Hacker News Reader

Comment by hipadev23 | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: Who looks at a video game that has raised hundreds of millions and think “Yeah they need more cash to get this out”

View on HN

Nobody does. They pay for a unique service, not as a handout.

"Finally I can be at the forefront of a gaming community just how I dreamt of when I was a kid. And in this particular gaming community, I don't even have to waste a minute playing!" It's suspension of disbelief pushed ahead one more level, a simulation of a space ship sim game. Think virtual virtual skeeball in Futurama s01e02. Just how kids who dream of risking their lives in a space-Spitfire don't really want to risk their lives in a space-Spitfire, grown ups who dream of sinking countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires don't really want to sink countless hours in a game of space-Spitfires. Both just don't quite know it yet, and profoundly enjoy that.

It's sounding a lot like fraud. And your whole stance seems to be "nobody knows what it means but it's provocative".

People feel entertained. And new code and new models get shipped. So maybe underdelivered, but why fraud? That would require a intention to mislead.

You're assuming that they don't have their own disbelief properly suspended. The illusion works, against all objective signs of failure, because they are believing it themselves. It's like Dafoe's Schreck delivering a very convincing Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire.

People are playing this game and apparently deriving enjoyment from it, that's why they're paying for things in the game. I don't think it's fraud, it's just kind of weird from the outside.

I don't think that's why people are giving them money at this point. They're paying for stuff in the game that happens to be rewards for "crowdfunding" the game. It's not a "Just 100 more bucks and maybe they'll deliver", it's folks already playing the content that's in the game and buying further ships or such for whatever reason.

Then this isn't crowdfunding any more, it's DLC revenue.

But nowhere near as clickable a headline

Yes I don't know why we're still talking about Star Citizen as a crowdfunding project in development.

It's a released game that is constantly evolving and getting money from in-game purchases, like Fortnite.

They apparently found every whale gamer on the market willing to buy virtual ships and stuff like that. I think all expenditure towards the game is counted as "crowdfunding"

That player database is worth a fortune.

Yes, gullible, impulsive gamers are worth more than most people would imagine. According to an industry insider who I talked to recently, a casino-like mobile game sold its users for ~$300 a piece, and that’s counting the majority of non-whale users who don’t spend a dime.

They're exploiting people who are vulnerable to collecting impulses.

Isn't that just most people though?

It seems like a majority. The people that collect NFTs should be in their own category though.

I always assumed that people buying nft's fell into three categories: a) fomo with crypto and feeling like this night be the next one, or b) zero critical reasoning skills, or c) wanted to make someone else hold the bag after eating losses on crypto or stocks at some point.

Either way, real question; are nft's still being traded?

I think they are, for money laundering.

Most people don't spend thousands of dollars on fake space ships.

I thnk programmers fall in a trap since we already have deconstructed whats going on. Normal people actually get attached to the pixels on screen

Yeah. Instead of money programmers spend thousands of hours mastering videogames like factorio.

Perhaps it's culturally dependent?

The community I grew up in could not accurately be described as poor, but money was tighter than in a lot of places. So people in this community prize getting good value for money, and not being tricked into wasting money.

I don't care if that Funko Pop plastic figurine or that Magic The Gathering card is actually an investment that will go up in value, I ain't collecting shit.

In my mind, the collectables market is only for a small fraction of the population - fools, and people with more money than sense.

So it's consumeristic, but all gaming is.

All gaming is not consumeristic. That's like saying all art is consumeristic, or all music is.

Play this game: http://passage.toolness.org/

It's 5 minutes long.

Read the creator's discussion on it: https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/statement.html

Hardly seems consumeristic. And there's a huge pile of games like this out there.

I always get so happy when Passage and Rohrer is mentioned, when I first played Sleep is Death my life changed, creating a story with so little but still endless possibilities. I made a js-version of it but never polished it enough, my first coding project inspired by a true vision, I learned so much.

I share your appreciation of Passage, it is a poem by another shape and a truly _different_ thing. Thank you for even mentioning it, it made my day.

> All gaming is not consumeristic. That's like saying all art is consumeristic, or all music is.

Sure. None of those are necessary.

It seems rather reductive to equate lack of explicit necessity with consumerism.

If I sing a song to myself, is that consumerism?

If someone else hears my singing and enjoys it, with no discussion of payment or exchange from either side, is that consumerism?

You're right. Folk work is exempt. (It is so dwarfed by the rest that I simply forgot it.)

That's super reductive. There's a pretty obvious difference between playing a game that only requires a modest one time fee for the whole thing, versus a game that somehow gets people to drop hundreds, even thousands of dollars for repeated purchases of virtual spaceships.

Sure, the difference is the amount. None of it is necessary.

I don’t think “consumerism is when people purchase luxury goods, especially goods I disapprove of” is a meaningful definition.

I never said that I disapproved of it. In fact, I think the ambitious goals of Star Citizen are great. On the other hand, Roblox bothers me a lot. However, I know I also make purchases that others don't understand. I don't think there are any clear lines to be drawn; the gaming industry is generally exploitative. I wish it were easy to find solid games without all the cruft.

Cyberpunk 2077 needed like $100+ million on top of the original $300+ million budget to get Phantom Liberty out and to patch the game to a point where the general public stopped hating the game.

Still, even with all of the money sunk into Cyberpunk 2077, its ~$450 million budget pales in comparison to Star Citizen.

And it's still full of bugs (Cyberpunk 2077). I've just bought it on sale, it's annoying close to being bloody amazing but every so often you get someone T posing or just something else that ruins it.

I've completed the game start to finish 3 times now and I've only really seen any bugs on my first playthrough close to launch. Post DLC I honestly hand on heart don't recall any.

I could open my copy of the game right now and find a bug in 5 minutes. That has been a constant for me since the game released and until at least 3 months ago when I last played

Cyberpunk have a massive problems caused by success of Witcher 3 a lot and i mean A LOT of people move to western studios and they were best engineers in the company.

They still have people problem as pay in CDPR is pathetic compared to other studios and not much top talent want to work there.

Cyberpunk 2077 budget was overblown thanks to that + ~50% of that was spend on marketing I would assume there were also a lot of IP "costs" so overall "production" cost was probably about ~30-40% of the budget.

Others have left the likely real answers here, but...

$750m is the right order of magnitude for this game. That's "only" ~400 employees for ~10 years. Games are hugely labour intensive, and in mainstream cases also hugely advertising intensive. The company currently have ~60 open roles. Your average Call of Duty game is $100-200m, and they come out with one every year or two, spending at a similar rate. The budget for GTA V was $265m, but has now made $8bn.

I don't think we can even say that it's "bad" or "unfinished" and therefore shouldn't cost this much... the game is finished in the truest of senses – it's available to buy and brings in revenue. Whether they are continuing development, whether it currently sucks, etc, are all somewhat irrelevant.

I think we can judge it for being a bad game, I think we can judge it for not being cash-flow positive like we would with any other startup, but the amount of money involved is seemingly in the right ballpark for the market.

I don't think comparing GTA, the most financially successful game of all time, to star citizen does star citizen any favors. Star citizen is a very niche game, even if they will do everything they plan I don't expect they will even approach 500m in sales.

These players are not investors expecting a return. In a way the game has already got them $750m.

They have already passed 100s of millions in sales. We can consider some of the earlier money inflows 'donations', but what's happening nowadays is de facto sales.

Buyers in Europe pay full VAT for Star citizen "donations" since that law was introduced many years ago.

So at least the EU and UK believe these transactions to be sales.

It's been more than ten years though? The kickstarter was in 2012, and they'd already been working on it for a year or two by then I think?

Not me. I funded them initially on Kickstarter for $35. I won’t fund anymore, I’m only in it for the single player Squadron 42 game.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com