR2 is smooth. You can be on a train fighting 30 guys (each with dynamic facial expressions) with animals running around in the distance, explosions, the wind is blowing the trees around you and it's changing from sunshine to pouring rain - all this and more without a hiccup. That's a lot of detail processing at one time.
EDIT: one other thing I found impressive and i'm not sure I've seen this in other open-world games or if they intentionally programmed it this way: during one of the missions I slaughtered about a dozen or two guys and traveled a considerable distance away from the scene. Normally when you come back to something like this, the world around you has pretty much re-rendered, but 30 minutes later when I arrived back, all the dead bodies were in the same place as before.
The graphics and animations are more or less on par, it's the underlying mechanics where new ground is being driven. Star Citizen has taken the "simulation" approach to insane levels. There are so many things you can do in Star Citizen that just aren't possible in other games because of how they're designed.
In a lot of games, each interior of a spaceship would be a map, and then you would have a map of each location you could exit the spaceship, and then you would effectively teleport at a doorway when you "exit the ship". (Think about how this works in Mass Effect. The "ship" that you run around on never actually "moves". It's much easier and more efficient to make a game this way for a lot of reasons. In Star Citizen, they actually move a ship around the map, and if you open the door, it opens the physical barrier between you and the outside world and you can see out of it.
By keeping everyone and all objects "in space" all the time, Star Citizen allows some insanely different experiences that other games would have to specifically program functionality for.
Seriously? They've done a TERRIBLE thing. They've shown that you can get ridiculous amounts of money for...pictures and empty promises. I hope this idea will never catch on because this is far worse then every loot box business model out there.
It also hurts everybody else attempting to do something like that. Just imagine what a capable director could have done with those amounts of money...
Agreed. I would also add they are completely rewriting what is the size of project approachable by “indie” game devs. A success changes the rules of the game dev ecosystem.
Roberts was already a big budget producer by the time SC came around...calling someone 'indie' when they've hired Nicolas Cage for a project is stretching the term well beyond its limits.
That's the least you expect from a $200m project. It's a massive failure if they don't deliver with that amount of money. It's just that they lose nothing but reputation because it wasn't their money.
$460M valuation and taking on money from a family office. Not too shabby. I still think CIG bit off far more than they could chew, and comprised the final product as a result. But I do hope they succeed.
I'm very impressed that they got that valuation. Looking at the UK CIG accounts for 2017 they had a balance sheet value of -£12,304 , so props to them for getting that much investment.
Readit News
GTA 5 had budget of $265M (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Aut...). Assuming info on wiki is correct SC is nearing 200M (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen#Funding) which isn't too far off from GTA budget.
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne5n7b/star-citiz...
Elsewhere they boast of a dev team of well over 400 members and 5 international studios... hard not to argue that's AAA studio development sized like a product from EA or Activision.
Almost 218 million.
> Media analyst Arvind Bhatia estimated the game's development budget exceeded US$137 million,[7] and The Scotsman reporter Marty McLaughlin estimated that the combined development and marketing efforts exceeded GB£170 million (US$265 million), making it the most expensive video game ever made at its time
And here's wikipedia's source on the $137m
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-02-01-gta-v-dev-...
For a while back in 2007-ish Google ads were working really well and bringing in paying players at about $35 cost to acquire each and they were worth more than $200 over their lifetime, but something changed almost over night and Google ads got more competitive and almost no amount of money would bring people in. I'm sitting here with a game that people like and will pay for but can't figure out anymore how to acquire them.
I think Tomasz Tunguz illustrates this concept beautifully in considering SAAS / MMOs as annuities (1)
With little incremental cost to each additional user, and predictable revenue over time, the customer acquisition cost becomes highly flexible if you can finance it (or leverage it).
As a result it's become an arms race and a common VC model today is to spend 2 - 3x total annual revenue in marketing spend to land grab new channels while the "annuity" cost is low.
If you're open to sharing more details you may spark somebody's attention on HN :) - I personally invest in SAAS / MMO / CRE + bring customer acquisition expertise (and a team) for cases exactly like this - although we try to target some minimum scale ($5m+ ARR / ASR)
(1) https://tomtunguz.com/recurring-gross-margin-dollar-efficien...
But the kind of person who appreciates this > https://www.starsonata.com/inc/images/screens/gallery/Galaxy...
Is not the same person who is just looking for a modern update of Wing Commander.
I think you need to focus those ads on the True NERD crowd. Like I bet the ROAS for an ad against "Terragenisis" search queries might be positive for you.
Also you need to go a little more modern in some of your design choices.
But you are 99% crushing it. I really hope Star Sonata 2 breaks through!
Not to be harsh, but suppose I was a new player and I knew that Star Sonata 2 was a thing. (I do now because I Googled it.) I still probably will not take the effort to download it, simply because of the work and trust investment it represents today, an investment which I would not have thought twice about ten years back.
Or worse the "about" page is some fiction storyline from the game with no indication of what game play is like, or how it compares to other games.
Some major games do this and it's shocking. Must be nice having such good word of mouth and press coverage (ie, written reviews, youtube videos) that you don't even need to bother making a nice marketing page.
I wonder if any of those have proper marketing "funnels", landing pages, analytics, elsewhere etc and just don't care much about using their homepage for sales. At last Star Sonata has a nice big CTA at the top of the homepage but otherwise is lacking a true central landing page.
E:D seem to have taken the route of getting an MVP out and functional and have been iterating on that base since then adding new content, play modes, platforms etc. As a result they had a playable game out in 2014.
SC seems to have gone more for a big bang approach of only launching once they've got more in place with, from the blog post, an alpha in 2020.
Star Citizen took a more traditional "big-bang release" approach, complete with the (also traditional) wildly incorrect release predictions. Its funding model is based on selling spaceships, particularly concept sales for ships that aren't available in game yet, which has been criticized for "selling jpegs" and "pay-to-win."
Braben and Roberts' games were both very famous in their day. They're theoretically equally capable of generating a fervent following. It's interesting to see such diametrically opposed approaches. It seems to me that Star Citizen is much more successful, which is surprising, because the E:D approach is more in line with modern startup advice. Despite the complaints about SC's funding model, it's been amazingly consistent at bringing in about $34 million in pledges a year. [1]
(The real moral of the story: people on the Internet, and particularly gamers, will complain about everything. But those complaints aren't necessarily correlated with success.)
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrD...
They were all about creating your own story, I think there wasn't a base storyline. It was like "here you have a kestrel with some equipment including atmospheric shielding and some pulse lasers. Now do whatever you want" But because I knew the trick trading route between Barnard's Star and Sol carrying Luxury goods and industrial stuff to and fro I could amass a huge amount of money in no time to buy me a Cobra MkIII and do military and imperial missions. And this was my story, a lot of people have different experiences with it. And even though it doesn't have any deep, life changing experiences it was fun and I think current iteration of E:D is faithful to that legacy. It is you who make the game deep with your experience I think. I don't play it, because me and internet-is-required games don't get along but from what I've seen I can make that claim.
Wing Commander and to an extent Freelancer can be seen more deep compared to Elite. But it lacked that free spirit Elite conveyed. Also on an unrelated tangent I still think a game with Freelancer controls (actiony rather than simulationy) with X-universe freedom can be a thing still.
Thanks for reading.
That advice is predicated on getting some amount of money from an investor who wants a return on their investment, rather than getting that amount of money as pre-purchases that from consumers who expect a game at the end of the process.
You go there without a game(!) and put different stuff in front of people's faces that they can pay for. Simple things that you can produce in a few hours. A kickstarter page, game_object.jpgs, planning schedules that you move up one year each year, engine demos, and then you look what brings in most cash.
And only if it's "engine demo" that brings in most cash, and only if it seems that the paying customers of that "engine demo" want "more gameplay" then you start building a game. If they pay more for schedules or for kickstarter pages, then you do more of that.
So I would argue SC follows much more closely the MVP+iteration principle than ED, and that IS(!) why it is financially more successful.
All that said I would not fall into the trap of defining "financial success" as only success. Financing the building of a game that is mostly there for people to enjoy a space simulation is also a succss! And in that regard X4 and ED are much more successful than SC will ever be.
Bias: I’m a project manager :-)
Instead he just seems to go on a mad hiring spree of artists, throwing more and more complete AAA assets on top of the POS visual demo he had made in Cryengine.. What boggles my mind is that it seems they never veered from this strategy, 100's of millions of dollars and 8+ years later, and it appears they are still throwing stuff willy nilly onto that original dumpster fire.
Seems like one of the best examples of the sunken cost fallacy in action that Ive ever seen.
Actually shipping a finished product would turn off the donation stream...
They're not that dissimilar, just the labels of what they've chosen to state of their status. Elite: Dangerous added planetary landing more or less around the same time Star Citizen did, for instance, but E:D called it an expansion and Star Citizen called it a new version for their alpha.
Also, you are confused Squadron 42, a single-player game, which has an alpha in 2020, and Star Citizen, which is more analogous to Elite: Dangerous, which is ongoingly available.
Elite: Dangerous had their alpha in 2013, playable beta mid-2014, with a 1.0 release end of 2014 that was a complete game.
Star citizen had a very scaled down version (Crusader) available end of 2015, as what amounts to an alpha.
I personally hope Star Citizen delivers, but there is really no equivalence here. Frontier delivered much faster.
Don't get me wrong, their development cycle is fine if they can keep with it and releasing content is awesome from them. However, I wouldn't recommend anyone that isn't a Space Citizen enthusiast to get their hands on Squadron 42.
Wow, the timeline is an horror story.
I don't understand the appeal of space opera games like this. They will mostly be empty zones of players.
I also have ideas to make an ambitious video game, with persistence and an open world. But I would rather start small and humble by releasing something that is playable, add cool features as the development progresses, but still providing basic features and playability at first, that would be slowly replaced by the more advanced features of the game. Making a game attractive quickly from the beginning is important, especially if you're using the crowdfunding model. Today it's possible to have a continuous evolution of a game, to constantly change and improve it.
The hardest will always be to track player locations in realtime, on a large world, while keeping the game smooth enough. Once that is done, the sky is the limit. I don't understand why so many games focus on the content (because that can be an real time and money sink), while the only things that are attractive for such games are the gameplay and the multiplayer.
They plan to have a complete Sims-like ecology of NPCs, and players will fit into that.
What is the time frame here? Decades? I mean seriously, why is anyone believing this?
From a gameplay perspective, it hasnt gotten to a point where Ive been been able to even speculate on that. Their gameplay concept seems to be: build a big online sandbox and then... fun will magically appear, and they've iterated on this less than 1 time so far, so my expectations are about as low as possible. Also any time I've played it, every kind of interaction (flying, walking, UI, everything) is a mess, and feels terrible.
I dearly want this to be my dream game, but my professional opinion is that if it ends up being any kind of decently playable game at all it would be a miracle.
When I fire it up occasionally I honestly don’t even do missions, I just go see what new places have been added and go chasing alien sunsets.
Landing on Hurston https://i.redd.it/xyjxc15jbh421.jpg
The moons of Hurston https://i.redd.it/opk5azvmvfr11.png
Some day I’ll work my way up to a Constellation Phoenix and just cruise around the galaxy taking in the sights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzVPVDIRgK4
If you want more technical stuff, the panels from Citizen Con are a good watch, but individually I’m sure there are other games doing some of the same things.
EDIT: I should mention that I haven't actually tried playing the game in quite a while. I've been waiting for the developers to stamp it as "released" before I take another look.
So perhaps in its current form, it's playable enough to satisfy what I signed up for. It's a little hard to tell from the varied characterizations of its current playability.
The graphics and animations are good but I seen similar on other games.
The game is seamless - and I think God of War does this well also - basically there's really no "loading" once you're in the game; you go from gameplay to cutscene to gameplay without any interruption. The graphics are high quality and that's amazing for how huge the game is and how extremely dynamic it is (e.g. how animals interact with the environment, the weather).
Considering the lag I get on the PS4 with games like Witcher 3 that try to balance high quality graphics with scale, RDR2 is smooth. You can be on a train fighting 30 guys (each with dynamic facial expressions) with animals running around in the distance, explosions, the wind is blowing the trees around you and it's changing from sunshine to pouring rain - all this and more without a hiccup. That's a lot of detail processing at one time.
EDIT: one other thing I found impressive and i'm not sure I've seen this in other open-world games or if they intentionally programmed it this way: during one of the missions I slaughtered about a dozen or two guys and traveled a considerable distance away from the scene. Normally when you come back to something like this, the world around you has pretty much re-rendered, but 30 minutes later when I arrived back, all the dead bodies were in the same place as before.
In a lot of games, each interior of a spaceship would be a map, and then you would have a map of each location you could exit the spaceship, and then you would effectively teleport at a doorway when you "exit the ship". (Think about how this works in Mass Effect. The "ship" that you run around on never actually "moves". It's much easier and more efficient to make a game this way for a lot of reasons. In Star Citizen, they actually move a ship around the map, and if you open the door, it opens the physical barrier between you and the outside world and you can see out of it.
By keeping everyone and all objects "in space" all the time, Star Citizen allows some insanely different experiences that other games would have to specifically program functionality for.
It also hurts everybody else attempting to do something like that. Just imagine what a capable director could have done with those amounts of money...
That's the least you expect from a $200m project. It's a massive failure if they don't deliver with that amount of money. It's just that they lose nothing but reputation because it wasn't their money.
Bad management so far.