Star Citizen Raised $148M from Fans, and Now It’s Raising Concerns
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I preordered Star Citizen back in 2012 or 2013. Whenever the original Kickstarter was. I've kind of forgotten about it. I've never preordered another game--or anything really. And I don't think this was a bad experience.
I haven't received a game yet, but I have played some demos that were really fun. I've seen hours of content (Sure, that content is freely available, but so is NPR), read some great stories, and had some great conversations about the game.
In 2013 I paid $60 for a game I have not yet played. That year I also went to a casino one night with $80 in my pocket. Both times I came away with nothing but a fun experience and some stories. In both cases I feel like I paid for some entertainment and received it.
This isn't a post to excuse vaporware titles on Steam Greenlight or preordering broken-on-launch games. Quite the contrary. I won't buy EA games until at least a year after they come out. I will NEVER buy a pre-release game on Steam. But I bought Star Citizen. I took a gamble, and I had some fun. I wouldn't have done that if I didn't think there would be some fun along the way.
Star Citizen could never come out, and I wouldn't really feel cheated, because I still got something out of it.
The check and balance you're looking for is traditional capital investment, I think?
Because if all things on Kickstarter clear a bar of "this is a sound business", then those projects probably wouldn't need Kickstarter.
edit: for clarity
There are different funding sites with different rules and different popularity due to those rules and the vagaries of advertising and attention. Kickstarter doesn't need to cater to every type of project or business.
Why does there seem to be a horde of people who think kickstarter is for pre-ordering finished products and getting pissed when they don't receive them? That's just not what it is!
In some cases they have no choice, because some kickstarters are really expensive. It might make sense to pre-order Ubuntu's $700 smartphone for example, but nobody would ever throw Canonical $700 for some "goofy schwag" and just hope they might or might not get a phone later.
Being able to back something to get that thing seems to confuse to many people into believing it is a shop where you buy things rather than an investing in something you would like to exist, but may never actually exist.
But the thing is, Star Citizen promised a level of capability of a game that has never existed up to this point. And I have backed it personally for... well, a lot. But even if it never comes out, I won't really feel cheated, because I know exactly what the goal is, and the challenges meeting it includes. It's not a scam if it fails, if it fails it was poor management and an impossible goal.
But I'd argue, seeing that even some Early Access games on Steam seem to have gained some Star Citizen-style features, that Star Citizen has raised the bar for what a space simulation game going forward should be able to do. And for that alone, it's worth it.
I've gotten some fun out of the alpha game itself, but also quite a lot of value out of these videos and other info they put out. It's a fascinating look into game development, which is something I'm interested in but not looking to pursue a career for myself.
Thursday is "Around the Verse" day, so they should be releasing one of their status update videos tonight. These are rotating through the four studios and covering what a particular studio has been working on over the last month, followed by a deeper dive into some particular subject.
Last week was the Austin studio update and touched on growing the studio's build systems. Previously they've covered subjects like QA testing, ship designs, procedural planets, procedural space stations, and a lot more. It's usually really interesting to watch.
I think this week is the UK studio. They're the ones working on a lot of the bigger ships, so I've got my fingers crossed for a look at the Aegis Reclaimer. But they were late in getting the video up last month, so we might be waiting until tomorrow. It's already 11 PM over there.
I really wish they'd occasionally give even a cursory nod to the programming team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMcLjNW8-SA&list=PLVct2QDhDr...
Watching Mark Abent demo bugs in his "handy dandy test level", all the "shenanigans" that result, and then show us the code and what the actual issues were, has been pretty much worth what I pledged right there :)
I just see so much cruft, so many useless people such as producers, talking a lot but not doing a lot. Taking all the credit, but not actually working apart from meetings.
The PO comes up with an idea, we break it up and enter it into jira, etc...
I guess it is interesting for people who don't work in IT projects.
Kickstarter on the other hand seems to deliver an EA game, which then has the same risks as a normal EA title. Often times you've just thrown away some cash without even a demo to show for it.
Editing to add that we're not even mentioning the fact that they are basically building a global development company with studios sprinkled all over the US and EU to keep up with the new funding expectations, those things don't happen overnight.
It's not clear to me what their development timeline is, although constant Alpha releases are promising.
> Editing to add that we're not even mentioning the fact that they are basically building a global development company...
I think this is where a lot of the risk exists. Normally a development studio grows by successfully releasing games (in terms of money). Star Citizen is in uncharted waters in that regard.
I think this is the key. A lot of people are sucked into the idea that kickstarters are a sure thing, but you can't spend money that way. Kickstarter isn't a place to buy stuff, it's a place to throw money away and maybe get something cool out of it.
Nothing separates you from this community: http://store.steampowered.com/app/252490/Rust/ you would fit right in and you'd have just as much fun. Nothing you said passes scrutiny. You're in it for a ride with the developers, and that's what's fun to you. Not the product. And that's ok.
The point I was trying to get at was that I wouldn't buy an unfinished game (or anything else) and expect a "final" product. If I ever do buy a steam greenlight game, it'll be for the same reasons I bought Star Citizen.
I also should have mentioned that I bought Banished well before it was finished, but it was after I read a lot of that guys development blog, and was interested in the content of just that part, and wanted to support that. It was a fun ride, and in the end, a (I feel) very polished game came out of it.
To use your Casino example, this is like going to that casino and paying for a shrimp appetizer, never receiving it but saying "well at least I got a nice experience and story out of it". People are pissed because they paid for something and still haven't gotten it (at least that's the story I keep hearing).
Having said that; if you believe that a game is about paying for an experience (not a disc or digital license), then you (and a lot of other people) have gotten their money's worth.
So for those people who are mad, it's really more like going to the casino and expecting to get a huge windfall playing blackjack. Like yeah it might happen but don't think of it as an investment opportunity.
All in all, this game is definitely worth your time and money if you're into this game genre. There's even a demo version if you're not sure.
Also their blog is excellent: https://www.factorio.com/blog/
The first time I played factorio I played for 24 hours straight, and I am not normally someone who finds games any fun at all.
But seriously, Factorio is a great game. A game I imagine myself still playing 10 years from now.
Not quite Factorio level (yet) though.
I've generally been pretty gung-ho with early access games if they have a Linux/SteamOS version available. Kerbal Space Program and Planet Explorers have taken weeks' worth of my time (and that time was enjoyable, even amid the bugs; in fact, the bugs were part of the reason why I enjoyed them). With both of those games, I had a chance to experience their evolution from alpha-quality-at-best to finished product. That's not an experience normally possible in the release cycle of a non-early-access game.
Other titles which are still in EA but are releasing constant stream of information plus software updates:
- Space Engineers/Medieval Engineers (weekly YT blog)
- Rust (weekly blog)
- Rogalia (daily to weekly Steam blog)
- Project Zomboid (weekly blog)
- Kenshi (between weekly and monthly changelist)
- Factorio (weekly blog)
- Don't Starve Together (multiplayer addition to Don't Starve)
- DayZ (I only play maybe once per year but the blog updates seem quite frequent)
- Terraria
- Kerbal Space Program
- Prison ArchitectHere is a Reddit post that covers in great detail the claims made by No Man Sky's maker about the game's content, as compared to reality on launch:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4y1h9i/wheres_the_no...
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/08/17/broken-promises-...
It may be that the game is perfectly fun for people as launched, but that's separate from the concern that the game's maker misrepresented it.
As far as the meat of the article, I've been following Star Citizen as a backer since the Kickstarter days. My take on the history of the game's development is that Cloud Imperium Games was kind of unfocused and spinning some wheels for a while at the start as they attempted to build a AAA studio from scratch by partnering with smaller outsourcing firms for animation and modeling work. I think they misfired on some of their choices of early partners but that seems to have ended and they seem to be focused and moving forward.
The thing a lot of people forget is that the game was initially going to be: "you log in, you spawn in your ship/you are your ship/and...dogfight". As well, many of the ambitious features that they've been successfully implementing like seamless travel across millions of kms of volumetric space were player requests. I know I requested the ability to fly from space to planet surfaces and also expressed that I would be content to wait longer for the game's release if that was possible.
I don't really have sympathy for the folks who feel cheated or abused because from my experience, CIG has bent over backwards many times.
Anyways, I'll get off the soapbox. I'm optimistic and the game is already fun, with only a limited amount of the full content to come (especially in June when they launch an expanded PU).
I also don't understand how anyone could possibly want a worse game sooner outside of plain impatience. If you wait longer and the game is delivered near spec, it will be a better experience than if we get it earlier and sacrifice some features. To have both is ridiculous, it's not like they are twiddling their thumbs over there. They are progressing as fast as they can.
To put that in perspective, Fallout 4 cost around $150m to make (IIRC), and that was an amazingly frugal budget for such a large game (Several AAA titles have budgets twice that large).
To be honest, I would have been happy with something along the budget of the original Privateer. And that would have probably left him lots of wiggle room to experiment and engage in research-esque goals.
I cant be too angry at him for being ambitious, or even changing his goals, but the #1 thing Roberts did wrong IMO was accelerating to AAA-style development and growing the team to 400 large before even really knowing what he wanted to develop. Spending a $100k+ on mocap and acting as early as he did is like producing a movie and then writing the script for it after the fact.
It's also worth noting that CIG only hit 400 employees fairly recently. I know some of their major presentations have included employee counts over time, so you could dig up the exact numbers if you wanted to. I _think_ they had roughly 50 at the end of 2013, and maybe 150-ish at the end of 2014?
Reminds me of: https://twitter.com/mcgd/status/850347746452099072
"When the kleenex box is full, you take two. When it's almost empty, you might use one twice. That's why oversized financings are bad."
It seems like the better route would be for them to make the $10 million game, and then to ramp up from there.
For example, given the task of building a complex system under a time constraint, it's easy to exhaust the time granted, be it a week, a month, or a year. A complex system can always be more perfect, so you can always spend more time on making it better. A limited resource (e.g. a week) can force you to focus on the essential solution whereas an abundance (e.g. a month) can lead to frivolous design and overengineering.
The antidote seems to be organizational restraint, concrete milestones, and constant readjustment to keep in line with greater goals. Scope creep, perfect-as-enemy-of-good, and bike shedding are all aspects of this behavior.
This overspending problem happens a lot in startups too (though VCs sometimes pressure startups to burn fast for various reasons having to do with the next round, which isn't really a factor with Star Citizen and crowdfunded projects). It's crazy there aren't more widely recognized best practices for teaching founders how to handle this issue.
He's arguably painted himself into an unfortunate corner by not imposing a fund raising cap - morally/ethically you could argue he has no choice but to try to spend all the dollars - to simply pocket 'the extra' cash would leave a bad taste in backers mouths I imagine, especially when they are effectively donations.
I can't help but feel that when he reached 9 figures Roberts maybe should have considered closing the donations for a while...
Or maybe release the game in 3 different parts?
I haven't played any of the demos but it does look like a really impressive game. I probably won't play it as I don't like MMORPGs, but I did really enjoy his earlier work in the Wing Commander series.
The Persistent Universe Alpha is currently at 2.6.x. It currently includes one "limited" area of space around a gas giant in one specific solar system. (Note that "limited" here means that it's only a fraction of the planned final solar system, but thanks to CIG's 64-bit map size technology, it's legitimately several hundred million KM^3.) There's a few space stations, several quests, and some limited economy. All fully playable, but gameplay-wise, it's still mostly at the "tech demo" level in a lot of ways.
The "holy grail" version that we fans have been waiting for since last fall is Alpha 3.0. The /r/starcitizen subreddit has a ton more info on what it's supposed to include, but off the top of my head: a larger chunk of the Stanton solar system; several moons or planets that will be 100% "see it -> fly there -> land there"; the first iterations of several professions; and a whole lot more.
The current production schedule for Alpha 3.0 is at https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report . They originally projected it would come out around June 29, but just pushed it back a couple weeks. Realistically, I would expect them to bump it back into August. Once that's out, they'll probably get out another couple good-sized updates later in the year.
So, definitely not "rapid", but given the scope of what they're doing, not surprising. (Besides, my laptop actually can't even handle playing the game right now, so I've just been watching the development progress. I'll probably upgrade later this year sometime after Alpha 3.0 comes out.)
Also the new technologies being developed are truly quite interesting. Nested physics grids, context containers, a complete NPC AI ecosystem that itself is extremely ambitious.
The $500,000 game would have been fun, but just another space shooter. We have some of those already.
It seems that the E:D approach has worked out rather better, in that they delivered an initial playable game that was rather lacking in some areas , and have been incrementally adding to that game over time in terms of both features and platforms supported.
On the other hand, I am a very early backer of Star Citizen, and I regularly (about once a week, which is a lot for me) play the alpha and because I'm also an Imperator subscriber, I get rental credits for new ships and weapons and stuff, so there's always something new for me to try. Then there's also the knowledge that the full persistent universe ("game") is yet to come. I've got a lot of ships to fly, and an organization/clan with lots of RL friends to fly missions with. I'm stoked for all the accompanying lore being built into Star Citizen. This universe already feels lived in and detail-oriented. I am confident that I could play for a long time and still not hit the end of the road to satisfy my inner "explorer" player subtype.
I think E:D succeeded at initially playable but is failing to scale. It's a really fun experience in VR but I'd much rather it had stayed in closed development a year or two longer if that's what it would have taken for it to have real depth.
It's not a reason I originally backed for but I've been increasingly more linux focused so it's something I'd love to see. PCI passthrough with KVM looks to be the solution for now, but it does mean having a chunk of machine resources reserved for windows :(
That stuff comes at the end of the development, not the middle.
As long as they continually scheduling and releasing new Alpha builds incorporating their growing world as they flesh it out, I don't see cause for concern.
Yes, it sounds like the $140 million game is not going to get made at all.
It seems that because of overfunding, these guys are already suffering from the second-system effect even without having built a first system to begin with.
AAA studios don't act the way they do just for the sake of being an asshole.
Also, immense scope creep. The game to be delivered is nothing like the game people backed originally, and hopefully that's a good thing.
Whether or not they put together a AAA game I guess is to be seen!
But when I look at the mind-numbing scope and ambition of the project... It will be very impressive if they can deliver everything promised, as good as promised.
The question will be, yes, if it reaches the level of scope and experience they're aiming for, even if specific goals change along the way.
The engineering is the biggest time sink so far and it's not surprising it's creeped and taken longer than expected. They have invented novel approaches to new problems and that is worth every dollar I backed to see happen.
The underlying theme though is that SC is built of very finite systems that all interact with eachother. When Chris Roberts talks about fidelity it is often misconstrued to be about graphical fidelity. But it is equally applicable to the systems fidelity. In theory, after you have placed a cargo crate of goods in the cargohold of your ship and taken off, a pirate could shoot out your generator, hop out of their seat and pick up a gun off their gun rack, EVA to your ship, enter through a hole blasted into your hull and grab the individual crates to move to their ship. Later the pirate will store the crates in their homestead on a planet nearby, or pawn the goods at a market. Meanwhile you are left to fix your generator and ponder deep space.
But the fact that you could steal the crate from a disabled ship isn't because they put in a crate stealing game mechanic . It's simply intrinsic in the way they are developing the item interaction system and physics systems in the game. That wasn't a great example but hopefully it conveys what I am trying to convey.
This comment is also an example of how No Mans Sky disappointed everyone. Community based hyperbole. But I used only current features or 3.0 features to make it up so here is hoping.
In the 2.5 Alpha you can already disable a generator, you can already EVA and board a ship. In 3.0 there will be planets, planet outposts and markets, cargo to steal and nefarious people to steal it.
Their development process seems inefficient from afar. They've switched engines at least once, maybe twice? They've announced titles that then kind of fade into the background. They build really detailed systems for simulating light / gravity / thrust in ways that seem impressive & unrelated to gameplay.
It kind of reminds me of Overgrowth, though with a whole lot more money (and charging users a whole lot more as well). I'd be interested to see, in 5 years or so, what the final-ish product looks like (I don't mean they're 5 years from release, I mean in 5 years they'll be past release).
They've been on CryEngine since the beginning. They've heavily customized large portions of it, to the point that I think one of the devs estimated it was only 50% original code left. They also actually bought a full license to the CryEngine source, and stopped taking any real updates from new versions of CryEngine as the codebases diverged.
They did recently announce that they were "switching" to Amazon's Lumberyard engine, but Lumberyard is itself a particular fork of CryEngine. The switch was primarily about branding and sponsorship. CryTek has been having serious financial issues, while Amazon is busy putting resources into Lumberyard. CIG also just switched all their backend cloud computing from GCE to AWS, and I'm sure they're getting a deal on AWS costs as part of the switch from "CryEngine" to "Lumberyard".
If by "titles that fade into the background" you mean the Squadron 42 single-player campaign... yes and no. Yes, they've been deliberately very quiet about that, because as a single-player game they'd like it to actually be meaningfully new and interesting on release. Also yes, backers are getting a bit antsy wondering where SQ42 progress actually stands at this point. However, it's not like they've abandoned development on SQ42.
My question is: What would he do if he got an extra $300M? Increase the scope even more? At what point do you stop increasing scope and concentrate on shipping a product?
Was keeping a large amount of the cash for himself a stated goal? probably not, hence my curiosity. His business occupies a grey area between business endeavor and charity. Me in his shoes, I'd sure as hell feel bad taking a chunk of the donations. I'd have no issue with him pocketing the profits of traditional sales, should he ever reach that point - no one who donated was under the illusion a return would occur, but they should perhaps quite rightly expect that their donation at least pay for development, not lining Robert's pockets.
I think it's also debatable the extent to which backers have "bought" anything, let alone received a discount.
Expansions to the $10m foundation would have to have been total technology and content rewrites to achieve what they are aiming for with the end release.
Once we see the 3.0 release things will appear to move a lot quicker, we'll start seeing more planets and professions being introduced.
It may seem unfair to take $140 million and build a $10 million game
If a film spent $140M and turned $10M at the box office, it would be seen as an utter failure. Should a game be any different?(More on Aido here: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/aido-next-gen-home-robot-...)
I have no problems with people questioning CIG's ability to hit deadlines, or wondering what exactly the status of Squadron 42 is. Those are totally fair critiques. But, as long as they keep showing progress updates like this, I'm perfectly content to sit back and let them make the game we want them to make :)
I'm not saying they're going to accomplish they're goal, but their dev time isn't even approaching unimaginable yet.
As a developer working on a Steam game, I've decided not to let myself down this path. Kickstarter is tempting, but I'd rather release something when it's ready and build from there - if someone pays me, I want it to be for a product they can have now.
The "investors" will keep saying that with just a little more time, things will be perfect
Right now my main reason for support is that they are planning to go Vulkan only, and Vulkan is what is going to allow gnu+linux to become a real competitor in the pc gaming market.
Don't buy into the "mass rage" that spreads from some small number of people crying out loud.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/#app_re...
Steam as a platform is great, but as a community it's a bigger dumpster fire than 4chan.
Quite frankly I find Steam reviews to be one of the worst possible metrics and would trust the octopus that picked world cup winners more than Steam reviews.
How so? Whether or not I trust someone has no obvious bearing on whether their opinion closely matches the general consensus.
For example, I know someone who likes the 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead better than the original. I absolutely believe her on this point. But it would be ludicrous for me to say, based on her preferences, that the 1990 version is widely considered the definitive Night of the Living Dead.
It's another thing entirely to call a game a scam.
Looking at the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/NoMansSkyTheGame/ it looks like there is a healthy community playing a lot and game updates are released regularly.
My initial point was to give a different view and to try to stop the negative feedback loop this game always gets.
Anyway, it sounded to me like your initial point was that the game is generally well liked and the people who are disappointed should be dismissed as "a small number of people crying," which is both rude to those people and seems to be the opposite of reality. That's why I was like, "Whoa there."
Games are consistently dog piled on by various communities and enraged fans who are upset by a game update.
It's a shame because the review system has a lot of near features, but the community is completely untrustworthy.
- dynamic economy based by station/planetary production of goods, demand and supply (influenced by distances and space piracy)
- known actors lending their voices to characters
- hundreds of items and ships
- massive universe filled with mysteries and lore
What happened instead was Microsoft stepping into the project and forcing changes to make ship plausible within a year due to continuous delays. Chris left the project. Universe was cut to 50 systems, bulk of characters gets killed off quickly after appearing in the plot, or have few spoken lines. There are omissions in items, like only only single top-class shield, whereas in every lower class there were three types of shields. Some commodities are sold on planet or few, but not bought anywhere in the universe, being useless for trade. Engine supports ship animations and plenty of ship models implement those, but they were eventually disabled. Etc. ect.
But game shipped, and besides cut content, it actually delivered quality experience, and even if it lacked replaybility, content or sandbox features of X-Universe games, it contained stateful multiplayer that resulted in game having long live in multiplayer thanks to Role-Playing mods and communities build around those.
There's a litany of bugs and brokenness that have been around for months, even years, but in the meantime, development effort is expended on Shiny Stuff to sell in the cash shop, and half-baked Shiny Stuff to release in expansions. Game-breaking bugs are fixed in weeks and months, rather than the traditional hours and days of any other MMO.
Communication with the devs is spotty and increasingly infrequent.
Sadly, it has no real competition either. And Frontier Developments knows this. E:D is a phenomenal and unique game, but it could be so much more if the devs would actually act like they gave a toss.
In the case of Star Citizen we're deep into gold-plating territory, wouldn't be surprised if it became a Duke Nukem Forever. But even then, Chris Roberts is genuinely trying to deliver a game, even if his ambitions may have gotten too large to deliver.
I call this the "Segway effect".
It is when the hype far exceeds any possible realistic product.
The evidence largely points to a developer who is good at his core job, but inexperienced at managing hype. And who was overly optimistic about what he and his team can accomplish in X amount of time. Based on how Hello Games is acting & communicating now, I think they've learned their lesson.
And I sympathise a little with them because I was once the overly optimistic team lead in my younger days, and had to get burnt a few times before I learned my lesson.
In video game development, studios are frequently forced to cut significant content or features from a game for a number of reasons. That's why the smart studios are pretty cagey about promises until they're VERY sure they can deliver them. Sean Murray was reckless with his promises and that's what got him into trouble.
It's possible he outright never intended to deliver those features but I don't think that's the case. It's clear they tried very hard to deliver as much as they could.
To be fair, the devs demo'd some supposedly in-game footage which was much better and more compelling than what shipped in the end.
Peoples expectations were set high, because the devs actually promised a lot of cool stuff on record.
They went big. They could have stopped at the few million they raised on Kickstarter, but they knew they'd need more to accomplish their vision.
Really good ROI for a low-to-medium complexity website, and a company of 129 employees.
Thanks!
It's the ultimate simulation. We know very little about space and even fiction (ex. star wars) seems to generate even more demand.
As people got excited and started throwing money at them, so did the scope obviously. I love Star Citizen's attention to detail but it's suffice to say that they've hit people's patience.
I can only image what goes on when the devs are let loose in the SC candy store with so much money and wanting to live up to the hype(so to speak).
Scopeageddon, for sure.
> “I’m already building the best game I can,” said Mr. Roberts, who acknowledged the bumps. “But imagine — the game I can build with $140 million is going to be very different to the one I could build with $10 million. If I can build a bigger and more robust experience, I will.”
My guess is they keep going until donations taper off and they're about to run out of money, then rush out a massively buggy release that disappoints everybody.