Star Citizen has officially reached half a billion in funding | Hacker News Reader

Star Citizen has officially reached half a billion in funding

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37 pointsmdotk60 comments

Bigger discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32916496

What a colossal waste of money. Thor: Love and Thunder had a budget of half that, and that film is a classic contender for 'Big Blockbuster Budget Franchise Film' fame.

I could build an entire theme park for that amount of money, from scratch. 10+ Roller coasters, footpaths, restrooms, in-park IT offices, the works!

Why spend so much but not complete the game? Because the gravy train keeps rolling. Game studios are motivated to ship the game because until they ship, they don't get paid as a company, yet the employees keep drawing paychecks, etc.

But this studio has no motivation to do that, they are getting the pay out now.

To be completely fair, a movie and an amusement park can only give you few hours (maybe days) of fun, but a good game provides way more than that.

I played Freelancer before I moved to Linux, that's a few years of fun experience, and as a bonus I also met many interesting people in that game. It's just a good investment for my entertainment.

The primary problem that Star Citizen faces at this moment is not poor management of money, instead it is that the fun the game provides is not unique any more.

For example, Elite Dangerous, which you can download and play right now, can deliver I'd say 70% of the fun that Star Citizen promises. There is no reason for me to lock my eyes on Star Citizen anymore, especially when you consider the fact that gaming is just a small part of ones live and spaces games are naturally grindy (maybe not correct, but the space game that I played, Freelancer, EVE Online and Elite Dangerous all require some level of time investment), you can only play so much.

All things considered, Star Citizen is not on top anymore. And that's .... scary if I'm Chris Roberts.

Or fund _one hundred_ Donnie Darko movies.

Edit: 111 movies.

How many Donnie Darko movies they can make before they start hitting diminishing returns? I wonder how many people want to watch 111 of them. There would be some natural variance between performances, editing, lighting, and the like, but it might be a niche audience who can appreciate those nuanced differences between what many might believe are effectively the same films.

Ha!

I’d call it an art project.

And you will likely end up with one high quality movie and 110 duds. We remember movies like Donnie Darko because they are the exception.

movies area poor comparison. the best movie of your life you can watch maybe 10x (20 hours). a game you like, you can play for thousands upon thousands of hours.

Edit: to be clear, I am implying SC stands to make much more than 50mil a year, much like GTAV and COD make multiples of their development cost year over year. /edit

They still have that incentive, because SQ42 is a standalone game they intend to sell to a broader market and SC is an MMO "forever game" they intend to monetize.

If you think 500m is a lot, go look at how much money games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto Online make year over year. 500m over 10 years is 50m a year, and not in profit. Blockbuster games are making much more than that much more quickly. To say nothing of the billions in scummy phone game microtransactions.

Cloud Imperium Games is multiple offices and 700+ employees, if the intent really was to not release they definitely don't need that many people sucking down wages. It's not like a VC scam where they can trick investors with headcount growth.

> If you think 500m is a lot, go look at how much money games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto Online make

GTA V had production costs of $265 million and was the world’s most expensive video game when it was released.[0]

GTA budget vs cities’ operating costs quiz at the time: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevintang/gta-vs-produc...

$500 million in funding is, yes, a lot of money.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/1466/most-expensive-video...

Thats development and marketing combined though, for GTA 5.

So the contrast is even larger. I doubt Star Citizen spent anywhere close to as much on marketing as GTA 5 did.

That makes SC look even worse. The spent twice as much money on development without even getting to marketing.

Making two games, and the game making is the marketing. The proof of that is in the very topic of the conversation, the funding.

I won't pretend it's not still a lot, but you can't point to another project like this for comprison. GTAV was built by an established team with history of making that kind of game, using an established IP and engine. It is not apples to apples.

You can't point to another project because anything else would have been canceled five years ago

That's the whole point of the project being done this way. It's an unconventional project, publishers weren't interested.

I am talking about what SC stands to make. Revenue from GTA Online was 1 billion dollars in 2020 alone, which was 8 years after it launched.

Games are often run like an ongoing concern now, a business all of it's own. SC stands to gain more than 50m a year if they reach their goal of being "the" space MMO.

> if the intent really was to not release they definitely don't need that many people sucking down wages.

Of course they do. They need artists to build the ships they sell and they need developers to create demos of stuff they have no hope of delivering, in order to convince people to continue parting with their money.

Frankly, you have not researched the project if you think this is what is happening. Invest some time into checking it out, you will probably be surprised. The information is right there, it's become a very transparent development.

You are also still wildly off the mark if you think the farce you imagine happening would take 700 people.

It's a different development model now. They've long passed the single payment kickstarter-style model and are monetizing existing players. For comparison, Clash of Clans gets over a billion/year revenue [1] but nobody calls it "funding" despite that money being used for further development of the game.

[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/clash-of-clans-statistic...

I aways wanted to play this AMAZING GAME. But it seems that they CANNOT deliver something. This is really weird. Is this game playable?

I'm a game dev and have been following this since the idea for this game was 1st publicized. It's like the ultimate case study in the sunken cost fallacy. Roberts was 100% in charge and made some utterly boneheaded technical decisions at the beginning (the main one being use cry-engine). And despite having many opportunities and many years they've just kept going.

More details. So Roberts initially funded a visual demo, which was made in cry-engine. He hired a bunch of 3d-artists to make cool models. Using this visual-demo he got a shittonne of crowdfunding in 2012. It was at this point that he should have dumped the demo and hired an amazing lead-dev who would figure out how they would build this game for real. Instead Roberts kept this cryengine visual demo, and hired a tonne of people who started haphazardly adding more stuff on top of the demo. So, it was really at that point the project became doomed, its been walking dead for ten years.

>It's like the ultimate case study in the sunken cost fallacy

If you have 5 or so hours to kill, there's actually a great video series about the game called Sunk Cost Galaxy: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCc...

An important bit of color is that the people who funded the game wanted CIG to go the route of more scope but taking a long time, rather than getting a lesser game more quickly. And this continues to be the general feeling of the community as I understand it. (Including myself for that matter!)

Doomed is also strong language — the company has clearly grown significantly and crowdfunding is clearly working to sustain it financially until they release the single player game. The alpha is bigger and better performing than ever. It’s not exactly dying :)

Certainly, I won’t disagree that the project has suffered from severe management, planning, and communication issues over the years. I chalk that partly up to CIG being a new company without established processes working in a unique environment (it’s rare for a big MMO to have to support a live environment while gamedev isn’t close to complete), and partly up to massive scope creep.

Anyways, I’ve easily gotten my $45 back in enjoyment of the alpha, so I’m not salty about it.

Dude, it's a dysfunctional pile of shit that requires a high-end gpu and connection.

If they focused on improving the game's initial loading times, cutting down on a hate inducing amount of lag, and making the elevators actually render reliably for everyone at any time, instead of bullshit like focusing on making bed sheets have realistic physics, then alright.

Until then, it's a barely playable piece of shit of a digital paper weight. It boils my blood just thinking about how shitty the experience they provide is.

I know this doesn't always scale, but in my experience it's best to get a game to the playable state before you can really know if it's going to in fact be fun.

Otherwise you're just a pitchman trying to sell/hype an idea. And ideas as we know are easy.

Barely playable.

Forget the name of the location, but when I tried playing again about a month or two ago, I tried moving from the wake up point to the elevator to head out to the lobby. The elevator never rendered and it's the only way out. This has been going on since first playing it some years ago, and it requires reloading the game which takes ~10-15 minutes.

When the game works and you're not experiencing lag, it's fun, but yeah it's still essentially a digital paper weight unless you have a rtx 20 or 30 series and a gigabit connection...

Oh and rather than putting focus on making the game actually playable, one of their recent dev goals was making bed sheets have more realistic physics... this kind of shit is a joke.

I had even less luck than this with the elevator. I couldn't open the door! Apparently it's unlike every other video game in existence, where door opening is a matter of a) walking up to the door, or at worst b) walking up to the door and hitting a button. But in Star Citizen, someone apparently coded an elaborate "door opening simulator" that requires you to switch modes and active your arm and do something complicated. I tried reading all the button prompts, and hit all the buttons, and I was able to open the door once, but then I was sent to another lobby with another elevator door and that one I couldn't open.

I was an original backer. Years ago I was able to get to the hangar and fly my basic ship around and shoot aliens and asteroids. Today I'm confounded by doors. I expect that when I try the game again in a few years, I'll probably have to read tutorials about how to make my character breathe and blink his eyelids.

Haha wouldn't put it beyond them to get to that level of detail.

The minute details don't bother me much, just that they're focused on so many of these (at times ridiculous) details, yet in my case and others, the elevator doesn't even appear.

At the least they should focus on making a playable/accessible game, then drill down

This is fake right? You enter a minigame to move your digital index finger around on the keypad sim and punch in the right opening code for the class of ship you're on and its commanding officer? And people paid 500 million bucks for this?

EDIT: It looks so easy in that video! I'm not sure why I had so many problems opening the door, but I did. Maybe I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just wait a few more years to see if the game gets better first, though.

I suspect that the rationale for adding more and more complicated systems is to increase the sunk cost fallacy for existing players, who will have invested increasing amounts of time into learning how they all work. (And perhaps, to make everything seem less like a video game and more like a "real life simulation").

There is no way that a new player would do anything but bounce right off this game, but perhaps that is by design.

Just tap F, instead of holding it. Holding it brings up the equivalent of a context menu, like right clicking in a 2D application. Some items have more than one action, rather than make you open up a dialog to pick from a list of actions, they tried to simplify it into the context menu. For what it's worth, the actual design goal is that most things are in-world buttons or screens, and that the context menu is less necessary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_BILL49nos

Last time I tried it, it didn't crash but after taking the lift and walked around the space station for a while I got bored. Apparently there's a game in there somewhere but I couldn't find it.

Apparently there is a way to actually find a ship to fly in, but they sure made it difficult to find out how to fly it.

Ah I understand that sentiment. One time I had the luck of getting to the lobby and experienced less lag than usual, only to be stuck in a similar way. Ended up having to dig through posts to figure out how to find shops, purchase from them, get my ship, how to start the ship, and take off.

Ngl, it was enjoyable when it worked, but I'm also the type who likes to aimlessly explore. Found myself heading to a random space station and then to a random planet and that was fun enough for me... until I got booted after walking around the planet for a few moments. Didn't know you have to rest at a location to have it count as a checkpoint, and upon reloading the game ended up starting back where I first spawned in the beginning of the game... only to find no elevator yet again...

Heads up though, when you get to a lobby there's usually a location nearby with screen panels or kiosks, and they usually have a yellow UI (forget if the UI is visible prior to interacting with the screen). You can use those to call your ship to a hangar

> Oh and rather than putting focus on making the game actually playable

Do be cognizant though, this is one of the reasons why the game is taking so long to make. They have a split focus on getting the game done off in another build, whilst maintaining the playable alpha that hasn't got all the game systems they've built connected to it. Most games don't have a requirement to be a fully playable game during development. If something isn't working in a dev build, you just say "Hey, don't go there, it's broken in this build." But with the alpha, everyone expects a working game even though the whole codebase is constantly in flux.

I'm fully aware of this reality. Wasn't suggesting "fully" playable in alpha, just "playable". If one has difficulty achieving something as simple as getting into the only available elevator since it's the only available exit, then the proper and consistent functioning/rendering of that element needs to be focused on in dev. For something like that to fail to function/render a high percentage of the time a player loads up the game, it makes the game unplayable and the game's initial load time not worth waiting for.

I’m thinking the actual customer is the person that’s dedicated enough to implement systems in the game, not the player.

Well you can sort of play it, it just doesn't feel like a half billion budget game.

Of course, since they are constantly moving the goalposts and making the scope of that game bigger, they will never actually deliver everything they promised.

If they have an audience already willing to give them money, why wouldn't they keep that going indefinitely?

What changes if they release a game? The reviews will inevitably not live up to inflated expectations.

And the other change would be that they'd have to start giving a relatively predatory cut to Steam. Compared to their payment processor or crowdfunding platform fees now.

Yeah, reminds me of the Silicon Valley quote about how revenue is never enough and it's better to be a "pre-revenue" pure play.

Star Citizen is a "pre-product" pure play.

I'm waiting for Star Citizen II. In my mind it is even more amazing still.

They had to build a company from scratch and are making two games in parallel. The open development nature of the game also slows it down a lot.

They were idiots to promise anything deliverable within 5 years, but I am not surprised at how long it is taking. Big games are hard, big companies are slow.

There's videos of it being playable online but it's not complete yet.

I honestly thought that HN of all places could appreciate the two big factors of this project:

A) It's a moonshot by an unproven company.

B) Software development is hard, it's two massive software projects, to say nothing of all the creative disciplines involved

I'm also surprised people here, in Venture Capital land, are worried over 500m being "wasted" to wages to produce the game, something that people can already play and have gotten returns for their money from. Maybe if we could be half as grass-roots down to earth individuals when evaluating startup ideas we wouldn't have a bright future in NFT powered Metaverse Real Estate salesmen knocking down our virtual doors.

You could actually go to space several times for this cash

My usual conversion - 267 full modular budget NIH R01 equivalent grants, including 50% overhead.

I see this project as an experiment. Despite what some people are feeling, this is not a scam, they really are building something.

It is difficult to predict if it will reach 1.0 status one day, or if it will be any good, but the whole process is extremely interesting.

This is much more ambitious than a simple game, the goal is not to build a few hours of entertainment, but a much more permanent space-sim "metaverse".

I could see them being bought by Microsoft of Nvidia at some point.

> Star Citizen gathers its funding from players by selling in-game space ships.

How is this called "funding" and not just "sales" or "dlc?"

My understanding - second hand, to be fair - is that the space ships do not actually exist in game. It's more like a promise that they will make you a badass space ship when the game's done.

I would say most of them exist now, not all though. Another misconception is that there's nothing "to show" for all this money yet, but they have been maintaining a playable alpha for years now and the development has been very open, detractors love to neglect the huge body of information that's available on the game's development to understand the situation better. It's one of the best multiplayer space games to play already, more content than some fully released games.

This is incorrect. There may be exceptions but ships that are bought exist in game and can be used right away.

At a certain point we'll realize if Star Citizen is the Notre Dame or La Sagrada of video games.

I backed this game when the original Kickstarter happened. That was ten years ago. A whole decade! The game is a victim of its own successful funding campaign. I wonder who it's even for anymore. Is anyone actually playing the early demos they put out?

Huge amount of money for a game. I'm waiting for Vulkan renderer and Linux version. I wonder if they'll reach it before a billion.

*yells to sky*

Fix the god damn elevators already!

It’s going to be the Hagia Sophia of video games

So a relic of the past?

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