Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date
ign.com
ign.com
When this game started accepting donations, it was 2012. Mass Effect 3 was released in March of that year. Mass Effect 2 was released just two years previous, in 2010, and the first game in the series was released in late 2007. Less than four and a half years from start to finish.
I know that development cycles have been growing quite a lot longer, but this is ridiculous...
Aside, does $700M make this the most expensive (or, rather, well-funded) video game of all time?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
"Marketing: $500m; Total: $500m"
Yeah, that sounds about right.
This is absolutely wild.
> Aside, does $700M make this the most expensive (or, rather, well-funded) video game of all time?
World of Warcraft and similar long-running service-games could be in the same range, but it's again a different type, and it's usually not known how much money went into their development.
And they did all of that to AAA standards, across multiple platforms.
Say what you will about Bioware botching the ending, they didn't leave their customers hanging. They worked quick. I guess that when customers pay for finished products, that incentivizes a studio to finish the job; when customers pay for pre-release trinkets, and pay dearly, a studio may suffer from a perverse incentive problem.
As for Minecraft, version 0.0.1 Alpha was released in May 2009, and Minecraft 1.0.0 was released in Nov 2011. Not much more than two years. And imagine how small their budget and team must have been compared to Star Citizen's $700M warchest.
40 Hours is not much, especially for the complete run, which usually contains grind and secrets. Going by that logic, Stardew Valley would be a better game, with 200 hours of content. Star Citizen should be even massivly better game, with 300 to 1950 Hours of content. Playtime is a useless metric if you ignore quality, complexity and game-type.
> And each game in the series utilized different systems, art assets, and mechanics. Testing/QC alone must have been pretty arduous!
You say it, as if Star Citizen isn't doing the same, and more.
> And they did all of that to AAA standards, across multiple platforms.
Just as a reminder, Mass Effect is using a Unreal Engine, meaning the vast work is done from someone else. Assets are dead content and a solved problem, they run on whatever platform your engine is working on. But as another Metric, Mass Effect 1-3 had still 9-10 Years of development-time, not including remakes and ports. Because it seems you forgot that Mass Effect 1 had also some years of development before its release, which was 3-4 years. That the other games then could release so fast is no surprise, they build on each other and mostly add dead assets.
> Say what you will about Bioware botching the ending, they didn't leave their customers hanging.
Nobody is saying that Bioware is a bad Company, or that Mass Effect wasn't a good and innovative game. But it's a different game and situation from Star Citizen, and it's company. Bioware did only a little bit of innovation, mostly transferring solved problems from movie-creators to gaming. The rest is just a regular story-game, using the regular old tools and experience they had. Star Citizen on the other side is a constant research, they build a high level simulation, went through several engines and fixed problems in areas which Mass Effect has not even touched upon. This is just not the same.
> As for Minecraft, version 0.0.1 Alpha was released in May 2009, and Minecraft 1.0.0 was released in Nov 2011.
Minecraft wasn't done with 1.0. It's constantly being improved in the last 15 years. This is the point where Minecraft and Star Citizen are the same, the constant research for more and better mechanics. This is very different from adding just dead asset-content.
This isn't really the way to measure the work required to build a product. A series of books that takes 80 hours to read doesn't cost twice to make as much as Mass Effect. Complexity and uncertainty is a huge factor. Mass Effect was a game principally composed of components that everyone involved has built many times before, and where most of the difficult problems are already solved. It's a complex project by some standards, but it pales in comparison to even what is already playable in Star Citizen.
A single feature of "being a person who walks into a ship, sits in a pilot seat, flies up into space, lands on a space station, gets out of ship and into the station, without clumsy transition screens in which you just magically become the ship" is a promise that many games (including EvE, Elite Dangerous) have promised and spent money trying to build for many years, and eventually given up on. Only Star Citizen has actually managed to deliver on this.
It's certainly the case that Star Citizen has lots of very annoying bugs, and doesn't have nearly the number of game loops it wants to have, even after this level of spend. However, it's also very intuitive to me that if someone is solving a novel engineering problem that the other leading experts have attempted to solve and failed at great expense, that this project that actually has managed to get further than anyone else is probably not going to be able to be cheap.
This is emphatically not the case. In its time, Mass Effect was considered very innovative -- one of the first "cinematic" game experiences, if not the first. (e.g., https://www.wired.com/2007/07/preview-mass-ef/ )
They did a lot of stuff with in-game cinematography and character face/voice acting that seemed extremely advanced at the time. Don't forget we were just a few years removed from 2D RPGs.
> A single feature of "being a person who walks into a ship, sits in a pilot seat, flies up into space, lands on a space station, gets out of ship and into the station, without clumsy transition screens in which you just magically become the ship" is a promise that many games (including EvE, Elite Dangerous) have promised and spent money trying to build for many years, and eventually given up on. Only Star Citizen has actually managed to deliver on this.
Okay, this is interesting.
But,
> they [bioware] did all of that to AAA standards
What do you mean by 'AAA standards'? You seem to imply it as a good thing but I can only think of it as a bad thing. AAA originally defines a budget not a standard, but when I think of what AAA has become, to me it means microtransactions, incredibly bloated games (100gb?), exclusivity, always-online, DRM, unnecessary accounts, and pretty much missing the point on that games are supposed to be fun.
A positive for 'AAA standards' must be accessibility features & internationalization, but that's all that comes to mind.
I've realized with video games being creative efforts, turning it into office work sucks all the fun out and lets 1-person creations (such as minecraft) run circles around businesses.
Anyway, neither applies to star citizen, which seems to be selling a dream rather than a product, and if it ever got to product stage the reality that people blew their money would set in.
There is a phenomenon in the start-up world where wildly pre-revenue fast growing startups are overvalued until they decide they want to make money and then they are judged on their profitability, which often kills their valuation.
Ships are 'sold' to individuals before they've ever integrated those models into the game. Doubtful there is any way it can be made a balanced and fun MP experience without some major walking back.
On top of that, each year CIG make money, it happens because more and more stuff becomes playable in the game. If they stopped developing new features or content, they'd stop making money. And since they release new patches frequently (or at least, several times a year), when (if they ever) "finish" the game feels less important - it's already a fun enough experience with enough content that many players enthusiastic about the space (whether you came from EvE, ED, NMS or somewhere else) can spend enough hours in it regularly for it to be more than worthwhile.
I've felt scammed for almost a decade now.
But to be fair, I think it was only $20 or something. Can't really remember.
In my mind, giving money for a game (or any sort of kick-started concept) is literally a donation. And if you happen to get anything out of it at the end, even better.
Granted, the developer also told you that your $20 would come to mean something. So that's on the borderline of being fraudulent (though, innocent because it was their intention to fulfill).
The $20 has totally tainted your view of the product. So that's the bad part in all this, that you would not give another $20 to another fledgling video game kickstart.
When it first was announced, I thought "that sounds super neat, but I'm a broke college student so I'll wait and see".
12 years of headlines like this later, I've given them no money. But I would still absolutely pay for a game like the originally-described Star Citizen.
Not that I'm going to bat for Star Citizen.
They recently released financials up to 2022. Back then they had 860 employees, spent $130 million in a year and earned about the same from pledges, subscriptions, etc. It looks like they have some cash on hand but mostly always just spent what they received rather than building large reserves. Which implies they have indeed now burned though just shy of $700 million in 12 years.
https://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/corporate/cloud-imperium...
Which means a lot of torched developer-hours.
Disclosure: I bought a ~$75 supporter pack back in 2012.
4.0 is going to be by end of year which will have server meshing, at which point, all of the difficult tech behind the scenes will be finished.
I think CIG is going to license the engine once this is completed.
A proper Star Citizen conversation would be:
- "Is this bug fixed yet?"
- "We added a new prototype feature!"[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
Yes, they pulled a lot of fake it till you make it, but what they’ve done is undeniably grand and impressive, no matter how buggy it still is.
It is grand and impressive, but very much not in a good way.
Anyway, that was 2 US presidents ago. Still waiting huh?
the compensation required to keep the boat from rocking must be staggering
For everyone else it's a passion or an unusually steady job. Many studios have layoffs as they finish games, but with Star Citizen never getting finished their jobs are pretty secure.
Edit: Oops, how embarrassing. Gary Oldman is not, in fact, dead. Not sure who I was thinking of.
There's so much history with this project it's hard to remember it all.