Star Citizen crowdfunding passes $750M

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

by haunter • 2 years ago

125 167 2 years ago

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

This is a question for someone that has been playing star citizen for a long time. How close are we to an actually playable game? How good is what they have built so far?

aeonik7• 2 years ago

It's in a quantum superposition of being really good and unplayable, and releasable soon and infinite scope creep.

NelsonMinar3• 2 years ago

Also not releasing is a highly profitable strategy for them.

adastra22• 2 years ago

So, Daikatana?

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

This is a question for someone that has been playing star citizen for a long time. How close are we to an actually playable game?

I'm probably missing your point, but it sounds like you've answered your own question.

aucisson_masque3• 2 years ago

Take my answer for what it’s worth, never played the game although I am curious because of all the people calling it a scam and take a look on YouTube once every few month.

It looks like a game in alpha, very very buggy, very little content. I am amazed at the time it takes them to add stuff, with a budget of 65 million things should have been going steadily but every time there is an update they promise not much to start with and even then always cancel things.

Personally I am absolutely convinced it’s a scam, they have to improve the game for legal reason but do the bare minimum and focus more on adding new ship they can sell than actual gameplay feature.

aeonik7• 2 years ago

It's definitely not a scam, just a highly ambitious project that spends more time on mechanics and infrastructure than content.

The ships by themselves are works of art. And their main funding apparatus, so of course the put an inordinate amount of effort towards this.

The bugs are definitely a problem, though they are migrating the entire infrastructure at the moment into a highly available cluster that is intended to keep all players on a single persistent universe like Eve online.

The combat is pretty good, but much of the game breaks down because of poorly performing code/servers.

I think their current clusters accumulate a lot leaks that eventually degrade the experience.

I'd honestly be very curious what their internal architecture looks like in more detail.

UltraSane3• 2 years ago

They have put a lot of work into their back end. They working on a really innovative server meshing system that can automatically and seamlessly balance the game world and entities across multiple servers. Your character can migrate to a different server and you will have no idea it happened and can still interact with characters on a different server.

t-writescode• 2 years ago

I expect Star Citizen is going to be one of those games that won't get tons and tons of new players (maybe double its total count right now? Is that a lot?) But the people that play it are dedicated and very, very interested in the experience that it brings.

So, perhaps you (for example) will never, ever be interested in playing the game for anywhere near the amount of time that would justify the cost of entry, but for the specific space exploration / worldbuilding experience that Star Citizen provides, and for the people that want exactly that, it was and is a fantastic game.

zamadatix2• 2 years ago

Agree on the take except replace "space exploration/worldbuilding experience" with "ship model buying experience". The former is a very common desire and what one might take away from reading about the game, the latter is more akin to what has been delivered so far and what people still spending money on the game seem to care a lot about.

stubish• 2 years ago

Pretty much at any point in their development they have had amazing visuals and disappointing game play compared to other games already on the market. As a concrete example, game play wise it has been chasing Elite Dangerous since it was released 10 years ago. I believe Eve Online too (but you can't get out of the cockpit there?). Even single player Starfield. I think the project has been taking so long because, when they release something, it needs not be a disappointment.

Supposedly, the single player Squadron 42 part of Star Citizen is feature complete, and if they can get that out of the door will be telling on what the MMO release would be like. Personally, I'm expecting Squadron 42 to be comparable to other releases that year, but better voice acting, more jank, PC only, and poor controller support. And given the focus on 'players making their own story', I'm expecting the MMO to suffer the same reception as Elite Dangerous with a shiny engine trying to hide tedious and repetitive game play (but many people like that, and it might remain a profitable niche game).

tarcon• 2 years ago

Youtube has a video of a frustrated Chris Roberts struggling to play from 8 years ago, which basically shows the same game we have today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWq8ynUq7wM

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

That is absolute gold.

CaptainFever• 2 years ago

I play it sometimes. It feels truly "next gen", in that it feels like a very buggy, early-access version of Elite Dangerous 2.0. Overambitious, for good (it does things no other game does), or for worse (the time and budget required). Definitely mismanaged though, in the amount of repeated effort required (e.g. AAA-quality assets that would be replaced anyway, which should have been prototype-quality instead).

bsder• 2 years ago

Erm, I think somebody missed a power of 10 somewhere in the title. Their funding is definitely not $750 million.

Although, $75 million is still impressive.

Edit: I stand corrected. I simply looked at the website which listed the stretch goals to $65 million and missed the $750 million total. Cowabunga.

aeonik7• 2 years ago

It's not a typo, it's 750 million.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-funded_crowd...

vunderba3• 2 years ago

There's not a lot of transparency around their funding - and the only indication that they've raised $700+ million is... their own website.

They also claim around 5 million backers which puts the average donation at around 150 dollars. That seems really high.

From the wikipedia article, the next highest game is Prison Architect at a comparatively paltry 20 million.

It's still possible. On the other hand, it could all be completely PR bull crap since there's no way to audit them.

aucisson_masque3• 2 years ago

Holy duck. That can’t be true, it said 65 millions on the website but I must have read it wrong.

10 years of development, 750 millions budget and people are still not convinced it’s a scam ? They want it so much, damn.

hotsauceror• 2 years ago

The article clearly indicates the funding milestones and dates.

ianburrell• 2 years ago

Crowdfunding passed $150 million in 2017, and $300 million in 2020, $500 million in 2022. $750 million is believable.

I'm really surprised that they are still raising money this fast. I would have thought people lost interest. Most of the discussions online are negative. There was fans buying ships, but I can't see that generating that much money.

edm0nd2• 2 years ago

The game has taken in hundreds of millions of dollars over the years and has still been "in progress" the entire time. It's a borderline scam imo.

hipadev23• 2 years ago

Genuine question: Who looks at a video game that has raised hundreds of millions and think “Yeah they need more cash to get this out”

noirbot• 2 years ago

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.

lolinder• 2 years ago

Then this isn't crowdfunding any more, it's DLC revenue.

dmix• 2 years ago

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"

mh-2• 2 years ago

That player database is worth a fortune.

NelsonMinar3• 2 years ago

They're exploiting people who are vulnerable to collecting impulses.

Loughla2• 2 years ago

Isn't that just most people though?

HKH26• 2 years ago

So it's consumeristic, but all gaming is.

usrusr3• 2 years ago

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.

vasco• 2 years ago

It's sounding a lot like fraud. And your whole stance seems to be "nobody knows what it means but it's provocative".

danpalmer• 2 years ago

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.

rowanG077• 2 years ago

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.

TulliusCicero2• 2 years ago

It's been more than ten years though? The kickstarter was in 2012, and they'd already been working on it for a year or two by then I think?

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

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.

roygbiv2• 2 years ago

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.

machinekob• 2 years ago

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.

speckx2• 2 years ago

Not me. I funded them initially on Kickstarter for $35. I won’t fund anymore, I’m only in it for the single player Squadron 42 game.

AdmiralAsshat• 2 years ago

Three quarters of a billion dollars apparently still isn't enough to resist laying off staff:

https://insider-gaming.com/cloud-imperium-games-layoffs-repo...

Justsignedup• 2 years ago

When your burn rate exceeds your cash flow you cut the burn.

They don't have much in the bank. They burn over 100 mil a year on headcount.

MisterBiggs3• 2 years ago

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.

zamadatix2• 2 years ago

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?

MisterBiggs3• 2 years ago

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

MrMember• 2 years ago

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.

HaZeust• 2 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.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/588210/HELLION/

jdougan• 2 years ago

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.

jagermo• 2 years ago

Same. It would be nice to have a game at one point, but No Mans Sky and Elite:Dangerous kind of filled that niche for me.

puzzlingcaptcha• 2 years ago

$48 today, adjusted for inflation.

Cthulhu_4• 2 years ago

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.

Ylpertnodi• 2 years ago

so at this point I think I'm content waiting.

'Content' meaning 'stuff', or 'content' meaning 'happy? Or both?

Hikikomori• 2 years ago

Don't think he can be stuff.

Olphs• 2 years ago

What would "I'm stuff waiting" even mean?

doctorpangloss• 2 years ago

The game focuses on the idea of the idea of a space game which turns out to be what people really pay for, ie space real estate, ie limited edition ships, ie works of art.

Another POV is that it would be much simpler to have waited 10 years and developed NFTs in 2021 instead.

If you have the skills to hype an aesthetic experience for a broad audience; and you’re so cynical as to not really do anything; just make a shitcoin. Make an NFT. Doing all this other work is a huge waste of time.

djmips• 2 years ago

I don't think you have the skills to hype an aesthetic experience for a broad audience.

spiritplumber2• 2 years ago

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.

sen• 2 years ago

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.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

I don’t get how it keeps getting funding. It always comes off as a glorified tech demo, and makes me think people are just funding a leisurely game studio hobby for the developers instead of a story they can experience.

pixxel• 2 years ago

I don’t get how it keeps getting funding.

Why’d you jump into these SC threads? There’s an interest, clearly.

empressplay• 2 years ago

Maybe with that much money they can have Mac and Windows clients too...?

Iulioh2• 2 years ago

It won't ever happen.

It needs BEEF to run and macs are not capable of that much cow.

globalnode• 2 years ago

and yet theres still no game

glimshe• 2 years ago

The product isn't Star Citizen, but the dream of Star Citizen's completion.

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

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?

saagarjha2• 2 years ago

Maybe the real game was the friends we made along the way.

Refusing23• 2 years ago

Im still a bit disappointed that they keep increasing the scope

instead of just getting the promised game out the door, and then creating some large free content updates as time progresses.

its getting a bit redicilous

i mean, they have motion capture and voice acting from mark hamill and Gary oldman (and probably more) and they're gonna die before the game is released

ConcernedCoder• 2 years ago

so who's holding the $750 million?

jdlshore• 2 years ago

They spend it as it comes in, mostly on salaries. It’s a large company. Their financials are publicly available if you care to look.

gigatexal• 2 years ago

An incredible number for sure. But space sims meh. I’d give 750M to Gave Newell for HL3 (yes I know it was never finished etc etc).

mdavid626• 2 years ago

I can’t close the cookie popup on my iPhone SE 2020. It’s a shame that we reached this state in 2024.

skrebbel2• 2 years ago

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.

Hawxy2• 2 years ago

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.

RUnconcerned• 2 years ago

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.

skrebbel2• 2 years ago

I said impressed, not surprised. Also I don't appreciate being called "a Hackernews".

nottorp• 2 years ago

That's 750k golden ships at 1000 each?

Golden the Ship Was - Oh! Oh! Oh!

Smithalicious• 2 years ago

And when this all blows up everyone will walk away without a scratch. In a just society everybody involved in this mess would spend a double digit number of years in jail.

Cloudef• 2 years ago

Scam Citizen

corobo• 2 years ago

At that level of funding and the amount of time it's taken I wonder what percent of their backers are dying waiting on this

In another 10 years I'll add "of old age" to the wonder

I can no longer remember a time where the internet wasn't waiting for Star Citizen haha

blitzar• 2 years ago

Sunk cost fallacy at its finest

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

somat2• 2 years ago

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.

Cthulhu_4• 2 years ago

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.

Hawxy2• 2 years ago

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.

newsclues2• 2 years ago

I think the problem is too much money.

torginus• 2 years ago

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.

Yizahi• 2 years ago

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.

somat2• 2 years ago

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.

CM30• 2 years ago

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.

Cthulhu_4• 2 years 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.

mekster• 2 years ago

A good example of how no money can guarantee a timely quality release. It only makes people lazy when they realize they have decades of time to waste.

Jean-Papoulos• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if you're joking or not. In which world does having no money guarantee timeliness and quality, because I really wanna live there.

v3ss0n• 2 years ago

And yet still full of bug in empty space with only boring things to do.

honeybadger1• 2 years ago

This game mirrors the paradox of a flawed system—like a government program that perpetually stumbles, yet justifies its failures as the inevitable consequence of insufficient means, forever seeking more while never addressing the root of its shortcomings.

kleiba• 2 years ago

In unrelated news, "Unknown Realm" was apparently demoed at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo this year: ttps://stirringdragon.games/portland-recap-pt-1/

personalityson• 2 years ago

It has glimpses of an awesome sci-fi atmosphere, which no other game has. I like to do a lot of this: https://youtu.be/0Cii3MWNN8M?si=n2WMfQfgxciRZj0A&t=75

FrontierProject• 2 years ago

Dude tried to make a chill scenery video then kept jerking the camera around like a schizophrenic squirrel.

Star Citizen crowdfunding passes $750M

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