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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

I'm not affiliated with CIG (edit: I am an early backer as I mentioned elsewhere), but I am passionate because I work in the games industry and I see what CIG is doing as incredibly beneficial to the industry; open development is huge for both studios and consumers but it needs all the love it can get.

So I'd really love a source for your "is seen as a joke in the gaming industry", because that is not at all what it's like here and is making me doubt your intentions. CIG is producing a game that people are passionate about years before it's released, completely self-funded and all that off a kickstarter. They're the reason Kickstarter got so popular in the gaming industry: everybody wants to be them.

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I agree it's beneficial but not for the reasons you think: it's turning thousands of people away from the ill-conceived crowd-funding model of game development.

BTW it has roughly about $140 MILLION of "all the love it can get". Does it really need any more than that? It has enough. That's well more than Skyrim's budget.

> They're the reason Kickstarter got so popular in the gaming industry: everybody wants to be them.

If you're backing Star Citizen because you think it proves the crowd-funding model, I'm sorry to break this to you, but it's more likely people in the know are rejecting the crowd-funding model due to Star Citizen, not signing up for it.

> it's more likely people in the know are rejecting the crowd-funding model due to Star Citizen, not signing up for it.

And your source for that nonsensical statement is?

Star Citizen is the most successful crowdfunded project to date and second most successful kickstarter project at the time of its completion (after Oculus Rift). The two successes together that year were what made Kickstarter famous and turned it from a niche site to "the american dream 2.0" where anyone's greatest ideas can be funded.

I don't care about the crowdfunding model and you're completely mistaken about my reasons on why I backed Star Citizen. I don't particularly like or dislike it and I do appreciate your stance that you prefer buying the finished product - I think it's a healthy stance.

But your comment on people rejecting the crowd funding model "due to star citizen" is absolute nonsense. And so is your comment on budgeting, by the way - You should keep in mind that the number on there isn't "Star Citizen's budget", it's CIG's budget. There's no particular point in time where anyone says "Alright guys, time to pack up, stop making sales, we'll do with the money we have right now because it's more than enough to finish the game".

Most successful? Measured in what, money spent? I'm sure other kick-started projects are more successful in that they actually produced a product that resulted in profitability.

Please stop trolling and read my actual post.

I don't see the trolling? How is Star Citizen the most successful crowdfunded game? It's still not released.

The point I now made several times is that it's one of the two major projects that turned kickstarter into a popular platform. It was extremely successful at the time it was released and while projects have since outranked SC in most spend on Kickstarter, it's still one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns of all time by any financial measure.

As for "not released", they've released a lot more than other projects have. Colossal failures such as Everquest Next have absolutely nothing to show for it - if SC stops development tomorrow (which is unlikely), they have in fact released an early stage game and a ton of near-game content.

How can a game that's something like 3 years behind schedule be considered "successful"? Even Half-Life 2 only added one year to their development time. I think your definition of the word "successful" is quite different from the popular one. The only thing Star Citizen is successful at is suckering people into paying for nothing.

Ok; so the number I gave isn't Star Citizen's budget. What is? Reminder: Skyrim had a total budget of $90 million, was released on time, and also managed to hire some kick-ass voice talent to-boot. I highly doubt Bethesda had an additional, what, $50 million in operational costs separate from the Skyrim development costs.

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