I think my biggest beef with the game is how unstable it is.
The game design is a bit grindy, whatever, lets grind away then, however any time I start to make any progress the game crashes. After two or three of these I loose interest. Only to try again in 6 months to much the same results.
They appear to be following a long term slow burn development plan, nothing wrong with this many of my favorite games follow this same pattern, factorio, valheim, however these games follow the cardinal rule of public development which is "keep it stable" it has been 10 years and star citizen still is a crashy mess.
They have a lot of neat tech in their engine, seamless space to surface to inside to instance is not trivial. But I wish they would just sit down for a quarter and stabilize the thing. I like to joke that the elevators in the game are probably some of their most advanced tech, the punchline is that if you have played the game you know that most of the crashes and other weirdness involve elevators. but I am only half-joking. because the elevators really are connecting zones and instances in a cool seamless way.
To this day the whole game feels like an FPS mod, and a poorly tested one at that.
Every so often, when a new update comes out, I check out some let's player who will, in a span of an hour, will run into some incredibly basic and fundamental bug, like clipping through an elevator and getting ejected into space, or being unable to get through a door that's supposed to open.
Honestly the whole game feels years away from release.
That's it, a lot of early access indie games are built using the lessons learned from agile methodology; Factorio recently released a video showcasing the ~6000 tests they have to verify all their complicated systems work as they should, and their velocity is incredible, fixing over 600 bugs in the span of a month (few of which were game-breaking btw, a lot of their bugfixes are fairly trivial).
But Star Citizen has all the hallmarks of too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management. They have over a thousand people working on it and have for a long time now. And that scale isn't the problem - Rockstar did the same with RDR 2 and will likely exceed it with GTA VI - but while the main guy has some games under his belt, they too had problems with development and actually finishing.
> too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management.
The main problem in this case was SC's game director. He was around for nine years and set the scope/goals/roadmap for the game before being abruptly fired 9 months ago and replaced. Through the grape vine I've heard he never provided a long-term vision for the project internally whilst constantly promising new things to the community (ie scope creep).
The new game director, Rich, is well liked within the development team and much of the recent CitizenCon event was spent cutting back scope and providing an actual goal for SC 1.0 to release as.
Doesn't it bother you that even if the game will be complete to the say, beta test levels, it would still be an insane pay2win product? Like not even "sense of pride and accomplishment" pay2win, there ingame stuff cost "only" tens of dollars per item. Here it costs hundreds and thousands of dollars per ship. If it was a EA or Ubisoft game, they would been eaten alive just for such monetization. While for SC it is ignored by the actual players.
Their monetization strategy appears to be largely modeled after flightsimulators. DCS specifically comes to mind. As in DCS you don't buy the game you buy the plane.
On the one hand I am fine with this. on the other I vaguely expect DCS levels of systems simulation from the ships and I don't see that ever happening.
I funded this back on kickstarter when I was still in high school. I remember the excitement that came with every $1mil milestone, it really felt like an incredible movement that was going to produce something really special. I haven't been able to follow progress closely over the past decade, but the gameplay demos have been fun and there always seems to be a decent amount of progress so at this point I think I'm content waiting.
I contributed $35 in the original Kickstarter because I love space sims and the genre was completely dead at that time. I doubt the game will ever come out at this point but I'm not going to sweat wasting $35 more than ten years ago.
There was this space sim game a while back that was called HELLION, it had so much potential it was unreal. Sadly, some internal affairs and change in priority left it abandoned. You hate to see it.
I gave them USD 50 for pretty similar reasons plus the additional reason of thanking Roberts for the entertainment I had from his earlier games. Since, I have easily gotten that much entertainment value watching the development, so for me it was a great purchase. ANd they tell me there will be a full game someday, for icing on the cake.
In between when that kickstarter went off and now, another company funded, built and released Elite Dangerous, then added multiple extensions adding planet surfaces, first-person stuff, etc to it. I mean in terms of gameplay it's nowhere near as ambitious and it's got an absence of story, but it actually released and gained success.
Out of curiosity, do you find the development story itself the worthwhile investment or are you holding out on the bet if you'll wait ${years} more then something like the promised feature set will eventually be delivered as the polished, complete, and functional package you've been looking forward to?
There is a lot of value in the development story for me. Over time they've almost entirely stopped talking about progress outside of major milestones which is disappointing but theres only so many years in a row you can say server meshing will be finished in 6 months before people get tired of hearing about it.
The team seems genuine, and donations aren't slowing down, so it seems likely that the game will materialize in some complete form eventually
So it's like the lottery where a lottery ticket doesn't really buy you a chance at riches, but the possibility to dream about what you'd do with riches?
To be honest, I think the biggest difficulty this game faces is that at this level of funding and this time amount of development time, I'm not sure you can actually make something that lives up to the hype. From what I've heard the stuff that's implemented so far is pretty good, albeit buggy. And the team definitely has the skill to make something amazing.
But you don't want decent or even good from a project that's spent over 12 years in development with over $700 million of development costs. You want a genre defining masterpiece that puts pretty much everything else in the genre (or even industry) to shame.
I'm not sure it'll be possible to deliver that, at least to the degree you'd expect from a game this expensive. At a certain level of development time/costs, expectations become so high that it's almost impossible not to disappoint everyone with the finished product. And I think Star Citizen passed that point a long time ago.
Exactly that. I mean sure, it may visually be up there, and it may have an attention to detail to things like... people shuffling around in line at a cantina or whatever it was I heard about the other day. But that's window dressing. If they can't get the core technical (= stability, performance) and core gameplay (= is it fun) right, it's a flop. Of course, at this point they will never earn as much from sales of the finished product as they have already received and spent on development cost. It won't be the next GTA Online. At best it'll be as popular as games like Elite Dangerous (fishing in the same pond) or Eve Online, which have player bases that are middling at best compared to the games they're competing with budget- and scope-wise, like GTA or Cyberpunk.
I mean Cyberpunk's launch was terrible as well because it too didn't get the basics right - crashes, poorly/slowly loading textures, etc.
Nobody does. They pay for a unique service, not as a handout.
"Finally I can be at the forefront of a gaming community just how I dreamt of when I was a kid. And in this particular gaming community, I don't even have to waste a minute playing!" It's suspension of disbelief pushed ahead one more level, a simulation of a space ship sim game. Think virtual virtual skeeball in Futurama s01e02. Just how kids who dream of risking their lives in a space-Spitfire don't really want to risk their lives in a space-Spitfire, grown ups who dream of sinking countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires don't really want to sink countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires. Both just don't quite know it yet, and profoundly enjoy that.
I don't think that's why people are giving them money at this point. They're paying for stuff in the game that happens to be rewards for "crowdfunding" the game. It's not a "Just 100 more bucks and maybe they'll deliver", it's folks already playing the content that's in the game and buying further ships or such for whatever reason.
They apparently found every whale gamer on the market willing to buy virtual ships and stuff like that. I think all expenditure towards the game is counted as "crowdfunding"
Cyberpunk 2077 needed like $100+ million on top of the original $300+ million budget to get Phantom Liberty out and to patch the game to a point where the general public stopped hating the game.
Still, even with all of the money sunk into Cyberpunk 2077, its ~$450 million budget pales in comparison to Star Citizen.
Cyberpunk have a massive problems caused by success of Witcher 3 a lot and i mean A LOT of people move to western studios and they were best engineers in the company.
They still have people problem as pay in CDPR is pathetic compared to other studios and not much top talent want to work there.
Cyberpunk 2077 budget was overblown thanks to that + ~50% of that was spend on marketing I would assume there were also a lot of IP "costs" so overall "production" cost was probably about ~30-40% of the budget.
And it's still full of bugs (Cyberpunk 2077). I've just bought it on sale, it's annoying close to being bloody amazing but every so often you get someone T posing or just something else that ruins it.
Others have left the likely real answers here, but...
$750m is the right order of magnitude for this game. That's "only" ~400 employees for ~10 years. Games are hugely labour intensive, and in mainstream cases also hugely advertising intensive. The company currently have ~60 open roles. Your average Call of Duty game is $100-200m, and they come out with one every year or two, spending at a similar rate. The budget for GTA V was $265m, but has now made $8bn.
I don't think we can even say that it's "bad" or "unfinished" and therefore shouldn't cost this much... the game is finished in the truest of senses – it's available to buy and brings in revenue. Whether they are continuing development, whether it currently sucks, etc, are all somewhat irrelevant.
I think we can judge it for being a bad game, I think we can judge it for not being cash-flow positive like we would with any other startup, but the amount of money involved is seemingly in the right ballpark for the market.
I don't think comparing GTA, the most financially successful game of all time, to star citizen does star citizen any favors. Star citizen is a very niche game, even if they will do everything they plan I don't expect they will even approach 500m in sales.
I backed Star Citizen in the first round (you may remember me from the Wing Commander Privateer remake) and... honestly the thing is, since I did, Space Engineers came out and scratched that itch better than any of this could.
Space Engineers is still to date my favourite space sim of all time. It has a steep learning curve and is ideally played with a few mods (encounters etc), but even stock standard it’s such an incredible game that only gets better the more you play it.
Wow, what a ride. As a non-gamer, I clicked the link, saw a site that looks like it's Best Viewed In Internet Explorer, with a ticker of an obscenely high dollar amount. It took me a good 2 minutes to figure out this was about a video game.
I'm very impressed they managed to raise this kind of money with a site like this.
Regardless of Star Citizen being a huge scam, a Hackernews encountering a site that does not look like all the b2b SaaS sites and being surprised that it managed to raise money is extremely funny.
The website is a fun mix of ancient Vue that was written a decade ago alongside an ongoing overhaul that has replaced the menu and most main pages with React.
Readit News
The game design is a bit grindy, whatever, lets grind away then, however any time I start to make any progress the game crashes. After two or three of these I loose interest. Only to try again in 6 months to much the same results.
They appear to be following a long term slow burn development plan, nothing wrong with this many of my favorite games follow this same pattern, factorio, valheim, however these games follow the cardinal rule of public development which is "keep it stable" it has been 10 years and star citizen still is a crashy mess.
They have a lot of neat tech in their engine, seamless space to surface to inside to instance is not trivial. But I wish they would just sit down for a quarter and stabilize the thing. I like to joke that the elevators in the game are probably some of their most advanced tech, the punchline is that if you have played the game you know that most of the crashes and other weirdness involve elevators. but I am only half-joking. because the elevators really are connecting zones and instances in a cool seamless way.
Every so often, when a new update comes out, I check out some let's player who will, in a span of an hour, will run into some incredibly basic and fundamental bug, like clipping through an elevator and getting ejected into space, or being unable to get through a door that's supposed to open.
Honestly the whole game feels years away from release.
But Star Citizen has all the hallmarks of too much ambitions, too many people, and poor management. They have over a thousand people working on it and have for a long time now. And that scale isn't the problem - Rockstar did the same with RDR 2 and will likely exceed it with GTA VI - but while the main guy has some games under his belt, they too had problems with development and actually finishing.
The main problem in this case was SC's game director. He was around for nine years and set the scope/goals/roadmap for the game before being abruptly fired 9 months ago and replaced. Through the grape vine I've heard he never provided a long-term vision for the project internally whilst constantly promising new things to the community (ie scope creep).
The new game director, Rich, is well liked within the development team and much of the recent CitizenCon event was spent cutting back scope and providing an actual goal for SC 1.0 to release as.
On the one hand I am fine with this. on the other I vaguely expect DCS levels of systems simulation from the ships and I don't see that ever happening.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/588210/HELLION/
The team seems genuine, and donations aren't slowing down, so it seems likely that the game will materialize in some complete form eventually
'Content' meaning 'stuff', or 'content' meaning 'happy? Or both?
But you don't want decent or even good from a project that's spent over 12 years in development with over $700 million of development costs. You want a genre defining masterpiece that puts pretty much everything else in the genre (or even industry) to shame.
I'm not sure it'll be possible to deliver that, at least to the degree you'd expect from a game this expensive. At a certain level of development time/costs, expectations become so high that it's almost impossible not to disappoint everyone with the finished product. And I think Star Citizen passed that point a long time ago.
I mean Cyberpunk's launch was terrible as well because it too didn't get the basics right - crashes, poorly/slowly loading textures, etc.
https://insider-gaming.com/cloud-imperium-games-layoffs-repo...
They don't have much in the bank. They burn over 100 mil a year on headcount.
"Finally I can be at the forefront of a gaming community just how I dreamt of when I was a kid. And in this particular gaming community, I don't even have to waste a minute playing!" It's suspension of disbelief pushed ahead one more level, a simulation of a space ship sim game. Think virtual virtual skeeball in Futurama s01e02. Just how kids who dream of risking their lives in a space-Spitfire don't really want to risk their lives in a space-Spitfire, grown ups who dream of sinking countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires don't really want to sink countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires. Both just don't quite know it yet, and profoundly enjoy that.
Still, even with all of the money sunk into Cyberpunk 2077, its ~$450 million budget pales in comparison to Star Citizen.
They still have people problem as pay in CDPR is pathetic compared to other studios and not much top talent want to work there.
Cyberpunk 2077 budget was overblown thanks to that + ~50% of that was spend on marketing I would assume there were also a lot of IP "costs" so overall "production" cost was probably about ~30-40% of the budget.
$750m is the right order of magnitude for this game. That's "only" ~400 employees for ~10 years. Games are hugely labour intensive, and in mainstream cases also hugely advertising intensive. The company currently have ~60 open roles. Your average Call of Duty game is $100-200m, and they come out with one every year or two, spending at a similar rate. The budget for GTA V was $265m, but has now made $8bn.
I don't think we can even say that it's "bad" or "unfinished" and therefore shouldn't cost this much... the game is finished in the truest of senses – it's available to buy and brings in revenue. Whether they are continuing development, whether it currently sucks, etc, are all somewhat irrelevant.
I think we can judge it for being a bad game, I think we can judge it for not being cash-flow positive like we would with any other startup, but the amount of money involved is seemingly in the right ballpark for the market.
I'm very impressed they managed to raise this kind of money with a site like this.