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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

12 years and $700M later, they're on Alpha 3.23.

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?

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I think most estimates place the budget of GTA 6 at well north of $1000M. That said, based on public data, it's #2 on wikipedia[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

That entry for "Monopoly Go!" is unintentionally hilarious because of the incomplete information:

"Marketing: $500m; Total: $500m"

Yeah, that sounds about right.

> By March 2024, the game generated $2 billion in revenue just 10 months after launch and three months after hitting $1 billion.

This is absolutely wild.

That's... surprising. But it kinda goes to the whole "the stuff that people really care about on social media is really only part of the picture" thing.

Yes, but a _significant_ portion of those are marketing. If you look only at development costs, nothing comes close to Star Citizen.

Wouldn't you argue that Star Citizen is mostly marketing?

Not paid (and expensive) marketing, like billboards, TV ads, whole campaigns across many media, etc.

They're spending their money on development, just really irresponsibly.

In two years' time, this game will have taken longer to develop than Duke Nukem Forever.

I wrote it off when a bunch of Freelancer fans were like "hey, is this going to have third-person ship combat and manual flying through asteroids?" and Roberts said "Yeah!" and then after he got their money he was like "Never mind, that will cost me money from the sim addicts, so we're not doing that."

Yeah, I was basically hoping for Freelancer 2. Galaxy on Fire and then Everspace 2 mostly scratched that itch, but I still think Freelancer did some things better.

It's the cruising and exploration. Flying across giant ice clouds that span half a solar system in Tau-37, hopping among the asteroids of Omega-11 as you hide from the deadly radiation, and all the rest.

That is a very pointless comparison. Mass Effect is a plot-driven theme-park, while Star Citizen is a World-Simulation. Not quite the same type of software. Minecraft or Microsoft Flight Simulator are probably the better comparison.

> 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.

Nah, think about it. You're looking at about two years between games. Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each, easy. And each game in the series utilized different systems, art assets, and mechanics. Testing/QC alone must have been pretty arduous!

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.

> Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each, easy.

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.

> 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.

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.

You're totally right that it was considered innovative - I was speaking mostly comparatively. Mass Effect did solve new and interesting problems, but my view is that the scale and inherent risk in those problems were on a different level. For example, Mass Effect released at the same time as Uncharted, which (though a shorter game) arguably outdid Mass Effect in terms of "cinematic" feel, quality of animation, etc. The big industry players trying their hand at the problem were able to meet them head on and solve them. Whereas when we look at the problems Star Citizen is trying to solve, several big players in the field have made substantial investments trying to solve them, but most have given up, and only CIG has actually managed to make substantial progress so far.

I agree with your point on how slow star citizen development is going, if it's even going anywhere at all

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.

> Those games are huge, with ~40 hours of content each

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.

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