Star Citizen: The Road to Release, Financials and New Partners
cloudimperiumgames.com
cloudimperiumgames.com
GTA 5 had budget of $265M (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Aut...). Assuming info on wiki is correct SC is nearing 200M (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen#Funding) which isn't too far off from GTA budget.
> Media analyst Arvind Bhatia estimated the game's development budget exceeded US$137 million,[7] and The Scotsman reporter Marty McLaughlin estimated that the combined development and marketing efforts exceeded GB£170 million (US$265 million), making it the most expensive video game ever made at its time
And here's wikipedia's source on the $137m
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-02-01-gta-v-dev-...
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne5n7b/star-citiz...
Smells like a me too offering from Amazon...
But Twitch (an amazon company) also had its own game store they were pushing (and giving a cut of any sales referred from live streams to the streamer) but Twitch closed that down last month (But they still have free games / loot which is linked to your twitch account and accessible via their desktop client). So it is possible they might of pursued that route more heavily and did what Epic has done with their store (lower fee's when using their store and engine over using Steam and their engine).
Just quickly read the terms for Lumberyard and they state the following[0].
> Operating Restrictions. Without our prior written consent, (a) the Lumberyard Materials (including any permitted modifications and derivatives) may only be run on computer equipment owned and operated by you or your End Users, or on AWS Services, and may not be run on any Alternate Web Service and (b) your Lumberyard Project may not read data from or write data to any Alternate Web Service.
But reading their github repo and FAQ you are allowed to use hardware you own and operate yourself and you are allowed to connect to things like steamworks etc [1]
> Q. Can my Lumberyard game connect to services like Steamworks, Xbox Live, PSN, Apple Game Center, Google Play Games, or console social services?
> Your game may read and write data to platform services and public third-party game services for player save state, identity, social graph, matchmaking, chat, notifications, achievements, leaderboards, advertising, player acquisition, in-game purchasing, analytics, and crash reporting.
So it would seem that you are fairly locked down to what Web Services you are allowed to use with Lumberyard so that is where Amazon will make their money back.
[0] https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/#57._Amazon_Lumberyard_...
Almost 218 million.
Elsewhere they boast of a dev team of well over 400 members and 5 international studios... hard not to argue that's AAA studio development sized like a product from EA or Activision.
For a while back in 2007-ish Google ads were working really well and bringing in paying players at about $35 cost to acquire each and they were worth more than $200 over their lifetime, but something changed almost over night and Google ads got more competitive and almost no amount of money would bring people in. I'm sitting here with a game that people like and will pay for but can't figure out anymore how to acquire them.
I think Tomasz Tunguz illustrates this concept beautifully in considering SAAS / MMOs as annuities (1)
With little incremental cost to each additional user, and predictable revenue over time, the customer acquisition cost becomes highly flexible if you can finance it (or leverage it).
As a result it's become an arms race and a common VC model today is to spend 2 - 3x total annual revenue in marketing spend to land grab new channels while the "annuity" cost is low.
If you're open to sharing more details you may spark somebody's attention on HN :) - I personally invest in SAAS / MMO / CRE + bring customer acquisition expertise (and a team) for cases exactly like this - although we try to target some minimum scale ($5m+ ARR / ASR)
(1) https://tomtunguz.com/recurring-gross-margin-dollar-efficien...
But the kind of person who appreciates this > https://www.starsonata.com/inc/images/screens/gallery/Galaxy...
Is not the same person who is just looking for a modern update of Wing Commander.
I think you need to focus those ads on the True NERD crowd. Like I bet the ROAS for an ad against "Terragenisis" search queries might be positive for you.
Also you need to go a little more modern in some of your design choices.
But you are 99% crushing it. I really hope Star Sonata 2 breaks through!
Or worse the "about" page is some fiction storyline from the game with no indication of what game play is like, or how it compares to other games.
Some major games do this and it's shocking. Must be nice having such good word of mouth and press coverage (ie, written reviews, youtube videos) that you don't even need to bother making a nice marketing page.
I wonder if any of those have proper marketing "funnels", landing pages, analytics, elsewhere etc and just don't care much about using their homepage for sales. At last Star Sonata has a nice big CTA at the top of the homepage but otherwise is lacking a true central landing page.
Not to be harsh, but suppose I was a new player and I knew that Star Sonata 2 was a thing. (I do now because I Googled it.) I still probably will not take the effort to download it, simply because of the work and trust investment it represents today, an investment which I would not have thought twice about ten years back.
E:D seem to have taken the route of getting an MVP out and functional and have been iterating on that base since then adding new content, play modes, platforms etc. As a result they had a playable game out in 2014.
SC seems to have gone more for a big bang approach of only launching once they've got more in place with, from the blog post, an alpha in 2020.
Edit: The page reads "estimated". "Estimated" isn't "promised".
They've switched to a quarterly release system and have, in fact, just released their Q4 drop last evening. I would grant you that they have had a history of missing deadlines, but stating that they have "never made a single deadline" is disingenuous at best.
Those issues were fixed in the 3.3 release earlier this year.
Last time I looked into SC (a few months ago), the only gameplay loop consisted of picking up cargo and dropping it off with no failure conditions attached. What else has been added since?
They're not that dissimilar, just the labels of what they've chosen to state of their status. Elite: Dangerous added planetary landing more or less around the same time Star Citizen did, for instance, but E:D called it an expansion and Star Citizen called it a new version for their alpha.
Also, you are confused Squadron 42, a single-player game, which has an alpha in 2020, and Star Citizen, which is more analogous to Elite: Dangerous, which is ongoingly available.
https://www.pcgamer.com/roberts-space-industries-denies-squa...
"Squadron 42, the single-player portion of Star Citizen, doesn't have a hard release date, but it was expected to be ready sometime this year. There's even a little “2016” over the “Answer the Call” logo on the Squadron 42 web page. However, that came into question when German site Gamestar reported that, in an interview at PAX West, Cloud Imperium Games boss Chris Roberts said the game probably wouldn't be out until mid-to-late 2017."
A fun reddit thread from Jan 2016:
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/40fsop/do_you_...
...one year later.
'Well, I never promised!'
Don't get me wrong, their development cycle is fine if they can keep with it and releasing content is awesome from them. However, I wouldn't recommend anyone that isn't a Space Citizen enthusiast to get their hands on Squadron 42.
Elite: Dangerous had their alpha in 2013, playable beta mid-2014, with a 1.0 release end of 2014 that was a complete game.
Star citizen had a very scaled down version (Crusader) available end of 2015, as what amounts to an alpha.
I personally hope Star Citizen delivers, but there is really no equivalence here. Frontier delivered much faster.
Whether or not you liked E:D, it's still a fully released game that felt polished, albeit shallow.
But that's besides the point. Parent poster was drawing equivalencies between the two games' release timings, and my point is those equivalencies aren't actually comparable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier:_First_Encounters
I don't see how E:D is inferior to it, but YMMV.
What we are discussing has never been delivered before which might explain some of the perceived delays.
Star Citizen took a more traditional "big-bang release" approach, complete with the (also traditional) wildly incorrect release predictions. Its funding model is based on selling spaceships, particularly concept sales for ships that aren't available in game yet, which has been criticized for "selling jpegs" and "pay-to-win."
Braben and Roberts' games were both very famous in their day. They're theoretically equally capable of generating a fervent following. It's interesting to see such diametrically opposed approaches. It seems to me that Star Citizen is much more successful, which is surprising, because the E:D approach is more in line with modern startup advice. Despite the complaints about SC's funding model, it's been amazingly consistent at bringing in about $34 million in pledges a year. [1]
(The real moral of the story: people on the Internet, and particularly gamers, will complain about everything. But those complaints aren't necessarily correlated with success.)
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tMAP0fg-AKScI3S3VjrD...
That advice is predicated on getting some amount of money from an investor who wants a return on their investment, rather than getting that amount of money as pre-purchases that from consumers who expect a game at the end of the process.
They were all about creating your own story, I think there wasn't a base storyline. It was like "here you have a kestrel with some equipment including atmospheric shielding and some pulse lasers. Now do whatever you want" But because I knew the trick trading route between Barnard's Star and Sol carrying Luxury goods and industrial stuff to and fro I could amass a huge amount of money in no time to buy me a Cobra MkIII and do military and imperial missions. And this was my story, a lot of people have different experiences with it. And even though it doesn't have any deep, life changing experiences it was fun and I think current iteration of E:D is faithful to that legacy. It is you who make the game deep with your experience I think. I don't play it, because me and internet-is-required games don't get along but from what I've seen I can make that claim.
Wing Commander and to an extent Freelancer can be seen more deep compared to Elite. But it lacked that free spirit Elite conveyed. Also on an unrelated tangent I still think a game with Freelancer controls (actiony rather than simulationy) with X-universe freedom can be a thing still.
Thanks for reading.
Why do you think depth is not a requirement for this self story telling game? Isn't it getting boring quickly?
From my experience with Oolite, a FOSS, modable Elite clone, providing a bunch of career choices (trader, pirate, bounty hunter) and NPCs that react to who you choose to be (e.g. bounty hunters will go after you if you choose to be a pirate) is a good start. Affordances for goal setting can be as simple as the traditional character/ship equipment upgrade ladder.
Oolite players tend to stick to the "non player centered universe" paradigm; that is the player is not a hero or destined to save the universe even though it is a single-player game. When a mod provides a new weapon or upgrade, it is considered better if the NPCs can use them too. They removed the Energy bomb that was present in Elite, an obvious player-only weapon.
In my experience, when the game doesn't make distinctions between NPCs and the player, your player instincts tell you to become stronger than NPCs.
A corollary of the non player-centered game paradigm is that the beginning of the game can be rough for the player. Typically in Oolite with the standard startup, the players spend their first couple hours staying away from any other ship and fleeing pirates because they cannot really fight back without a decent equipment.
One could name that a "difficulty inversion": a game that is difficult at first, then get easier as the player acquires better gears. Oolite has this problem. I was trying to make a set of mods to fix it before my interest shifted to another game. Not that I got bored of Oolite, it's just that I've found something even more interesting to work on, and sometimes I have an Oolite itch, because solving similar issues but in a full sandbox multiplayer game is even more difficult.
The endgame can be a problem too, because eventually players can afford the best gear and one-shot most things. My take on this is to use the "high-score" game approach, that is making it more and more difficult to survive (really just like Tetris). More specifically, in Elite/Oolite there's a mysterious and hostile alien race than can be used to create an unstoppable invasion force scenario. This approach both helps with increasing the difficulty proportionally to the wealth of the player, and provides a story-telling affordance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance - my spellchecker doesn't know that word so I guess it's not common?
You go there without a game(!) and put different stuff in front of people's faces that they can pay for. Simple things that you can produce in a few hours. A kickstarter page, game_object.jpgs, planning schedules that you move up one year each year, engine demos, and then you look what brings in most cash.
And only if it's "engine demo" that brings in most cash, and only if it seems that the paying customers of that "engine demo" want "more gameplay" then you start building a game. If they pay more for schedules or for kickstarter pages, then you do more of that.
So I would argue SC follows much more closely the MVP+iteration principle than ED, and that IS(!) why it is financially more successful.
All that said I would not fall into the trap of defining "financial success" as only success. Financing the building of a game that is mostly there for people to enjoy a space simulation is also a succss! And in that regard X4 and ED are much more successful than SC will ever be.
Bias: I’m a project manager :-)
Instead he just seems to go on a mad hiring spree of artists, throwing more and more complete AAA assets on top of the POS visual demo he had made in Cryengine.. What boggles my mind is that it seems they never veered from this strategy, 100's of millions of dollars and 8+ years later, and it appears they are still throwing stuff willy nilly onto that original dumpster fire.
Seems like one of the best examples of the sunken cost fallacy in action that Ive ever seen.
1) Hack together assets as close to AAA as they can get, on top of a POS tech demo. Enough to show to people and get sales (this is a very Hacker News startup-y technique)
2) Pick one part of the system that "needs to work" by release, hire a few good coders and have them actually write a proper software subsystem
3) Hack together another POS tech demo, with the proper subsystem in place
4) Redo all of the assets that have already been done to use that new subsystem
They've gone through this several times with many many subsystems. It's not clear to me this will ever crystalize into a system that has a certain quality bar it hits across the board. So in that sense you might be right that they should've taken a more top-down high falootin' architecture approach from the beginning.
But that's speculation too. Design is hard, and you generally have to try stuff in order to figure out a large system. Some degree of iteration is necessary. At a certain size waterfall just won't work.
But for sure your characterization of "he's just throwing artists at cryengine" is not correct.
I can sum up my point very quickly.. They used CryEngine.. Maybe the worst possible choice imaginable for this kind of game. They needed someone early on to choose not Cryengine, to choose some tech-stack that they wouldnt be fighting a constant losing battle against.
Actually shipping a finished product would turn off the donation stream...
Wow, the timeline is an horror story.
I don't understand the appeal of space opera games like this. They will mostly be empty zones of players.
I also have ideas to make an ambitious video game, with persistence and an open world. But I would rather start small and humble by releasing something that is playable, add cool features as the development progresses, but still providing basic features and playability at first, that would be slowly replaced by the more advanced features of the game. Making a game attractive quickly from the beginning is important, especially if you're using the crowdfunding model. Today it's possible to have a continuous evolution of a game, to constantly change and improve it.
The hardest will always be to track player locations in realtime, on a large world, while keeping the game smooth enough. Once that is done, the sky is the limit. I don't understand why so many games focus on the content (because that can be an real time and money sink), while the only things that are attractive for such games are the gameplay and the multiplayer.
They plan to have a complete Sims-like ecology of NPCs, and players will fit into that.
What is the time frame here? Decades? I mean seriously, why is anyone believing this?
The only time there was talk about user-generated content was when they had a "design a ship"-contest. Designer teams jumped on it, designed a ship that you could visit in the hangar instance but it's gone now...because they needed to rework things there. I wonder what because that ship was never playable....This is SC for you.
Actually, I think there’s a 50/50 chance SC becomes one of the first permanent 24/7 habitable VR universes. Where people live and work full time. A full economy, elections, etc.
Obviously that’s decades away, but who else is building anything equivalent? Facebook is taking the approach of giving us mini VR apps, and hoping a universe will evolve from that. Cloud Imperium is taking the opposite direction, building a “Sim Universe” first and adding “apps” as needed.
I’m not sure which is the better approach... which is harder, building a fully fleshed out simulated universe or building out the killer apps of VR interaction?
Actually I think they’re probably about equally hard, and each side will just copy what the other did to complete the picture. But CI and FB are both well positioned to capture a slice of the fulltime VR market when it emerges in the late 2020s.
> I’m not sure which is the better approach...
Really? How about a stable foundation for something like a permanent universe? How about a management that is capable and how about a serious, viable business model?
Instead the business model is the worse of the new lootbox-generation of games, the management is a highly questionable dictator with a terrible history of managing teams and his wife. The foundation never was properly stable for anything of the scale it is in now. Not even speaking about a functioning MMO. And of course there is no native support for VR there...it may come...like female characters...
I mean man, come on... The visions some people have of this game are so far away from justified, it has all the signs of a unhealthy cult.
FYI: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAo...
The rest will keep on laughing...
Edit: regarding delusional artists https://wccftech.com/roberts-squadron-42-above-god-of-war/
From a gameplay perspective, it hasnt gotten to a point where Ive been been able to even speculate on that. Their gameplay concept seems to be: build a big online sandbox and then... fun will magically appear, and they've iterated on this less than 1 time so far, so my expectations are about as low as possible. Also any time I've played it, every kind of interaction (flying, walking, UI, everything) is a mess, and feels terrible.
I dearly want this to be my dream game, but my professional opinion is that if it ends up being any kind of decently playable game at all it would be a miracle.
Compared to being an employee collecting a salary or an investor collecting a share of the profit, Kickstarter is a terrible deal.
Not a pre-order indeed. Not even a pre-order. Worse than a pre-order.
The graphics and animations are good but I seen similar on other games.
In a lot of games, each interior of a spaceship would be a map, and then you would have a map of each location you could exit the spaceship, and then you would effectively teleport at a doorway when you "exit the ship". (Think about how this works in Mass Effect. The "ship" that you run around on never actually "moves". It's much easier and more efficient to make a game this way for a lot of reasons. In Star Citizen, they actually move a ship around the map, and if you open the door, it opens the physical barrier between you and the outside world and you can see out of it.
By keeping everyone and all objects "in space" all the time, Star Citizen allows some insanely different experiences that other games would have to specifically program functionality for.
This is a non-exhaustive comparison. There are an insane number of aspects where Star Citizen is trying to take it to another level. Trying to compare Battlefield 1942 to an approach like Star Citizen is like comparing a deck of playing cards to Battlefield 1942. You're trying to compare a first-person shooter which allows for a handful of straightforward game loops to a game that attempts to include the full scope of MMOs and sandbox games with the graphical and environmental fidelity of a first-person shooter.
When you play what has been delivered, it feels like a shitty side project put together in a hurry. Game crashes. Current art is ugly. Interiors are empty and feels fake. Performance is sluggish even on top of line PCs. Physics are no fun. Collisions are not properly implemented. Every ships and players look the same.
They should call this project a failure and release the resources currently being stuck in this project.
This is objectively false, and you seem to have a serious chip on your shoulder.
I played their last open play session, and I definitely jumped in a ship with multiple friends, flew to several different planets, flew down to their surface, transitioned between different atmospheric environments.
I had a lot of fun with it.
It's one thing to say, "I don't like what they've done." It's another to say, "They haven't done something." when they objectively have.
3.x builds are a ton of fun and there's a lot of places to see and stuff to do. I've heard about all sorts of features and landmarks I've not yet trekked out to see or tried to do, and this is on a game which "barely has any content" according to some people.
The biggest issue right now is that there's no solid incentive to put a lot of time into it. Since it's still in "we reset everything each major patch", I don't want to put time into running missions and accumulating crud that might not be there next time I sit down to play. I personally hesitate to play most MMOs on beta servers for this reason, I feel like I'd rather accomplish things when it "matters".
Note that that's just the persistent universe portion, and there's effectively three "competitive modes" in the game as well, with which the leaderboards are shared in the newsletters each week: Arena Commander has both dogfighting and racing game modes and Star Marine has a first person shooter which has some fairly neat mechanics.
> Trying to compare Battlefield 1942 to an approach like Star Citizen is like comparing a deck of playing cards to Battlefield 1942
A deck of playing cards isn't inherently fun. A game is, though. There's a much better comparison of Star Citizen to the deck of cards here, and of BF1942 to a game.
You can, and have, created some fun by bending Star Citizen into game-like situations. I have, too! That's totally valid. That doesn't happen as often in BF1942—not never, but many people simply play BF1942 as designed.
Is Star Citizen fun, or are you and the people you play with fun? You can list features and functionality all day, but is the enjoyment coming from the game, or is Star Citizen primarily a medium for you to create your own enjoyment?
It's maybe a subtle difference. You might even consider it a meaningless one. But seriously: is Star Citizen fun?
Wait, are you arguing something? If so, what?
Even as a little kid, when playing in actual sandboxes, I never considered that kind of playing a "game". Playing tag or hide and seek or checkers was always distinct from just running around in the woods or playing in a sandbox. Even filling up balloons with water and looking for targets on our BMX bikes, even though it was trickier than many games, wasn't a game. Making a bet, having a competition or playing a game, that has additional elements to just having fun with whatever.
Not that there's anything "wrong" with "just having fun", or that "just having fun" can't get crazy very complex and tricky! With most games, certainly if they're multiplayer, you can have the sandbox element, too. That is, you can just ignore the rules and turn gameplay features into derpmanship tools. For example, this movie is from clips recorded when a new TF2 map came out, I joined a nearly empty public server, and along with others managed to do everything BUT the objective for 15-20 minutes. I'm the pyro doing the impossible at 3:11 ^^
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQlz7kFoXSc
None of these people knew each other. Eg. at 0:58 a guy shows up who isn't in on it yet, ruins the fun, then switches to soldier to shoot projectiles that don't do damage, for even better ping pong. No voice chat, hardly any text chat; all this basically just happened, and it was more fun than many "real" TF2 matches I had. In a normal match you just think "how can our team score", when the objective is "have fun", the feasible permutations for what do you increase by a lot, it's a whole other level of complexity.
After watching that movie again I totally forgot what I was arguing, sorry. I agree with games having win/loose conditions, and usually a way to measure better/worse performance, roughly, and therefore sandbox games "not being games in that sense" -- but I think there's nothing wrong with that, and that ideally, you'd have the option for both. I never played Star Citizen so I have no clue how the universe is set up, but I could imagine some regions being more active and contested, where money and/or weapons establishes a pecking order, whereas you can always just fly off to some moon in the middle of nowhere and hold races there, or spell out obscene messages with ship wrecks or whatever.
If you don't have anyone to play it with, I can't recommend it at all. You will not have fun. Maybe once there's more to the game.
3 underwhelming gameplay features and 11 ship designs? Other games like Warframe tend to suffer from feature creep because they keep adding dozens of features which do not integrate deeply with the rest of the game. (I'm looking at you Archwing mode) StarCitizen's development pace in comparison feels rather anemic and primarily focused on all the damn ships people have preordered for thousands of dollars.
[0] https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citi...
Btw I was not criticizing RD2 , a good game can use old boring techniques, I was wondering if I missed some revolutionary thing they did since previous games.
The new X game also looks interesting, Space Engineers is also a game that I follow it's progress
Andromeda moves Mass Effect forward here and there, but it's still more or less limited in the same ways, and I think my comment still mostly applies. I didn't intend to specifically refer to "Mass Effect 1", but the franchise as a whole.
This doesn't sound special or ground breaking at all. Heck there are decade old MMOs like shores of hazeron that combine survival game elements, sim city style planet construction with complex resource simulation and minecraft style construction of your own custom designed spacecraft. At all times you're playing single character seamlessly without any loading screens. There is one exception though. Traveling to another solar system via a wormhole opens a loading screen, however if you don't have a warp drive you can just accelerate to light speed and travel within 10 minutes to another solar system without a loading screen.
However it's developed by a single guy and pretty much dead nowadays with 5 active players but it wouldn't surprise me if star citizen can't reach the complexity of that game within the next few years despite having significantly more resources.
Another commenter wondered why more Star Citizen backers weren't interested in the 2D game he founded. Again, hard to tell if people are serious, or they just don't understand what the draw is.
Images: https://cdn.mmos.com/wp-content/gallery/shores-of-hazeron-ov... https://cdn.mmos.com/wp-content/gallery/shores-of-hazeron-ov... https://cdn.mmos.com/wp-content/gallery/shores-of-hazeron-ov...
Of course the graphics of S:C are going to be more complex. But that says nothing about the underlying technology, which you claimed is so incredibly groundbreaking but were immediately disproven by other games managing the exact same thing a decade ago.
It's really not as insurmountable of a challenge as you make it seem to support prettier graphics on the same technologies used 10+ years ago with the massive CPU and GPU upgrades we've had in the last decade.
The game is seamless - and I think God of War does this well also - basically there's really no "loading" once you're in the game; you go from gameplay to cutscene to gameplay without any interruption. The graphics are high quality and that's amazing for how huge the game is and how extremely dynamic it is (e.g. how animals interact with the environment, the weather).
Considering the lag I get on the PS4 with games like Witcher 3 that try to balance high quality graphics with scale, RDR2 is smooth. You can be on a train fighting 30 guys (each with dynamic facial expressions) with animals running around in the distance, explosions, the wind is blowing the trees around you and it's changing from sunshine to pouring rain - all this and more without a hiccup. That's a lot of detail processing at one time.
EDIT: one other thing I found impressive and i'm not sure I've seen this in other open-world games or if they intentionally programmed it this way: during one of the missions I slaughtered about a dozen or two guys and traveled a considerable distance away from the scene. Normally when you come back to something like this, the world around you has pretty much re-rendered, but 30 minutes later when I arrived back, all the dead bodies were in the same place as before.
Lots of games have had "no loading" (after a large load in the beginning and hidden loads throughout the game), dating back at least to the PS3.
What God Of War did differently is that there's no camera cuts; the whole game is one continuous camera shot.
Again, the overall package and detail is incredible, especially the amount and variety of voiceover work. But it’s not particularly innovative.
I can understand why those innovations don't really count for a lot of hardcore gamers. You are typically looking for innovations in AI, persistent world features (memory optimization), game decisions that effect the world and game play (branching trees).
RDR2 isn't a revolution from a technology perspective. But it's revolutionary from an artistic one.
The attention to detail in animal behavior is my favorite part about the game. I'm sure there are many geniuses at Rockstar but what made this game was beautiful craftsmanship.
I think when this game eventually gets the VR remake like Skyrim recently did, people will be able to appreciate how much went into this game. People will be revisiting it for a long time.
0: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/63481/superman-star-henry-cav...
EDIT: I should mention that I haven't actually tried playing the game in quite a while. I've been waiting for the developers to stamp it as "released" before I take another look.
So perhaps in its current form, it's playable enough to satisfy what I signed up for. It's a little hard to tell from the varied characterizations of its current playability.
If the $200m came from a studio's budget, the guy is fired 5 years ago.
I’m sure it was a very important optimisation for Star Citizen, but it’s not like some amazing tech that will be important for the game industry or anything.
Star Citizen had some awful performance problems, and because the development is quite public, optimisations that programmers are working on get important sounding names and publicity all their own. If it wasn’t for that, this would just be an implementation detail in their engine.
As you said, OCS was a needed optimization at the time it was rolled into the publicly facing releases, and I thought it was an interesting topic to at least share with others who are interested in the discussion (the amount of negative downvotes I see now maybe suggests folks don't find it as interesting as I do as someone who merely plays video games but doesn't develop them); at the very least I wasn't aware that it's a common technology, but it is still an interesting technology to me nonetheless.
As fun fact, its something you are getting for free with Unreal Engine 4.smth these days because Epic needed it for Fortnite Battle Royale ;)
The SC version has a star system, which has containers for areas around each planet, which has containers for moons and the planet, and you go down to the planet and it has containers for cities, which have containers for buildings which have containers for apartments. I wouldn't think Fortnite would bother rigging it up that way, but maybe arbitrary nesting is a natural way to handle it.
Of course there's the additional mess of coordinate systems on a spinning planet orbiting around a star that your average shooter doesn't deal with either.
But the really impressive part is that they managed to stuff this into an old version of CryEngine and make it work. They really lucked out with CryTek running out of money to pay their programmers with, which let CIG scoop up a bunch of the engine devs and start their Frankfurt office. When it comes down to it, that might be what makes the whole project possible.
When I fire it up occasionally I honestly don’t even do missions, I just go see what new places have been added and go chasing alien sunsets.
Landing on Hurston https://i.redd.it/xyjxc15jbh421.jpg
The moons of Hurston https://i.redd.it/opk5azvmvfr11.png
Some day I’ll work my way up to a Constellation Phoenix and just cruise around the galaxy taking in the sights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzVPVDIRgK4
If you want more technical stuff, the panels from Citizen Con are a good watch, but individually I’m sure there are other games doing some of the same things.
It also hurts everybody else attempting to do something like that. Just imagine what a capable director could have done with those amounts of money...
That's the least you expect from a $200m project. It's a massive failure if they don't deliver with that amount of money. It's just that they lose nothing but reputation because it wasn't their money.
Bad management so far.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/2-Squadron-...
But serious question, how long did it take to make this roadmap? Like was there a roadmap for the roadmap project?
The data from the roadmap comes from CIG's internal Jira. There's some sort of automated export once every week. I presume they tag Jira items in some way so they show up on the roadmap.
They've been providing a roadmap for Star Citizen (the MMO counterpart to Squadron 42) for a year. It's been reasonably accurate about what will be delivered in the next quarter, with only a few things slipping. It's been mostly inaccurate about the following quarter. Longer term plans are almost always delayed.
It's reasonable to assume the SQ42 roadmap will experience the same sorts of delays and I think plotting out a roadmap to this level of detail was a mistake. I think it reflects a culture of wishful thinking among CIG's upper management and the delays will inflame the fans and the press.
[1] https://www.turbulent.ca/en
(To be clear: I don't think there's anything wrong with delays. Software is always delayed. The mistake isn't the delays; it's believing the estimates.)
However the product itself lacks...everything.
When SQ42 finally launches in 2020, they'll probably want to expand the userbase, and marketing is an effective way to do that. Even Rockstar, which is a current industry legend with unbeatable name recognition and hype around GTA and RDR, still spends hundreds of millions in advertising.
Who will they advertise to, they've attracted enough attention that any potential players have already heard of this project?
I don't know if I, a frequent Star Citizen player and Day 1 backer would say it lacks "everything", and am unsure if your hyperbole was just for dramatic effect but from the first executable to where we are now in Alpha version 3.4 (soon to be 3.5), we have an impressive amount of content-all things considered, especially via in-game locales and systems that have facilitated some incredible emergent gameplay among the player base.
The "Jumptown Wars" have been an amazing thing to watch and participate in, and I encourage you to go look through the Star Citizen subreddit to see some of the in-game coordination players are engaging in just to secure a static trading depot on a dead moon (diving deeper into the anecdote rabbit hole: I participated in a 12 ship assault on said depot when a pilot in the player "Organization"-SC's guild system-I'm a member of was shot down by a rival group and requested evac).
It's light years from lacking "everything". It's not complete, but it's also not near as empty of an experience as you seem to be suggesting.
Kiiiind of? As in, you can see the framework of how it could work, and to a certain extent, specific actions by one player at-for example-the Grim Hex Orbital station can affect trade for another player, but it's a level of detail I wont bore you with by typing out a gigantic wall of text.
But again, it's not fully fleshed out, and lacks a few elements, but it's not nothing, and what it is, is enough to have spawned a trade war among players, which we are having loads of fun with.
In my opinion it's a terrible abomination and it reflects Roberts career and pretty much the worse things about the gaming industry today. I don't see a single good thing about what is happening there. I just hope nobody, ever will get the idea that this is a way of delivering a game or any kind of product.
If I had to guess, I'd say you're either not a backer, or you haven't played recently.
I haven't even played Elite:Dangerous in ages since the Alpha 3.1 update came out and Elite is one of my favorite space series of all time
I came into this thread looking for the acronym. Thanks for not letting me down.
I mean, there are plenty of controversial topics being discussed on the internet, but I only see the F-word being used ad libtum when the topic is either cryptocurrency or Star Citizen. Perhaps these two have more in common than it looks?
For some examples, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3 both had 35 million dollar marketing budgets. Grand Theft Auto V was 128 million. CoD: Modern Warfare 2 was 200 million.
Since Roberts promised to only spend the crowdfunding money on game development, all that money has to come from somewhere. That means either signing on with a publisher, or taking outside investment.
And just for the record, despite liking space sims I'm also not planning to pay $27,000 for a starter pack.
Well the good news is a Star Citizen starter pack these days runs about the same cost as your average AAA game these days, give or take a few bucks.
You can't add SQ42 at that price later, so if you're interested in single player be sure to hit that checkbox.
What are you talking about? You can get in for $35.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/for...
Since then, I've spent time watching and the main problem is the same one I had with games like Destiny 2 at launch or Elite: Dangerous (played both, wish I had waited two more years). There's a kernel of fun in there, but that's where it ends, and there are plenty of other games out there that have both the kernel of fun and a fleshed out execution.
Star Citizen doesn't look bad, it just looks incomplete against its ridiculous ambitions, and I'm lumping this in among games that will probably become complete a few iterations after release. I would much rather have the game as promised, but I've seen this pattern too many times before and there are too many other great games in the meantime for me to hold my breath for it.
EDIT: this one https://starcitizen.fandom.com/wiki/Mustang_Omega
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen_trades/search?q=Omega
No idea how people handle escrow on those gray market transactions, maybe there are trusted middlemen who will do it for a cut. I’d be iffy on trading a limited edition ship to some random person online.
The early demos can certainly do more than anything currently on the market...
Even CD Projekt Red, which is based in a low cost of living country spent $81 million developing The Witcher III. A small studio with a $2 million budget has absolutely no chance of making something that players who expect The Witcher III will think is good enough.
And as technology (and budgets) progress, gamers expect more. More art, more story, more quests. The kind of content that we are nowhere near auto-generating.
1. I shouldn't say can't be made--can't be made up to the standards players expect. No Man's Sky and other games have tried, but procedural generation just doesn't come close to matching the quality and detail of more hand crafted open worlds.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/445220/Avorion/
Its considerably small and limited in scope, yet game progression feels rewarding enough that some people (me included) have clocked hundreds of hours doing it.
This is the kind of game I feel we need more of. Small games focused on limited number of features, continously improving those features.
So the power comes not from the customers but from the investors. Because investors will bring money for developing these products and they will do so with the very intention to influence the market to their own advantage. And these people want a more and more centralized monopoly around their source of income.
That's why companies like Blizzard get worse and worse, they don't care if they lose their current player base. They can gain another and make their investors more happy with that.
That's why a company like EA exists for so long and is so successful.
The market is not getting better but worse. The more easier to use and open worldy and better graphics the AAA titles get the harder it becomes to find players and investing for your indie titles. Probably we will also see that regulation will set in more and more, creating real legal requirements to sell games.
Indie games will always exist. Like indie movies, and indie music. But they will make less and less money, get less and less actual funding, and become more and more a personal hobby and art form.
Did they switch to Vulkan already to do it? In the past they said, that was the plan.
Also, no word on Linux version in this announcement.
So 9 days, and Christmas/New Years Eve Holidays to deal with.
I think they are in real danger of fucking up their 2 roadmap within the first week of releasing it.
I hope for their sake they didn't publish this without getting a few of those tasks basically finished ahead of time so they could at least start off in a way that made it look like they could follow their own schedule.
It seems like Derek Smart has come up in every thread about SC for a few years now. Why? Google tells me he developed a similar singleplayer game a long time ago and is currently working on some kind of online venture. Is he attached to the SC project?
All the profiles he's written about himself seem extremely conceited. His posts present hyperbole and opinions as fact. And to top it all off, the exact things he is criticizing SC for he has done himself with his most recent game Line of Defense... https://steamcommunity.com/groups/acpreport/discussions/3/48...
Dude has an entire subreddit where a majority of the users seem to be devoted to "calling his crap out": https://www.reddit.com/r/DerekSmart/
And of course encyclopediadramatica has their own page on the guy (of course nothing there should be taken at face value, just found it amusing after reading up on him): https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Derek_Smart
Line Of Defense isn't crowd-funded. It was released on Steam Early Access. His games traditionally take a long time to develop and release because they are complex, and he doesn't have a large team or resources.
Comparing an indie funding his own games to a company that has taken over $200 million Dollars in crowd-funding, and also investor money, is laughably foolish.
That doesn't sound quite right. For all of SC's seemingly infinite problems, Chris Roberts has actually shipped a whole bunch of beloved classics. Derek Smart has not.
http://gameranx.com/updates/id/70033/article/the-chris-rober...
Derek Smart, since 1996, has developed and shipped over a dozen games. He still makes games.
You could say they're rivals in who is going to turn out to be a bigger scammer and purveyor of unfulfilled promises. Roberts might end up winning that one overwhelmingly as well.
http://www.dereksmart.org/2015/08/star-citizen-how-i-got-inv...
Since that time, the most avid backers of Star Citizen have been waging a proxy war with him on behalf of CIG. And at times it gets a lot worse than the Usenet flamewars he was engaged in back in the day. They even hijacked a sub Reddit bearing his name, and were using it as a way to harass, attack, dox him etc. Until it was closed (by the mods) about a year ago. They re-opened it temporarily due to him being right (once again) about the dire financial straits of the project, as revealed in their financial statement released this week.
Kotaku has a five-part series which also covers the beef between him and Chris Roberts.
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/tag/inside-star-citizen/
Don't believe everything you read from those who have a vested interest in either Star Citizen, or those who don't like him. So far, he has been 100% on the ball regarding the key issues with this project. From the money part, all the way down to the technology, challenges, schedules etc. Since Summer 2015, he has been obsessively documenting everything about this project. So much so that many on the Internet, including the media, go there for material when writing about this project. It's uncanny and disturbing to say the least.
He apparently has plenty of friends who work on or have worked on the project. And they are the ones who appear to have been feeding him his most accurate leaks. For example, about this investment, he leaked the news on Twitter in May. That same month CIG was closing this deal. We know this because the public filings in the UK which became public in Dec, show all the signatures and actions regarding this $46M investment taking place in May. His latest article lays it all out.
I've no skin in the game apart from I loved the original wing commander, but it is funny looking over old threads in /r/starcitizen actually, here's one I just found where the top comment was saying it'd be too long if there wasn't a beta in 2018 (there wasn't) and that some Squadron 76 missions should have been released by then (they haven't):
https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/4j211n/how_lon...
I ask because you sound exactly like one of the people complaining because they can't for some reason handle how the game is developed, that its not going according to your expectations. If you don't plan to play Star Citizen, then why do you care how Star Citizen players feel about the game? CIG has been very clear from the start that Star Citizen's development will be unlike any other game before it, and they have been especially clear and emphasized that "it will be done when it's done".
Look at the thread, people in there believed SQ42 was almost finished. That was 2 years ago! CIG were giving the impression that they'd almost done the single player campaign, now they're talking about 2020.
A possible scenario at this point is that they burn through all the cash and the game is put out either unfinished or never sees light of day.
Maybe a great game will come out of this, but it's perfectly reasonable to believe that's doubtful.
https://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/corporate/cfo-comment-20...
Right now Star Citizen is barely a proof-of-concept tech demo, while Squadron 42 which was coming in 2014, is still almost 2 years away from BETA.
After blowing through $200 million of backer money, in May 2015 they sold 10% of the company to an off-shore investor for $46M to continue funding development. And Derek Smart was the first to leak that info as well, and almost a full week before CIG made it public that this was in the works since May 2018 (when Derek Smart first leaked that something was in the works).
Looking at the original kickstarter page https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen there's pledges of a finished product in 2014, so it doesn't feel unreasonable for people to say that it's late.
In there they very clearly commit to delivering the game in specific timelines, nowhere that I can find does it say "it'll be done when it's done" or "this is an estimated time it could be much later"
Perhaps I'm missing where the page that backers used to decide whether to commit to the project says that their timelines are an estimate...
I've missed the point when fanbase became fiercely defensive of SC, but it's crazy how quickly reaction to any criticism of the game is to shut down that criticism. Saying that "Chris Robets said in advance that game will be developed differently" is not some sort of "get out of the jail card" for criticizing them for ballooning the game out of scope.
It's actually crazy how far some people are putting in "for defense of a dream". I once saw a comment under the article about SC which's author was berating the site for not knowing what they are writing about and telling them to shut it. Because comment was made using facebook comments, I've decided to follow the link to Facebook profile for my own curiosity.
His Facebook profile was literally those things:
- Intro was I am 64 years old retiree living somewhere. I am participating in creation of Star Citizen video game and love it!
- Wall was usual posts with photos of relatives, family meetings, travels and shares of StarCitizen news/commentaries
It's absolutely nuts!
I'm thrilled at this new way transparent way to see this game coming together, and it's a real look behind the cloak of game development. Imagine seeing GTAV or RDR2 development within a few months of development, it would probably be a shit show of bugs, ideas or features.
Another question, have we ever seen behind the cloak of a AAA game in super early development, and getting to watch all the pivots, bumps and warts so transparently? I can't think of a single instance.
Usually by the time the hype train starts on a game, the game's usually %75-%90 done.
What I do love, is that they're building a foundation of a game engine that they won't abandon next year for the annual or bi-yearly refresh. Imagine if there was only a single version of Battlefield/CoD that they continually added features to (like WoW). I would expect the level of code polish would be higher as the devs would be invested in creating good solutions verses throwing it away and starting over again.
I'm not sure why more games don't follow other Sass software models, or a WoW model, where the game lives on perpetuity, and the developers continue to enhance it over time as technology and resources change. As a developer, the choices you make about your code really impact when you know that you're going to have to deal with your choices years later, versus starting the project brand new again.
Same with whatever engine is used for CoD, although I’m not sure if each studio is using the same engine.
There has to be a reason why you guys always can't seem to help but drag him into all your discussions about Star Citizen. That's how ALL of you made him an integral part of the discussion. And that is how you all gave him the power to shape the narrative, while aiding in the complete destruction of the reputation of the project.
He says so himself:
http://www.dereksmart.org/2015/08/star-citizen-how-i-got-inv...