‘Star Citizen,’ a video game that raised $300M but may never be ready to play
forbes.com
forbes.com
I've always seen crowd funding as chucking a little money at an idea that interests you, if it works then cool, if not then it wasn't (and shouldn't ever be) an amount I'm going to lose sleep over.
As for the people spending thousands of dollars on promised future digital shiny things? I just don't understand it, why are you paying money for virtual things that don't exist yet in a game that doesn't even exist yet? But then I've never understood the (reasonably) recent trend for paying hundreds/thousands of dollars on cosmetic items for games that you're actually playing so maybe I'm missing something.
Who needs virtual reality when you have hyperreality?
(I could go on like this but I refer you to Baudrillard on the hyper-real and simulacra. Buying a virtual object that doesn't even have a virtual existence is clearly a stage 4 "simulacra". This comment should not be taken entirely seriously or literally, either.)
I think it's important to add this: No Man's Sky turned out to be a great game! It just took about a year longer than expected and in the meantime Hello Games got the full fury of the internet. But they didn't stop. They buckled down and worked on it. And it turned out just fine.
Kickstarter is sort of like a more up-front version of this, in that it's easier to figure out what you're actually paying for than standard pre-ordering of a product that does exist. Of course there's the default story that you're supporting the independent developers. But I haven't joined a Kickstarter without the expectation of some product at the end of it... so in these cases, I'm paying money now in an attempt to create a future where this thing that does not exist now, does actually exist.
What a time to be alive. All of my grandparents watched every dollar of their cash flows, and here I am throwing money at people I'll never meet, working with hundreds or thousands of people doing the same thing: trying to conjure up some new reality we'll experience for a very brief period of time through a 24" screen.
E.g. I bought Risk of rain 2 in the pre release for 17€ Because I liked the first part and I thought these devs deserve to try something new. I was prepared for the worst (it is a alpha after all), but it turned out to be one of the best 17€ I ever spent on a game already.
But could I really have predicted that? No..
Yes, but Kickstarter's angle is that it will work out. That's the underlying assumption. People don't usually give away their money for nothing, they need some idea that they'll get something in return. I think Kickstarter is actually more harmful to the cognitive processes involved in creating these illusions, since the future product is usually fairly well-defined from the beginning... so the illusions designed to attract your money happens in the beginning, and then the developer just needs to manage the backers' expectations until the product is released. At which point everyone will be busy comparing the actual product with their expectations, and hopefully enjoying the game too, and no one is getting their money back.
I'm not saying RoR2 wasn't worth your money. That 2-for-1 deal was a good way to balance taking your money before giving you anything (I think that deal was pre-release). Early Access releases are another good balance I think (I feel the same way about Slay the Spire as you do RoR2 -- best $20 game I've ever bought and 1 year before release). But you alone didn't decide they deserve your money, they gave you the option to recognize that feeling, by sending some cash their way.
If you imagine the same thing happening in a face-to-face exchange, it's pretty weird, and that makes me feel uneasy about this whole trend. If it wouldn't happen face-to-face, but it happens when we're all forming opinions about it separately, it seems like something else is going on besides just selling video games.
People made many predictions back then, some said it'll never achieve that level of detailed game play while supporting multiplayer. And yet, look how far that game has went today.
Pretty impressive already if I do say so myself.
I'm looking forward to see it's completion. And even if somehow it failed, I think it's already a nice game.
It's all relative. I'm sure those with very little money wouldn't understand you throwing $50 at Star Citizen.
I love video games, I love the escapism, I love nerd culture. People willing to pay $1000 for a virtual spaceship are people I care about, and they deserve better.
Being a bad investor is not an illness. Just because we don't die easily anymore does not mean that our environment isn't hostile, that natural selection does not exist.
Some people want to have fulfilling lives that make the world a better place and become doctors, and nurses, and teachers, and cops, and firefighters, ... and work long hours, with little holiday, for little pay.
Others want to enjoy their every moment on earth, learn to exploit their environment for profit, and this is how it looks like nowadays. There are always people that are smarter than you, and there are always people that aren't.
Crowdfunding is great because it gives you access to thousands of non-professional investors that have too much money and don't know what they are doing. People who want a game go and buy a game, but these people made an investment. If that's bad, it is IMO their own fault.
A $10 ticket to Avengers:Endgame is a downright bargain, so is $15 a month for HBO.
I give $60+ dollars on the regular to companies like Rockstar and From Software with a huge smile on my face and then line up to do it again.
It is very possible to be successful and not rely on predatory practices. I think part of the problem is that as a society it is our responsibility collectively to punish the true predators. We seem to be getting worse and worse at this and the predators seem to be getting hungrier and hungrier...
Investment implies monetary return. so if the thing you're investing in is financially successful, you actually make more money than you put in. that doesn't describe kickstarter/indigogo style crowdfunding.
A campaign that says "give us x money and we will give you y reward with an intended time scale of z" (which is most kickstarters) is clearly (IMO) a sale.
You are a customer, paying money for a product.
There are crowd-funded investment platforms, which have different, more stringent, requirements, but Kickstarter is not one of them.
But on the other hand, I don’t really get why it is so important how long it takes? As long as they get it done and as long as they can fund it who cares?
It felt like they were all using the same playbook to respond to any question that could be considered negative. E.g. If you asked about the game being Pay-to-Win, they'd all say "There's no such thing as winning an MMORPG, so it can't be Pay-to-Win", which is an impressive feat of mental gymnastics when literally everything in the game can already be purchased with real money.
There are people who have "invested" over $20,000 in this game. Other people built gaming PCs three years ago specifically to play it, most of which will be woefully inadequate by the time it launches.
I hope someone makes a documentary about this one day. Or maybe that was Chris Roberts' plan all along?
From what I saw I didn’t have the feeling the game was in apathological state. There seems to be a lot of movement (but it is a huge project).
Not sure if I would ever play it, but they came up with many interesting solutions that seem to work better than many existing things out there and I kinda like their way of sharing it without assuming the viewers are idiots
My other favorite thing was the monthly updates from their Frankfurt studio where most of the engine development happens, but it's been a while since they did those too.
All the community outreach content is currently getting rejiggered and the jury's still out on whether the new lineup is any good. Last week was the first episode of "Inside Star Citizen" and there should be a new one later today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKvI_eDpOgg
If you're curious to check it out but not interested in shelling out $45, they're currently a "Free Fly" event where anybody can play until the 8th.
https://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-is-free-to-fly-for-a-we...
Eve Online alone took fifteen years to get where it's gotten, and probably spent much more than $300 million to do it over that time period. That's just for one of the three things Star Citizen is trying to be. By the way, it's a lot cheaper to build out a game like this when you do it gradually. Doing anything fast is generally more expensive than doing it slow, because you need a bigger team and there is consequently more coordination overhead and risk. You also run less risk of building the wrong thing when you take it slow, because you have an established player base that's telling you what it wants.
The $20,000+ backers do strike me as crazy, yeah. But on the other hand, it's not a total waste like Clash of Clans where you're just throwing money into a pit with no hope that anything useful will come of it. These are people supporting a game that would never have gotten made through the traditional publisher model.
And like the Forbes article says, maybe it will never get finished on the crowdfunded model either. But I don't think that's a forgone conclusion.
If you want to see where it's at, it's open to everyone until the 8th. https://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-is-free-to-fly-for-a-we...
I have the same feeling. Yeah, it's a bit crazy to throw so much money at a game. But it is also crazy to throw that much money at a car or any other hobby. But no one blinks an eye. People just say "you've earned it" or "but it's a really nice car" as if that somehow changes the fact that it's just a vanity item which you can throw away in a few years.
I've thrown 45 Dollar at SC. Maybe that's crazy. But I've also thrown more than money at Anthem and that is an AAA game by a well known studio with "proper" management. And so far it didn't turn out really well.
Is this in reference to using it to get to work or something? They would be correct to not expect a return from investing in a depreciating asset.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdfunding_in_video_games#Re...
I find any time you can walk around in an open world game, it ends up becoming an MMORPG. Elite very much does not feel like an MMO. You really only encounter other players around major trading hubs and combat zones inside the bubble, and even then not many due to the way they shard the instancing. Space is empty and unforgiving.
It's already incredible with the HTC Vive, and you definitely get used to how it looks, but the resolution just isn't quite there (e.g. its especially noticeable if you are trying to railgun someone from a significant distance)
It is a great game for some people. If you want to try the first generations of VR, I think this game is the reference for that.
They didn't have the marketing of Star Citizen, but were better in everything else they did.
CMN is using KS to bootstrap their products to the detriment of other smaller dev who can't even test the water and see if the product could be made.
I think you might have misread that wikipedia page... it says “In March 2014, Kickstarter announced it had achieved over $1 billion in pledges, with more than $215 million of that dedicated for video gaming and tabletop gaming projects.[23] By mid-2016, Kickstarter reported over $186 million in video game-related pledges with over $500 million for all game-related projects.”
[Edit: my reading in the following paragraph is wrong too, see my reply below. Kickstarter funding for games increased. It did not decline.] Between 2014 and 2016, video game donations dropped by around 14%, while total Kickstarter projects dropped by 50%. Video games vastly outperformed other categories on Kickstarter. That tends to indicate Kickstarter lost popularity in general while video games did not. It would be wrong to not assume that some of Kickstarter’s decline came from competition ramping up, like IndieGogo, RocketHub, FundRazr, Fundable, Pozible, etc., etc.. You’d need to look at aggregate contributions to figure out whether crowdfunding for games is actually in decline.
> there is a lot to lose if indie game companies do not get the opportunity and resources to make great games
We don’t have any strong evidence that indie game funding is even in decline. Kickstarter contributions are rather far from representing the available “opportunity” for indie games. Since crowd funding wasn’t a thing 10 years ago, indie opportunities are still way ahead of where they were in the very recent past.
That said, why isn’t having some competition for funds a good thing? It’s not like every indie game ever made is amazing. All the crazy amount of funding available today is definitely attracting more people in search of dollars, people who wouldn’t normally make games, and aren’t committed to making high quality games. The funding for games is a big part of the reason the market feels over saturated.
Look closer. It’s saying $215 million for all games in 2014, both video games and table games.
Then $500 million in 2016 for both categories, with video games alone being $186M.
This is saying that video game funding grew massively -- more that 2x -- in those two years. Neither category declined, and it’s not comparing total contributions.
*more:
Looking at https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats
Games today are $1B in crowd funding. Games are the top category on Kickstarter. Games project success rates are 6th out of the 15 major categories. More games have raised over $1M on Kickstarter than any other category.
The more I look, the more it's clear that funding on Kickstarter and in general for indie games has never been bigger or brighter than it is today.
I installed it last night. It's a ~40 GB download. Right from the start it's very confusing and quite buggy. I'm sure there's some cool tech in there but they need to work on the initial experience if they want to attract new players with a free play week.
I also think it has "too much realism" disease. It's delivering on the dream of a space simulator where you can wake up in your bunk, walk to the flight deck, use the computer console to request your ship, walk to your assigned landing pad, climb the ladder into your cockpit, run through a preflight routine, and take off. But is all that fun?
The most infuriating bits is the intense attention to detail and realism in an alpha. For example, you can never just do stuff in the universe, you have to put your character into a mode so you can interact with objects, so you can't just like, open a door by hitting x like you do on a normal game, you have to point your cursor to the handle and then hit a button, and so on. Take that to the extreme and you find yourself spending tons of toil trying to figure out how to do basic things like ... partying up with a friend. Oops, someone opened the back door of the ship and Billy didn't have his helmet on, so he's dead and respawns back at Port Olisar so it will take him 45m to get here, except his ship is out of gas so he's stuck in space forever.
Those kinds of mechanics would be fun, in a _finished game_ where that was a balanced, but for now even sending messages to people is annoying because each and every interaction with the universe is via their little holodevice wrist thing that looks cool, but is unusable.
In the past like 2-3 years we've never been able to successfully pile a group of people into a ship and move from point A to point B. People do it all the time in videos and stuff, but so far watching other people play on twitch is much more fun than trying to do it yourself.
The amount of work they put into stupid little shit was insane. I have never played an MMO (EverCrack came out when I was in Uni; watched people get sucked into it; never played WoW even once) and I feel at this point in my life, I just need to be religiously opposed to them.
You're spot on about "too much realism." The city I was in was incredibly intricate and didn't have any sort of layout that helps you navigate. So many areas I found my self lost in had seemingly no use to players in-game.
I wish the design team had courage to say "No, we won't implement that". Instead, everything that the players suggested was met with "That sounds interesting, we'd like to have that in the game at some point". This leads to unrealistic expectations. Many backers that haven't gave up yet have the unrealistic idea of the game in their minds, one that will never flourish. A game to end all games, a game in which you can be everyone, do everything. Whether you want to flip burgers on a passenger liner or lead an army to unexplored lands, Star Citizen has got you covered. Except it won't, because it's struggling to deliver the basic gameplay loops.
Beautifully put.
Under any circumstances buying into a software prerelease is high risk. In this case the project lead has described this as his dream project and spoken of how quality will drive the schedule. Expecting such a strategy to deliver early or even on time seems optimistic.
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08815227/filing-h...
and
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08703814/filing-h...
seem to be the relevant ones.
Lord. I had no idea it was THIS bad. This game was my son's first taste of Kickstarter pseudofraud. He got a good machine out of it from his dad (me), but he's still bitter 5 years later not being able to play what was promised.
I'm not sure entirely how I feel about that response. While I agree that fewer fully fleshed systems are better for a game it feels a lot like they promised things they had no clue about in the first place. Unless someone can possibly link me a brief overview of the original scope vs. what is in the works now I'm lead to believe my coworker had just been drinking the koolaid and will hand wave any scope creep that this project presents.
But even in your case, it's extremely flawed, how can you know the final retail price before they set a final retail price?
An investor stands the chance to make a profit if a venture is successful.
That does not describe the model of this kickstarter or any other one I've seen.
If a kickstarter says "pledge at this tier and get x in return" that's a supplier-->consumer relationship.
Getting something that does not exist yet is the payout. Handing over money for say a 1/3 chance of the reward is what separates this from a normal purchase. But, hopefully you understand that risk going in.
So we're talking financial investments, not regular exercise.
In the financial sense, an investment is where you put money in with the hope of getting more money out. There are levels of risk, and generally the more risky the investment the higher the expected payout.
That's not what kickstarter is, at all, as you have zero chance of getting more money out (in this kickstarter for example)
you're giving someone money in exchange for the hope of a product downt the line.
Still, you can get more value out than you put in depending on how you value the output. Many kickstarter’s are not items that you can buy but rather art projects. How valuable is it for something to exist in this world even if you don’t own it?
Now, that’s less true if games or flashlights. But, even if that specific item does not get created simply proving a market for it exists can provide value.
Consider, if 10$ helps creat a great restaurant near you. Simply being able to eat at it would provide value even without getting a discount.
"remember that you’re playing the role of an investor, rather than a consumer"
you don't take from it that this was meant as a short-hand for financial investor?
If not then semantic differnce, but there is a persistent meme whenever kickstarter is discussed on HN that backing is akin to financial investment rather than purchase, and I disagree with that meme.
Sure you can back something purely for the hope that it will happen, and I've done that, but you're not a financial investor in that product/service/etc
I think they promote the term backers which is also used for people who donate to charity. Unlike with charity you can get meaningful payout rather than a token item. Still, the highest rewards are often symbolic in nature just like charity’s “gold donor” lists etc.
"When a project is successfully funded, the creator must complete the project and fulfill each reward. Once a creator has done so, they’ve satisfied their obligation to their backers. "
if a kickstarter has symbolic rewards, then sure that's fine.
But otherwise it's a contractual obligation to provide a reward in exchange for money. Not a donation, not an investment.
The only real difference between a kickstarter and a bond is handing back money vs handing back something other than money. Well, granted interest payments don’t compound.
you're referring to something like a bond, that pays back more money than is invested.
Kickstarter does nothing of the kind. There you pay money in return someone gives you goods (virtual or physical) that's not an investment, it's a purchase.
But that's not what kickstarter is and not what their T&C's say.
to quote https://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use
"When a project is successfully funded, the creator must complete the project and fulfill each reward. Once a creator has done so, they’ve satisfied their obligation to their backers. "
You're clearly paying money to the creator in return for the stated reward, you're not investing in the hope that they might create (unless that is what was stated in the Kickstarter)
At no point on Kickstarter does it ever say you're buying the final product. Kickstarter is not a store. You're not paying someone to make the thing they're kickstarting. You're investing so they can give it a good shot.
Perhaps there's an argument that crowd-funding sites need to be even more upfront about how it works, but withholding the money until the team is finished would just mean 99% of projects never happen. That's far worse for the consumer.
Pebble failed when it tried to pivot to a more explicit fitness-focus, directly competing with Fitbit (though I'm not sure if this was not maybe intended to lead to the acquihire).
I'm still happily using my Pebble Time Steel as a wearable that tells me the time, notifies me when I get notifications on my Android phone and lets me dismiss calls, quickly send canned responses to messages on WhatsApp and control my phone's audio.
Ironically the only feature that seems to have stopped working that I notice is the step counter (because pressing the "up" button on the watch face tries to invoke it).
What I was hoping long ago was that KS would have been a place to buy shares of equity, and be part owner of these ventures. Instead it turned into a "ebay of almost buy". That way would have been a way of democratizing ownership without doing a traditional IPO - yet also targeting people who believe.
(As an aside, the SEC also punishes people under the 1% class, by preventing many types of investments to the rest of us. Note how IPFS's FileCoin IPO was only for the millionaire class. Risk is risk, but the SEC prevents new risk and opportunities except to the millionaires.)
I have kickstarted a videogame that's still not available after years, but the developer gives monthly honest feedbacks which have been very entertaining. I don't expect to have a game within the next 3 years, but i don't really care much. He got his adventure, i got mine.
I also kickstarted a board game that has never ever been finished completely and never will. It works, but there is zero communication or updates. Just silence. That hurted way more.
I heard that Double Fine was doing that for Psyconauts 2.
There's much to do, but the game is in a far better state than a year ago. Everything else is subjective and it's hard to have a discussion if all you provide is two (and a half) words.
But decide yourself, right now it's free flight all weekend which means you don't need to buy the game to test it out. It's pretty wild to see what it's like as a new comer, very different from other space games out there right now even as an alpha. The official site to register for Star Citizen is the roberts space industries website, and if you use a star citizen referral code you get bonus ingame currency but I recommend to people to use this code STAR-GN2F-6JLW because it's from a high level backer group that allows everyone who uses the code to have access to an INSANELY large fleet, the site it's from is enlistcitizen.
In any event, people shouldn't take the article for more than face value as basically a tabloid piece, come to your own conclusion, try the game out when it's free. Which is any week they do free flight, which is usually once every 3 months or so.
They could have avoided the expensive actors, changing engine half-way, and they still should come out and say - we promised 1000 things. We can do 50 to get the ball rolling and we will do the following 950 in due time.
I really do hope that they put together at least the single player. We've spent money on the same sport simulators since '97. What's $50-$60?
I am rooting for them.
I wonder how many of the people who dislike Star Citizen as a game actually like space games?
Even with FPS elements, mining, trading and dogfights, space is a huge place and it takes a certain type of person to enjoy flying around in a ship for longer than a minute.