Hacker News Reader

Comment by blakeyrat | Hacker News Reader

While I'm sensitive to people who gave money to this project, I have to ask:

If Chris Roberts, with his name and reputation in the games industry, were still capable of making quality games, wouldn't he have been able to find a publisher to fund Star Citizen instead of having to beg thousands of his fans?

My attitude towards crowdfunding is to never contribute. If the product's successful, I can just buy it off-the-shelf when it's finished. (Like the new Elite, for example.) If it fails, I'm not out anything. (Sure, there's a small chance I might miss out on some Kickstarter exclusive deal, but I'd rather miss out on that then have an Ouya collecting dust in my living room.)

View on HN

I could believe that a talented game designer was capable of getting money from publishers, but not for the game the actually want to make (at least without substantial compromise).

And the downside of sitting out on crowdfunding is the reduced chance that something you like will get funded/made. Whether that matters to you depends on how excited you are by a project, and how likely you think it is to produce something matching your expectations.

In the field of video games, there's already far more good games than I can play in a lifetime. I'm willing to let someone else do the vetting in my stead.

EDIT: to respond to your first sentence, I get your point, but it seems like that particular market has been severely under-served recently (as demonstrated by, well, Star Citizen's funding campaign for example). It shouldn't be a hard-sell to a publisher to make a game for a market that's been badly under-served for a decade or so.

And it's not like Chris Roberts is a game design savant who isn't capable of doing the wheeling and dealing-- the cast he got for Wing Commander 3 demonstrates he can deal.

I find it hard to believe if he had taken his pitch to, for example, EA, that they'd just brush him off unless they had good reason. I think now what we're seeing with Star Citizen development is the reason.

He could have rushed out an uninspiring space simulation game and made a lot of money. Star Citizen is an attempt to raise the bar and advance the state of the art. This alternative development methodology is a part of that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com