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Star Citizen is a topic I sink a bit of time into every year or so, because I find the whole phenomenon incredibly curious and somewhat unique to our times.

Don't be generous to Cloud Imperium Games (CIG).

If I had to present but a single slide:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

They've spent more time & money than any other game development studio for a single project, broken promises, and delivered nothing that resembles what most people would qualify as a playable game. They've only given evidence that they will continue wasting resources.

For some really entertaining coverage, I'd highly recommend:

"Sunk Cost Galaxy", an amateur YouTube series made by former fan/investor/associate/!?: https://youtu.be/gU3uEBUBIEA

And LTT's more recent feature, which definitely pokes fun but is still overly generous IMO: https://youtu.be/bYs_zn2pTZo

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Wow, that's been ten years already. If that 339M USD figure is accurate, they could have partnered with a few companies to launch a real space ship. Shades of the never-ending train of hype and mostly lies that was Battlecruiser 3000 two decades earlier. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD )

There is a clearly a giant wad of latent demand-money sitting around waiting for someone to deliver on the concept, would be interesting if some studio with more traditional funding makes a go of it.

Going from "we're going to make a game about space ships" to "we're going to launch a real space ship" would be a feature creep deserving of a monument.

> They've spent more time & money than any other game development studio for a single project

The Wikipedia page states:

"Most game budgets are not disclosed, so this list is not indicative of industry trends."

I would expect ongoing major MMOs to easily exceed that number. For example WoW, but probably even games like EVE online.

From Wikipedia: "[World of Warcraft] has grossed $9.23 billion in revenue, making it one of the highest-grossing video games of all time, along with Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Street Fighter II."

Yes, that's revenue. Parent's post neither claims WoW is a failure nor that WoW has taken in/made lots of money-- just that they've probably spent a lot of money and no one knows how much.

I don't think MMOs should be counted as a single project. Each expansion should be counted separately, at the very least.

Star Citizen hasn't even released the base game, and the fact that they haven't segmented off any of their feature creep into future expansions is itself a story of project mismanagement. Part of a successful project is knowing how to divide it into multiple sequential projects.

Original development cost for WoW was $63M.[0] That’s enough to land it a spot towards the bottom of that Wikipedia list.

4 years of post-launch support ran up costs of $200M.[1]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20060619205201/http://www.digita...

[1] https://www.wired.com/2008/09/total-operating

I wouldn't be surprised if WoW has spent more money by now than Star Citizen has, but WoW was announced in 2001 and shipped a release version in 2004. The added expenditures are all game updates, new campaigns, and general recurring expenses from running arguably the most successful MMO of all time.

Star Citizen, by contrast, was announced over a decade later in 2012, and has gone through its hundreds of million dollars without shipping a release version, or even a beta version (they dub what's currently shipping an alpha). So it seems reasonable to hold them to a different standard.

(Granted, it's not impossible Star Citizen is also profitable, all things considered, but that just raises more questions.)

That "Sunk Cost Galaxy" series is quite good. I didn't know much about this before.

It really feels like cashing in on nostalgia, put something barely playable together and keep cashing in. The fact that a lot of the development was outsourced.....

Ehhh that list of game dev costs seems really suspect; Star Citizen is only notable because they released dev costs when everyone else holds them tight to the chest. Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie. AAA video games over the last 10 years typically have as much if not more budget than tentpole movies (and corresponding revenue draw).

Yeah, interesting point!

However, even if you just adjusted all the other dev costs in that list by a factor of two or three - Star Citizen would still easily remain in the top five.

My point was mainly- Compare CIG's efforts to other studios that have spent hundreds, or even just tens of millions!

"Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie."

Are voice acting costs that huge?

It's not like video games have to shell out millions to get name-brand actors to star in their cut scenes. It's usually unknowns or has-beens who stoop to doing video game work. How expensive can that be?

Cheap enough that you can get them on fivr

Not the good ones. There are definitely top-tier voice actors out there who command good salaries. The ones on fivr are for like, recording audio books or radio commercials.

From what I know, talent is usually cheap enough relative to the total cost of a game, it's the whole pipeline around integrating voice acting and motion capture into a game that's really expensive. In this[1] episode of that podcast they talk a bit about the costs around that. If you decide to do voice acting and motion capture you also have to adapt the whole game and writing around that decision, which balloons costs a lot since you've decided you want _that kind of game_.

[1]: https://youtu.be/cTejdjnf-jI with Mike Bithel dev of "Thomas was Alone", Troy Baker celebrity video game voice actor, Austin Wintory composer (Journey), Alanah Pearce writer

Most of these games are made by publicly traded companies, which have to release information such as dev/marketing costs to their shareholders.

Yes, but never at the level of detail that is being discussed here. You won't see the costs for the latest WoW expansion broken out in the R&D line items in Activision-Blizzard's financial statements.

You make a good point for the opposite.

Cyberpunk is not that far away and it launched probably 2 years too early

Heh, I'm most surprised that their marketing spend is so low

Still cheaper and better than Battlefield 2042.

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