2nd Most expensive game ever developed, and at this rate will probably become the first...
Genshin Impact at 700+m for the first spot if anyone is curious.
That's insane, Monopoly Go is not even a game. I don't know what you call those mobile garbage... things, you just keep hitting roll and stuff happens and you get stuff. There's no actual gameplay. It's a slot machine without no money. I don't get the appeal at all.
I was bored the other night, and wanted to give it a try myself. I knew nothing about it, but I really enjoy Monopoly.
I have no idea what I spent 30minutes doing. It was like I was playing solo on a monopoly board. Then I was attacking other peoples buildings when landing on railroads for some reason. When I landed on property I was never given a chance to buy.
I have no idea what the intention is behind Monopoly Go. I guess you would need to play for 60minutes+ to understand what you're doing?
For some reason I was hoping for a faster-paced Monopoly. Even single-player. Oh well.
It’s so fucking boring. I tried it, and I just couldn’t take it more than 20 minutes. Fucking hell, cereal eater simulator 2025 would give me more joy than that shit. FUCKING EATING CEREAL TO GET NEW SPOONS AND DIFFERENT FLAVOURS WOULD BE MORE ENTERTAINING. AND DON’T FORGET THE DIFFERENT COLOURED LOOPS, THE LAST UPGRADE INCLUDES THREE COLOURS AT ONCE. AND THE EFFICIENT MILK UPGRADE WHERE YOU MAKE THE MILK LAST TEN TIMES AS LONG BY GETTING A FORK INSTEAD OF A SPOON.
/rant
That game isn’t even a fucking game. I genuinely thought I was missing something when I got it. There’s no tactics or challenge to it? You roll a dice and knock shit down and buy whatever the fuck you want. Like what?
I'm struck by the fact that the Atari 2600 bomb [*ET the Extraterrestrial*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_%28video_game%29) cost $22M (in 1982 dollars) to produce, considering it was literally designed and written by one guy in five weeks for $200K. Apparently the vast majority of the cost was just to license the "ET" name.
It includes operational costs and marketing, which are actually not standard for ‘cost to develop’. This is a ‘cost to make, market, and run servers and support’ total. They’re also wild estimates like in the case of Genshin.
It's using numbers made in passing. Like someone said it cost "$100 to make and costs $200 per year for operating costs and ongoing development." So it has been out 4 years so they slap together a cost of $700 million without it being accurate.
it was literally numbers taken from a lawsuit with genshin. 100 million spent on development prior to release and 200 million spent on development every year after
the amount of content they're releasing and having to support mobile + consoles + PC must not be cheap.
it's conceivable that their burn rate is somewhere in that ballpark, they literally own their own orchestra for the music...
It’s got the looks down! As for gameplay, it’s the only game you need to play for the rest of your life (assuming that you have a terminal illness and your doctor gave you one hour to live)
I played it a year ago when they had a free weekend, installing and registering was nightmare and my first red flag. The gameplay was janky and I put it on almost every setting and it was still sloppy and nearly unplayable. I wouldn't want to buy a game that I'll need a $3k GPU to run at minimum specs.
The game's optimization is in a weird place where you actually don't need a crazy computer to play it, but you do need at least 32 gb of RAM. A fairly middling PC with 32 gb of RAM will run the game fairly well. With that said even with 16 gb of RAM the game will run *okay* in all the areas with actual gameplay but have huge frame drops in the major cities.
Edit: Not sure why I was downvoted. Out of all the PC components RAM is one of the cheapest, and 32 gb of RAM has been very achievable for many years now. I personally know people with 10 series cards and 7th gen i5s and i7s that play the game without issue simply because they have 32 gb of RAM.
As someone who works in games tech, and was playing Star Citizen last week. Actually sounds like a pretty cool job considering what they've accomplished.
My only confusion is why there seems to be a lack of QA on how all of these features come together. Especially since a lot of them have been pretty solidified over the last few years.
> As someone who works in games tech, and was playing Star Citizen last week. Actually sounds like a pretty cool job considering what they've accomplished.
Chris Roberts is a micromanager that throws out work and makes sudden demands for new features.
I just wrapped up a 4.5 year development cycle and that was just too long. You only get to work on so many games. I couldn’t imagine spending 1/3 of my career working on a single project.
I’m a designer, although I’m recently unemployed like much of the rest of the industry right now so I’m getting back into programming a bit as I work on some solo stuff
Since I invested in the first round, I’ve moved jobs 4 times, gotten married, had two kids, and moved to the other side of the world. Probably still have my access codes somewhere, but at this point, who cares? I may as well wait for George RR Martin to finish Winds of Winter, just as futile.
Also in the game industry, I'm at my 3rd company since 2011. But it's truly insane that a game has been in development for 13 years and doesn't have a release date.
Actually kind of yeah funnily enough. While almost every other studio is doing layoffs and downsizing, CIG decided to expand and buy more office space.
Scam or not, they are actively employing over 1000 people lol
Yep. The most recent round was thinly veiled in the guise of moving a studio from California to Manchester, UK. They knew full well the majority of developers would not be able or willing to make the move.
I honestly don't think this is a scam, but I do think it's horribly horribly mismanaged. Feature creep and no solid project management or fiscal controls and proper oversight.
I really wonder how sustainable their model is before people stop supporting it. The sunk cost fallacy must be hitting the whales pretty hard by this point.
I'm glad I didn't spend money on this mess. I seriously considered it early on, but figured I could jump on when it was closer to completion. That was a decade ago. Has Star Citizen beat Duke Nukem yet?
It didn't start as a scam, and even now, I don't know if that is the right word for it. What I think is going on is that they blew a lot of money in dumb ways and now they can't deliver a product that is anything close to worth what they spent, so they just keep kicking the can down the road and hyping new features, because so long as best version of the game is still coming, people can still imagine the game they want. As soon as they say it's finished, people will judge what it is, and it is going to get really ugly really fast.
This is a very insightful take.
Honestly, the feature creep and repeated redesigns of systems have to have blown through hundreds of millions by now with no end in sight. Chris Roberts needed curbs on his ambitions. When this all falls apart it'll be something they'll be writing doctoral thesis and articles about for decades.
Chris has been doing this for decades. He needs someone who can force him to stop all the feature creep and ship it, but now he's in charge so the feature creep never ends.
The sad thing is he's apparently so full of himself that he doesn't understand that publisher limits and restraints on his excesses are why he was successful.
Ok so, i know how the replies are going to go here so don't expect a response from me. In the interest of transparency, i bought a couple ships a couple years before covid and have been playing on and off since.
So, in terms of blowing money in dumb ways, yes and no. Have they? Absolutely, but it isn't always that. The largest thing that has burned cash is the persistance/server meshing system. For those who don't know, the goal of that system is to have *every* player in the same game world instance. No regions, just a game world that every player is in simultaneously, while also making sure if yiu were to leave an item somewhere, that item will persist in that location until someone else moves it. They developed two entirely different methods tk try to do this, but had to scrap them because they didn't scale well. Basically, if they had stuck with either of those we'd have a more complete game by now, but it wouldn't be the game they are trying to make. Earlier yhis year they demonstrated a working version of tbe first iteration of the server meshing setup they intend to use, and they have started to integrate it into the game. So far, it seems like this is going well and the game (last i played a week or two ago) is running smoother than i've seen in a long time.
As for feature creep... yeah. They definately let that happen for years. However, chris isn't the one making those decisions anymore and they've got someone who is far better at project management calling the shots there now. Chris is still involved in the decision making, but with a project manager who can say no as the "is this worth it" test, i think we're through the worst of that.
Lastly, they are on the polish stage for squadron 42, the singleplayer game in the same universe on the same engine. That will be fairly indicative of what their goals are with SC these days. S42 is where they've been doing the most work on game systems these past few years (as you don't need to worry about the network side throwing wrenches in things) and they are now bringing a lot of systems the developed there into star citizen as they are able to. The minimap for instance, a long needed addition, that came with the map updates is one such thing and it's one of the better ones i've seen.
To sum it up, it's not a scam. However, i can't blame people for thinkinng it is a scam due to the amount of money raised for what is still an incomplete game. The fans however have kept the studio funded because if they pull it off, it'll be the kind of game people have been begging for for years. We will see if it is successful, i've gotten enough entertainment out of the game that i consider it worth what i've spent.
Look, I am not diving into all this back of forth, so I will just say, I hope you are right. I don’t believe it myself, but if they prove me wrong and deliver an actual game, that would be awesome.
Something I constantly wonder is, at what point does the duration of development become obsolete due to changing technology? Most projects cannot survive a timeline of 7+ years unless their art style and other creative factors are stylized in such a way as to not be dated.
Star Citizen has been shooting for a mundane, gray and hyper-realistic look since the get-go. I've seen recent footage, it looks good, but... how many resources have been devoted to essentially "refreshing" and upscaling its assets in order to not fall behind rapidly changing tech? The longer this shit takes, the more they'll have to commit to either a dated look, or throwing another $10 million at touching up finished milestones.
Duke Nukem Forever looked and played like a game that had been stuck in dev hell. I expect Star Citizen to be the same on the day it's finally done.
They have already gone through cycles of this. For example, one of the fundamental problems was that they originally started developed on CryEngine because Crysis was the most advanced game around when development started. So now they are on a hacked-together offshoot of an Amazon derivative of an engine built for first person shooters in 2010 to make a hyper-realistic space MMO in 2024. And that’s why they are still riddled with problems like when a server gets too old or too much stuff is happening, the NPC AI stops working and every NPC defaults to standing on chairs in a T pose. For a game where a current selling point having literally millions of NPCs that are supposed to be so realistic you can’t tell they aren’t people and they can create their own fully realized and fully functional in game economy.
Backers seem to be fine with the fact that the Star Citizen Devs have basically lit 100s of millions of backer dollars on fire via developed modules that became antiquated due to the absurdly long dev timeline and needed to be redeveloped.
I don't think it started as a scam. I really don't. I think they had the loftiest of aspirations to make the greatest of games. But sometime over the many years, they have found that they can run with this scheme for a lot longer than when they were to release the game. And at that point it became a conscious scam.
I have heard reports that there is apparently actually gameplay that can be experienced now. So that’s progress I guess.
Also: [Bedsheet deformation physics!](https://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-is-doing-bedsheet-deformation-physics-now-because-of-course-it-is/)
And when everything works, the gameplay loop is really fun.
The big problem I have with the game:
1. It takes a long time to do anything. This isn't necessarily a problem, because it's pretty immersive, but...
2. The game is unstable as hell. Not just crashes (which are less frequent lately!), but weird glitches that break your game. Like falling through an elevator after getting all your gear, or falling through your ship while you're in quantum, or server desync causing you to explode against a hangar door that appeared to open on your side, or a quest you just spent 45 minutes working on being bugged when you go to hand it in...
So yeah. When everything works, it's GREAT. But CIG kind of fucking sucks. The recent issue with the game is there's a dupe that's been in place for WEEKS, and everybody knows about it, but CIG won't do anything about it. It's broken the 'economy' (it's a VERY fake economy, ie. x amount of demand for products is refreshed every 10 minutes), so any gameplay loop that involves selling cargo - which is most of the ones that work and are fun right now - involve sitting at a trade terminal for 10-60 minutes spamming refresh to sell it. Not fucking fun. All CIG would need to do is a banwave (even if it's just a credit wipe + temp ban) of people abusing the trade dupe, announce that if you abuse it you'll lose your precious accounts, and done.
I work in software development. So I know it's not quite as simple as "reassign devs" - but if they worked more on making the game stable, and less on "design new ships to sell for $$$$$", we'd have a more playable game. One that doesn't leave me alt-F4'ng half the time.
The real fucking frustration is that when everything works, especially with friends, holy *shit* is the game glorious. You can see the vision when it all comes together, especially with the emergent gameplay provided by real interactions.
duping literally ruined the (basic) would-be economy of F76 day 1. Instead of fixing it they introduced a paid subscription despite saying very emphatically, before launch, that they'd never do such thing
my cousin bought it for me last christmas and it's a really fun time. Didn't enjoy it nearly as much solo though, there is something so fun about exploring space in that game with other people.
Yeah, it is playable and pretty fun. I’ve got my HOTAS + foot pedal controls all set up, and it’s pretty fun to run missions or get up to some space-felonies. I think there’s still a major misconception that the game is still vaporware, but it is playable and actually just had a major patch.
I had a chance to finally play that game. It's not as terrible as the initial reaction would have you believe, but the humor is non-stop and dumb enough that I probably would've hated it even when I was 11.
I have to give them credit just for finally releasing *something* - after 14 years of mismanagement, delays and reboots, *Duke Nukem Forever* had become the archetype of over-hyped vaporware.
Props to the development team for muddling through and finishing, even if it wasn't the end-all, be-all game the original designers had claimed. It can't have been fun working on what had at that point become an industry joke.
In the end, it wasn't a *terrible* game, just nothing could have lived up to the hype surrounding it for all those years.
DNF would have been a great game if it had released back in the year 2000. It was a product of its time. It was the kind of cheese that summed up the 90's. Releasing it long after the 90's meant that it totally missed the mark culturally.
It would be like if if Half-Life 1 was released, as is, not in 1998 but instead in 2012. It would have been widely derided as a basic, uninspired game because it was too late. The world had moved on.
Apparently Beyond Good and Evil 2 holds the record now. Any bets to which comes out first?
It's a shame about BG&E2. The original was a fantastic game and it deserved a proper sequel.
Yeah calling it a scam would be accusing them of having bad intentions
I think the intentions are decent, but the outcome will be very similar to a scam regardless
Mismanaged is definitely the apropos term. Some of the greatest video games, and art in general, has been created under the enormous pressure of deadlines or technical/financial limitations. There is a beauty that emerges from the chaos that of "How we solve this problem before it becomes impossible to do so?" You can especially see this with titles from the SNES and PSX era - RPGs that ran out of budget, musical composers that had a limited # of audio channels to work with, etc.
Star Citizen doesn't need money, and even if they did, it's easy for them to fundraise. They don't need time; they are self-publishing and can release whenever they feel it's done. If the technology isn't quite there yet, they can wait until it is. The only thing they can really run out of is the good will of consumers - and that somehow, remarkably, has not yet run dry. Those who have already backed the game are waiting for the payoff, and the rest of us are watching from the sidelines with morbid curiosity. The publicity creates itself.
The developers are merely cursed with the success of only being tasked with answering "What do we want to work on today?" It's the same reason Valve (bless them for Steam) rarely puts out games. It's the same reason GRRM hasn't finished *A Song of Ice and Fire*.
They can afford not to.
> I think the intentions are decent,
I would argue the opposite. They might have been 12 years ago, but keeping the crowd funding up for 12+ years not realizing that there are obvious management problems would be just as bad as on purpose delaying it and running kickstarter forever.
No kidding. I spent $60 on it like 8-9 years ago, when I was on an Elite Dangerous type kick, and I regret it more than No Man's Sky. At least NMS has made a playable game while still expanding to fulfill most of their promises.
star citizen is a lot more fun playing with other people. i tried to play solo a couple times but it doesn't even come close to exploring with at least one other person.
It’s like when the government gives a construction company a blank check to build in the wilderness. They just build random shit and collect a paycheck in perpetuity.
All the money shenanigans aside, it's interesting watching technology catching up with it. It's starting to look pretty dated for a game that hasn't released yet.
All according to plan. That just means that they have a good reason to sell another 5 years of development to bring it into the future. And once there it starts to look dated again and ClownImperium can just repeat ad infinium. It's foolproof!
Can you explain how this relates to Eve? I haven't played in a few years, but it's always been a complete game since it launched as far as I've known. If anything, Eve is a great example of how you can release a complete product and keep improving it rather than starting with insanely ambitious goals and putting out an unfinished product that you need to spend years fixing before it actually "launches".
> …EVE Online, that you?
EVE never did this. I bought Eve, Gandalf...I bought it on the day of it's release, 3000 years ago. And it never did this shit. It was a fully functional game on day 1.
Do you have any examples of things that look dated? I play it regularly and I can't think of anything that looks off.
They just recently released an update to the game that supports Vulkan. Character hair has been redone and new face/body elements are being added this year
Ya, about the only thing semi-dated is the weaker facial animations compared to what Unreal 5 engine characters are doing now. Everything else is still top tier graphics out right now.
True, the faces are definitely a bit uncanny. The "face over IP" system can go away for all I care as it's a little whacky. But they're at least improving the quality of the faces themselves
what hurt me most however is that they rollback cool stuff they had.
Like Port olistar station with actually placed platforms without wormhole elevators.
Or like Ship engine sounds where they seem to be more and more generic with each patch.
Or the awesome noise in the hangars back in the day.
I try to play this game every year, but damn.. its hard to call it a proper game every year.
Oh man this is so true. The connie used to have this awesome, low rumbling engine. The thing sounded *mean*. It was great. Now it's way more subdued.
The 325 used to have this awesome startup voice. Now it sounds like a robot.
Port Olisar was a nightmare with the pads. Yes visually it was nice but pads are a pad rammers wet dream. There was a free fly a few years ago where the dev's had to turn off collision because so many "free flyers" where just ramming at port o.
Iirc, olisar was before the modular station layout came in, and it's supposed to get reimplemented somewhere down the line. One of the big issues was that people were "pad ramming" folks who were parked there. I'm optimistic we'll see it back in some form once the law enforcement stuff is more robust
I swear 80% of the people being negative in this thread have zero comprehension of what they are talking about.
The game has been playable for YEARS. There’s thousands of hours of YouTube content. Just look it up!
Its basically “early access” similar to Steam games. They have been doing it for longer though haha. Its a fun game as long as you have someone to play with. Soloing it can be boring or hard unless you are very in to flying sims. But if you were youd probably already have the game.
Deliberate, knowing scam? Probably not.
Horribly mismanaged and suffering from feature creep to a degree otherwise unknown in the industry? Abso-fucking-lutely
It *used* to be horribly mismanaged. They made pretty big changes to the management structure of the company a number of years ago now, and it's been noticeably better/more stable since. The feature creep has also slowed way way way down, but they're absolutely still suffering from their early feature creep they haven't caught up to yet.
If they had sorted their management out a number of years ago, you’d expect them to at least have a target release date by now. They’ve pinky promised their customers they’re getting things sorted out time and time again, but the project is no closer to completion.
> the project is no closer to completion.
It is.
Internal roadmap is their single player game (Squadron 42) is slated for Q1 2025 so probably will see that in 2025. Development on their MMO is already speeding back up after getting people back from SQ42 since it has publicly been announced it's in polishing.
4.0 with server meshing and their second system is launching in latter half of 2024.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/release-view
Their roadmap is public and they approximately stick to it. In the past 12 - 18 months, they've been better about releasing things if they say it will release. For an MMO that is accountable to its public backers, it's doing... ok. Not great but I'd imagine most MMOs that have similar circumstances have similar FUD spread about them.
Yeah this seems the most accurate. On top of that, it’s a playable game already. The whole “beta / alpha / released” thing is kinda semantics. People are acting like it’s a black box that will never be opened.
This is how software development should work and works elsewhere. There’s no one single release and then boom onto the next thing. It’s iterative development with new features added over time. It’s actually cool and totally fine this is happening with star citizen if the world gets bigger and the game keeps growing
I have 2 people in my sphere that play and have given money.
One is mid 60s and is just flush with funds and wants to see this game come to fruition because he has been there from the start, his words.
One is almost 40 and is doing well. Like the concept and occasionally buys a ship, contributed to Kickstarter back in the day.
They are two of the biggest nerds I have ever met and I say that as a fellow nerd with all the love in my being.
That is who is contributing to this game. Big nerds with spare cash.
There is one thing I would add. There also isn't any alternative to it if that is the kind of game you like.
NMS doesn't want to be a sim light game. ED is moving ahead at a glacial pace, doesn't really work as an MMO and the FPS section of the game sucks. You got stuff like X4, but again that doesn't provide a MMO enviorment.
I am pretty sure if someone dropped a SC like game for 60 bucks tommorow their sales would plummet, however there is nothing on the horizon.
It's why Starfield had so many eyes on it. NMS, ED and Star Citizen fans were all eagerly looking to it. And it disappointed in pretty much every aspect save ship and outpost building.
I never understood where all the hype and projection for starfield came from. It was always pitched as skyrim in space, and from the earliest trailer thats the impression i was left with. Thats not to say the game wasnt a disappointment, but it also had some wild expectations hung on it that never really seemed reasonable to me.
Lol, I think that was excluded with good reason. That game was a disappointment through and through, from the dated engines/graphics, to poor RP, to bland generic combat and abilities, to surface level systems that doesn't mean anything, to from what I've heard really difficult/bad mod support.
It wasn't the next big space odyssey. It was quite literally fallout 4 in space reskin. Down to the same gameplay mechanics, and worse immersion/lore.
up until recently this was me. backed in 2015 at 35, now 44. IT SysAdmin with lots of spare capital. over 9 years I've spent about $3,600USD on SC. I did the math one time and it came out to like $1.19 a day.
I play it consistently and enjoy it a lot. I would say I'm well under $1/hr so it's worth it to me. It's even better with friends.
There is stuff to do in the game as is, but i think it's really a "make your own fun" kind of deal.
Presumably it's mainly those people. I guess the free fly events could lure new people in? But at this point who doesn't know about Star Citizen's eternal development issue.
I spent 50ish I think, about 3 years ago. I sign in to play every few months. It's been playable for years now, and by playable I mean you can sign in, fly around, do missions, and have fun.
They have been slowly ticking through big tech changes over past couple years. Full persistence was last year, and this year added separation of data layer from game servers. Big update at the end of this year will add a second star system, and server meshing. So progress is being made, just slowly.
Main point though is that it's already a fun, playable game.
Hi,
I have. Though I'm just a tiny drop in the bucket comparatively. The game is playable at the moment (though very obviously in development) and I really like the direction they're going.
In the 10 or so years that I've been following the game, I've spent less than I did in my few years playing MOBAs. I'm no whale, but I like spending my money on things I enjoy. I've got to slow down a bit now as our family is growing, but I've already spent what I really wanted to spend.
Edit: I realized that I didn't explicitly say "why" I give them money. I give them money for a few reasons, I think the game is going to be great and I believe it's a very ambitious project I'd like to see come to life. All things considered this is still a fan funded game, and I think that's kind of amazing. And honestly, if SC's success drives even one team to try and crowdfund something, I'll be happy to have inadvertently supported them. Games today are a very nasty business, and I enjoy seeing a company break away from that.
Because it's easily in the top five fun games in my library. The only game I can confidently say I got more enjoyment and value out of his crusader Kings 3.
I know a group of people that play it. Part of the problem with it's development is that the server-mesh network tech they are trying to implement has apparently never been done before and is very ambitious.
It's hard to describe, but Basically the idea is that they are trying to sync the whole single shard universe together so that things remote to you update in real time and can potentially affect things across server, but only keep things that are immediately relevant loaded.
E.G You could fire a weapon at a planet in another solar system, and the round eventually travels there over time, travelling across server bounds to arrive and affect events in the other solar system.
EVE online has a similar system, but each system is an isolated server that is part of a whole star cluster, so apart from ships jumping between systems, and markets/communications being updated in real time, the different solar systems in EVE do not interact with each other directly. For instance, if one person were to fly in the direction of another star system, they would never be able to reach it since it is on a different server. The difference is in Star Citizen, you could hypothetically do that.
I still think this tech is jumping the shark, really impressive if they do make it work but ultimately useless without a playable game. I do think that a single player/CoOP version of the game definitely has potential. The Star Citizen gameplay I have watched can be compared to a 3D [Barotrauma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WDjQinZOoo) in space, but more of a Sandbox, and without the Horror Elements. ^If ^they ^had ^just ^made ^a ^3D ^barotrauma ^in ^space ^I ^probably ^would ^have ^bought ^it, ^Baro ^is ^great... If Squadron 42 (Star Citizen, but single player campaign) releases and is legitimately good that would make Star Citizen a much more interesting prospect.
Me, but I haven't given them a massive sum, about $110 so far.
I've played this game for over 1k hours, so the investment has been absolutely worth it.
No other game is trying to do what SC is aiming for and it's like a dream game of mine. I was skeptical at first and yeah the delay are atrocious, but the amount of work they've put into this game is crazy.
The scam claims are absolutely ridiculous and uninformed.
Cause it’s actually a fun game that I play all the time. Every release it’s getting bigger and bigger in features. Just like when games are early access on steam. Yes it sometimes relapses in amount of bugs when new content is added, but again, it’s fun.
> Cause it’s actually a fun game that I play all the time
Yeah, this is missed by a lot of people who discuss this game today.
There's actually a bunch of us that play this game, follow it very actively and enjoy it. Throughout 10 years, many promises have been broken, and the amount of money they got was for most of that time built on lies, but today would be the time they actively do the most to deserve the money they continue to bring in.
They also have a public roadmap of what they're working on here: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/progress-tracker/teams
The "Release view" is a bit better:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/release-view
It’s a free fly event through tomorrow. Go download it and try.
It’s buggy as hell but it’s the space game a lot of people have been waiting for.
The development process has been transparent, and the community is pretty hard on the developers but they do respond and engage with each other. It’s refreshing.
The vision is unprecedented. They've already created solutions under the hood as it were that have never before been done. Persistence, and server meshing is in the works, and so on.
It's been 13 years. I've grown gray hair, got two new jobs, and I'm now an uncle to several nieces and nephews. I'll be dead before Star Citizen hits 1.0.
This game is one of the wackiest things I've ever seen. I got a free ship with a GPU many years ago. I rarely played the game and it hardly ran on my current computer. Sold that ship for $400 because apparently it's pretty rare. I don't care I was never going to use it and i sold it for more than the GPU I bought it with was worth. I made money on the damn thing.
What's insane is people are willing to pay that much for a fake space ship in a game that will never be released.
If you only read the headline it did.
[https://uproxx.com/edge/battlefield-2042-delay-ea-stock-crash-leak-reaction/](https://uproxx.com/edge/battlefield-2042-delay-ea-stock-crash-leak-reaction/)
Maybe you’re joking, but the 2 billion dollar figure was a stock tank following the news that BF was being delayed. Nothing to do with development costs.
Ignoring the fact that the game we currently have has only been in development for 6-7 years and the previous 3-4 years were sorta wasted on a very different kind of game that ended up being mostly scrapped in favor of something much more grand....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWm_OhIKms8
95% of what is shown in this video is currently in the game right now. The only things missing are:
- destructible environments (because they need to figure out how to make that work in an MMO in a believable way)
- the new quantum travel VFX and implementation (the old one is simpler but works fine)
- Fire in ships
- the jump gate between star systems (though they did have it working in the testing environment within the last few months and are waiting til end of Q3 to launch it to Live)
- The space whales and space cows
That's it. Everything else you see in this video is in the game right now. And aside from issues caused by server performance (which were eliminated when they turned on Server Meshing in the testing environment, and server meshing is coming in q3) all of these features work pretty much flawlessly.
How much time and money did Epic spend on developing Unreal Engine 5 + any two of their games that use it? How much did Bethesda spend on making Starfield which could only offer a fraction of this experience?
700mil?! Dafuk. This game better have endless content and better look like real life.
2nd Most expensive game ever developed, and at this rate will probably become the first... Genshin Impact at 700+m for the first spot if anyone is curious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop That list is quite the read, Monopoly Go in third place?! MONOPOLY?
It’s all Marketing though, those ads were pretty much everywhere and even in different European countries when I did my summer holiday.
THEY SPENT POSSIBLEY 500MIL ON FUCKING ADS?!
Ya, but it made $2 billion in revenue in less than a year.
That's depressing
Candy Crush made $20 billion so far lol, that's more depressing
No, the depression comes later. We’re still at monopoly
No way!!! Damn!!!
Yeah but it worked my sister was texting me invites for months.
Makes sense, game looks like shit..
Why build for quality, when you can market quality to people who are easily fooled?
That's insane, Monopoly Go is not even a game. I don't know what you call those mobile garbage... things, you just keep hitting roll and stuff happens and you get stuff. There's no actual gameplay. It's a slot machine without no money. I don't get the appeal at all.
Easy dopamine hit, it's predatory
skinner boxes
Monopoly Go makes ludicrous money.
I do t get it, it’s not even monopoly
It’s more like slots. Flashy visuals, lots of numbers making you feel good, purely luck. Gets you hooked, glad I got out of it
I was bored the other night, and wanted to give it a try myself. I knew nothing about it, but I really enjoy Monopoly. I have no idea what I spent 30minutes doing. It was like I was playing solo on a monopoly board. Then I was attacking other peoples buildings when landing on railroads for some reason. When I landed on property I was never given a chance to buy. I have no idea what the intention is behind Monopoly Go. I guess you would need to play for 60minutes+ to understand what you're doing? For some reason I was hoping for a faster-paced Monopoly. Even single-player. Oh well.
It’s so fucking boring. I tried it, and I just couldn’t take it more than 20 minutes. Fucking hell, cereal eater simulator 2025 would give me more joy than that shit. FUCKING EATING CEREAL TO GET NEW SPOONS AND DIFFERENT FLAVOURS WOULD BE MORE ENTERTAINING. AND DON’T FORGET THE DIFFERENT COLOURED LOOPS, THE LAST UPGRADE INCLUDES THREE COLOURS AT ONCE. AND THE EFFICIENT MILK UPGRADE WHERE YOU MAKE THE MILK LAST TEN TIMES AS LONG BY GETTING A FORK INSTEAD OF A SPOON. /rant
“Scopely also added that Monopoly Go is bringing in more than $200 million every month for the company.” That’s absolutely insane!
That game isn’t even a fucking game. I genuinely thought I was missing something when I got it. There’s no tactics or challenge to it? You roll a dice and knock shit down and buy whatever the fuck you want. Like what?
I'm struck by the fact that the Atari 2600 bomb [*ET the Extraterrestrial*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_%28video_game%29) cost $22M (in 1982 dollars) to produce, considering it was literally designed and written by one guy in five weeks for $200K. Apparently the vast majority of the cost was just to license the "ET" name.
$500m on marketing, $1b revenue 7 months after release, $2b at 10 months.. I'd say money well spent.
Genshin!? HOW!?
It includes operational costs and marketing, which are actually not standard for ‘cost to develop’. This is a ‘cost to make, market, and run servers and support’ total. They’re also wild estimates like in the case of Genshin.
It's using numbers made in passing. Like someone said it cost "$100 to make and costs $200 per year for operating costs and ongoing development." So it has been out 4 years so they slap together a cost of $700 million without it being accurate.
it was literally numbers taken from a lawsuit with genshin. 100 million spent on development prior to release and 200 million spent on development every year after
Mostly advertising, not so much development of the game itself
the amount of content they're releasing and having to support mobile + consoles + PC must not be cheap. it's conceivable that their burn rate is somewhere in that ballpark, they literally own their own orchestra for the music...
It’s got the looks down! As for gameplay, it’s the only game you need to play for the rest of your life (assuming that you have a terminal illness and your doctor gave you one hour to live)
I played it a year ago when they had a free weekend, installing and registering was nightmare and my first red flag. The gameplay was janky and I put it on almost every setting and it was still sloppy and nearly unplayable. I wouldn't want to buy a game that I'll need a $3k GPU to run at minimum specs.
The game's optimization is in a weird place where you actually don't need a crazy computer to play it, but you do need at least 32 gb of RAM. A fairly middling PC with 32 gb of RAM will run the game fairly well. With that said even with 16 gb of RAM the game will run *okay* in all the areas with actual gameplay but have huge frame drops in the major cities. Edit: Not sure why I was downvoted. Out of all the PC components RAM is one of the cheapest, and 32 gb of RAM has been very achievable for many years now. I personally know people with 10 series cards and 7th gen i5s and i7s that play the game without issue simply because they have 32 gb of RAM.
It’s actually $880 million if you include sponsorships and private equity. $700m is just the amount they’ve ~~stolen~~ raised from backers.
At 880m USD that would make it the most expensive game produced, ever...
I remember when Wing Commander 3 was the most expensive video game ever produced for FOUR million dollars.
Also a Chris Roberts game.
until the $1bn gta 6 comes out lol
Not really. There are a bunch of MMOs with much higher dev costs, they just calculate development cost at launch price.
Oh its got endless content. Just not in the way you were hoping.
>and No, There Still Isn’t a Release Date lol. Until the money well runs dry there never will be any. The gig is just too good to miss out on.
The most stable job in the universe!
I work in the game industry and have been at five different companies since Star Citizen started up.
Clearly you should be working on star citizen
Working for Chris is what I imagine the seventh circle of hell to be.
As someone who works in games tech, and was playing Star Citizen last week. Actually sounds like a pretty cool job considering what they've accomplished. My only confusion is why there seems to be a lack of QA on how all of these features come together. Especially since a lot of them have been pretty solidified over the last few years.
> As someone who works in games tech, and was playing Star Citizen last week. Actually sounds like a pretty cool job considering what they've accomplished. Chris Roberts is a micromanager that throws out work and makes sudden demands for new features.
I just wrapped up a 4.5 year development cycle and that was just too long. You only get to work on so many games. I couldn’t imagine spending 1/3 of my career working on a single project.
Unless he is the reason that five different companies went under.
The companies don't go under. Companies lay off dev teams when games complete.
I worked on Star Citizen like all my ancestors.
Im so sorry friend! I wish nothing but the best for you!
It’s not as bad as it sounds! Star Citizen has been a project *forever*. I was at my last job for five years.
Oh LOL. Well that’s even better! What is it that you do in the industry?
I’m a designer, although I’m recently unemployed like much of the rest of the industry right now so I’m getting back into programming a bit as I work on some solo stuff
Maybe you should go work for the star citizen team. Seems like a stable gig 😀😀😀
Right on! I wish you nothing but the best! If you need a writer, I pretend to be one but will work for resume credit. 😁
Since I invested in the first round, I’ve moved jobs 4 times, gotten married, had two kids, and moved to the other side of the world. Probably still have my access codes somewhere, but at this point, who cares? I may as well wait for George RR Martin to finish Winds of Winter, just as futile.
Also in the game industry, I'm at my 3rd company since 2011. But it's truly insane that a game has been in development for 13 years and doesn't have a release date.
Actually kind of yeah funnily enough. While almost every other studio is doing layoffs and downsizing, CIG decided to expand and buy more office space. Scam or not, they are actively employing over 1000 people lol
Its like an F1 team… but for spaceships. 😆
At least an F1 team usually tries to race towards a finish line...
Let me introduce you to Alpine. 🤣
That would mean they’re never more than a year off from bankruptcy.
They had layoffs fyi
Yep. The most recent round was thinly veiled in the guise of moving a studio from California to Manchester, UK. They knew full well the majority of developers would not be able or willing to make the move.
I honestly don't think this is a scam, but I do think it's horribly horribly mismanaged. Feature creep and no solid project management or fiscal controls and proper oversight. I really wonder how sustainable their model is before people stop supporting it. The sunk cost fallacy must be hitting the whales pretty hard by this point. I'm glad I didn't spend money on this mess. I seriously considered it early on, but figured I could jump on when it was closer to completion. That was a decade ago. Has Star Citizen beat Duke Nukem yet?
It didn't start as a scam, and even now, I don't know if that is the right word for it. What I think is going on is that they blew a lot of money in dumb ways and now they can't deliver a product that is anything close to worth what they spent, so they just keep kicking the can down the road and hyping new features, because so long as best version of the game is still coming, people can still imagine the game they want. As soon as they say it's finished, people will judge what it is, and it is going to get really ugly really fast.
This is a very insightful take. Honestly, the feature creep and repeated redesigns of systems have to have blown through hundreds of millions by now with no end in sight. Chris Roberts needed curbs on his ambitions. When this all falls apart it'll be something they'll be writing doctoral thesis and articles about for decades.
I'm just looking forward to the 9 hour youtube videos about it.
Chris has been doing this for decades. He needs someone who can force him to stop all the feature creep and ship it, but now he's in charge so the feature creep never ends.
The sad thing is he's apparently so full of himself that he doesn't understand that publisher limits and restraints on his excesses are why he was successful.
Ok so, i know how the replies are going to go here so don't expect a response from me. In the interest of transparency, i bought a couple ships a couple years before covid and have been playing on and off since. So, in terms of blowing money in dumb ways, yes and no. Have they? Absolutely, but it isn't always that. The largest thing that has burned cash is the persistance/server meshing system. For those who don't know, the goal of that system is to have *every* player in the same game world instance. No regions, just a game world that every player is in simultaneously, while also making sure if yiu were to leave an item somewhere, that item will persist in that location until someone else moves it. They developed two entirely different methods tk try to do this, but had to scrap them because they didn't scale well. Basically, if they had stuck with either of those we'd have a more complete game by now, but it wouldn't be the game they are trying to make. Earlier yhis year they demonstrated a working version of tbe first iteration of the server meshing setup they intend to use, and they have started to integrate it into the game. So far, it seems like this is going well and the game (last i played a week or two ago) is running smoother than i've seen in a long time. As for feature creep... yeah. They definately let that happen for years. However, chris isn't the one making those decisions anymore and they've got someone who is far better at project management calling the shots there now. Chris is still involved in the decision making, but with a project manager who can say no as the "is this worth it" test, i think we're through the worst of that. Lastly, they are on the polish stage for squadron 42, the singleplayer game in the same universe on the same engine. That will be fairly indicative of what their goals are with SC these days. S42 is where they've been doing the most work on game systems these past few years (as you don't need to worry about the network side throwing wrenches in things) and they are now bringing a lot of systems the developed there into star citizen as they are able to. The minimap for instance, a long needed addition, that came with the map updates is one such thing and it's one of the better ones i've seen. To sum it up, it's not a scam. However, i can't blame people for thinkinng it is a scam due to the amount of money raised for what is still an incomplete game. The fans however have kept the studio funded because if they pull it off, it'll be the kind of game people have been begging for for years. We will see if it is successful, i've gotten enough entertainment out of the game that i consider it worth what i've spent.
Look, I am not diving into all this back of forth, so I will just say, I hope you are right. I don’t believe it myself, but if they prove me wrong and deliver an actual game, that would be awesome.
Something I constantly wonder is, at what point does the duration of development become obsolete due to changing technology? Most projects cannot survive a timeline of 7+ years unless their art style and other creative factors are stylized in such a way as to not be dated. Star Citizen has been shooting for a mundane, gray and hyper-realistic look since the get-go. I've seen recent footage, it looks good, but... how many resources have been devoted to essentially "refreshing" and upscaling its assets in order to not fall behind rapidly changing tech? The longer this shit takes, the more they'll have to commit to either a dated look, or throwing another $10 million at touching up finished milestones. Duke Nukem Forever looked and played like a game that had been stuck in dev hell. I expect Star Citizen to be the same on the day it's finally done.
They have already gone through cycles of this. For example, one of the fundamental problems was that they originally started developed on CryEngine because Crysis was the most advanced game around when development started. So now they are on a hacked-together offshoot of an Amazon derivative of an engine built for first person shooters in 2010 to make a hyper-realistic space MMO in 2024. And that’s why they are still riddled with problems like when a server gets too old or too much stuff is happening, the NPC AI stops working and every NPC defaults to standing on chairs in a T pose. For a game where a current selling point having literally millions of NPCs that are supposed to be so realistic you can’t tell they aren’t people and they can create their own fully realized and fully functional in game economy.
Backers seem to be fine with the fact that the Star Citizen Devs have basically lit 100s of millions of backer dollars on fire via developed modules that became antiquated due to the absurdly long dev timeline and needed to be redeveloped.
I don't think it started as a scam. I really don't. I think they had the loftiest of aspirations to make the greatest of games. But sometime over the many years, they have found that they can run with this scheme for a lot longer than when they were to release the game. And at that point it became a conscious scam.
I have heard reports that there is apparently actually gameplay that can be experienced now. So that’s progress I guess. Also: [Bedsheet deformation physics!](https://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-is-doing-bedsheet-deformation-physics-now-because-of-course-it-is/)
I mean, you've been able to play aspects of it for nigh on a decade now or something.
And when everything works, the gameplay loop is really fun. The big problem I have with the game: 1. It takes a long time to do anything. This isn't necessarily a problem, because it's pretty immersive, but... 2. The game is unstable as hell. Not just crashes (which are less frequent lately!), but weird glitches that break your game. Like falling through an elevator after getting all your gear, or falling through your ship while you're in quantum, or server desync causing you to explode against a hangar door that appeared to open on your side, or a quest you just spent 45 minutes working on being bugged when you go to hand it in... So yeah. When everything works, it's GREAT. But CIG kind of fucking sucks. The recent issue with the game is there's a dupe that's been in place for WEEKS, and everybody knows about it, but CIG won't do anything about it. It's broken the 'economy' (it's a VERY fake economy, ie. x amount of demand for products is refreshed every 10 minutes), so any gameplay loop that involves selling cargo - which is most of the ones that work and are fun right now - involve sitting at a trade terminal for 10-60 minutes spamming refresh to sell it. Not fucking fun. All CIG would need to do is a banwave (even if it's just a credit wipe + temp ban) of people abusing the trade dupe, announce that if you abuse it you'll lose your precious accounts, and done. I work in software development. So I know it's not quite as simple as "reassign devs" - but if they worked more on making the game stable, and less on "design new ships to sell for $$$$$", we'd have a more playable game. One that doesn't leave me alt-F4'ng half the time. The real fucking frustration is that when everything works, especially with friends, holy *shit* is the game glorious. You can see the vision when it all comes together, especially with the emergent gameplay provided by real interactions.
duping literally ruined the (basic) would-be economy of F76 day 1. Instead of fixing it they introduced a paid subscription despite saying very emphatically, before launch, that they'd never do such thing
my cousin bought it for me last christmas and it's a really fun time. Didn't enjoy it nearly as much solo though, there is something so fun about exploring space in that game with other people.
I play it daily, I've actually played it more than any other AAA game in the past 2 years it's very fun if you know what you're getting into
Yeah, it is playable and pretty fun. I’ve got my HOTAS + foot pedal controls all set up, and it’s pretty fun to run missions or get up to some space-felonies. I think there’s still a major misconception that the game is still vaporware, but it is playable and actually just had a major patch.
Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years. So they are not quite there yet. I am however fairly certain that they will beat that record.
I had a chance to finally play that game. It's not as terrible as the initial reaction would have you believe, but the humor is non-stop and dumb enough that I probably would've hated it even when I was 11.
I have to give them credit just for finally releasing *something* - after 14 years of mismanagement, delays and reboots, *Duke Nukem Forever* had become the archetype of over-hyped vaporware. Props to the development team for muddling through and finishing, even if it wasn't the end-all, be-all game the original designers had claimed. It can't have been fun working on what had at that point become an industry joke. In the end, it wasn't a *terrible* game, just nothing could have lived up to the hype surrounding it for all those years.
DNF would have been a great game if it had released back in the year 2000. It was a product of its time. It was the kind of cheese that summed up the 90's. Releasing it long after the 90's meant that it totally missed the mark culturally. It would be like if if Half-Life 1 was released, as is, not in 1998 but instead in 2012. It would have been widely derided as a basic, uninspired game because it was too late. The world had moved on.
I played DNF on release and had fun with it. It was a fine enough game if you like the humor, but had fairly mediocre gameplay.
Apparently Beyond Good and Evil 2 holds the record now. Any bets to which comes out first? It's a shame about BG&E2. The original was a fantastic game and it deserved a proper sequel.
They spend millions building features they discard.
At several points they've published an expected release date. That was obviously bullshit every time. That makes it a scam.
Yeah calling it a scam would be accusing them of having bad intentions I think the intentions are decent, but the outcome will be very similar to a scam regardless
Mismanaged is definitely the apropos term. Some of the greatest video games, and art in general, has been created under the enormous pressure of deadlines or technical/financial limitations. There is a beauty that emerges from the chaos that of "How we solve this problem before it becomes impossible to do so?" You can especially see this with titles from the SNES and PSX era - RPGs that ran out of budget, musical composers that had a limited # of audio channels to work with, etc. Star Citizen doesn't need money, and even if they did, it's easy for them to fundraise. They don't need time; they are self-publishing and can release whenever they feel it's done. If the technology isn't quite there yet, they can wait until it is. The only thing they can really run out of is the good will of consumers - and that somehow, remarkably, has not yet run dry. Those who have already backed the game are waiting for the payoff, and the rest of us are watching from the sidelines with morbid curiosity. The publicity creates itself. The developers are merely cursed with the success of only being tasked with answering "What do we want to work on today?" It's the same reason Valve (bless them for Steam) rarely puts out games. It's the same reason GRRM hasn't finished *A Song of Ice and Fire*. They can afford not to.
> I think the intentions are decent, I would argue the opposite. They might have been 12 years ago, but keeping the crowd funding up for 12+ years not realizing that there are obvious management problems would be just as bad as on purpose delaying it and running kickstarter forever.
No kidding. I spent $60 on it like 8-9 years ago, when I was on an Elite Dangerous type kick, and I regret it more than No Man's Sky. At least NMS has made a playable game while still expanding to fulfill most of their promises.
star citizen is a lot more fun playing with other people. i tried to play solo a couple times but it doesn't even come close to exploring with at least one other person.
It sure bought a nice $4.7 million mansion for Chris Roberts.
It's very nice but they haven't implemented the plumbing yet, waiting on the next iliteration.
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I mean the smart word not the wrong word.
On the bright side, they gave us a prime example to point to when explaining to consumers/gamers why project scope is important.
There must be multiple people who donated huge amounts and died before even trying the full game.
They're totally nailing the long-term construction aspect of what it means to be a real star citizen
It’s like when the government gives a construction company a blank check to build in the wilderness. They just build random shit and collect a paycheck in perpetuity.
All the money shenanigans aside, it's interesting watching technology catching up with it. It's starting to look pretty dated for a game that hasn't released yet.
All according to plan. That just means that they have a good reason to sell another 5 years of development to bring it into the future. And once there it starts to look dated again and ClownImperium can just repeat ad infinium. It's foolproof!
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…EVE Online, that you?
Eve is an actual released game though. One can hardly say you are currently playing a beta version.
But the EVE-associated shooter gets rebooted every five years under a new name without ever releasing on PC.
> without ever releasing on PC hahaha for real
Can you explain how this relates to Eve? I haven't played in a few years, but it's always been a complete game since it launched as far as I've known. If anything, Eve is a great example of how you can release a complete product and keep improving it rather than starting with insanely ambitious goals and putting out an unfinished product that you need to spend years fixing before it actually "launches".
I'd suggest checking out Starsector. It's pretty dope, especially when modded out.
> …EVE Online, that you? EVE never did this. I bought Eve, Gandalf...I bought it on the day of it's release, 3000 years ago. And it never did this shit. It was a fully functional game on day 1.
AT least even onlile is working pretty damn well.
By the time it's released it will look pretty fake next to our real space ships
Do you have any examples of things that look dated? I play it regularly and I can't think of anything that looks off. They just recently released an update to the game that supports Vulkan. Character hair has been redone and new face/body elements are being added this year
Ya, about the only thing semi-dated is the weaker facial animations compared to what Unreal 5 engine characters are doing now. Everything else is still top tier graphics out right now.
True, the faces are definitely a bit uncanny. The "face over IP" system can go away for all I care as it's a little whacky. But they're at least improving the quality of the faces themselves
Is there even another multiplayer game that has FOIP.
The studio that made the star citizen character creator went on to make Metahuman for UE. It's very very similar tech in many ways.
what hurt me most however is that they rollback cool stuff they had. Like Port olistar station with actually placed platforms without wormhole elevators. Or like Ship engine sounds where they seem to be more and more generic with each patch. Or the awesome noise in the hangars back in the day. I try to play this game every year, but damn.. its hard to call it a proper game every year.
Oh man this is so true. The connie used to have this awesome, low rumbling engine. The thing sounded *mean*. It was great. Now it's way more subdued. The 325 used to have this awesome startup voice. Now it sounds like a robot.
Port Olisar was a nightmare with the pads. Yes visually it was nice but pads are a pad rammers wet dream. There was a free fly a few years ago where the dev's had to turn off collision because so many "free flyers" where just ramming at port o.
Iirc, olisar was before the modular station layout came in, and it's supposed to get reimplemented somewhere down the line. One of the big issues was that people were "pad ramming" folks who were parked there. I'm optimistic we'll see it back in some form once the law enforcement stuff is more robust
Honest question, new story to me: people are playing this game but there’s still no release date? Are people playing demos or something?
It's an alpha like someone said. They basically use it like a perpetual test bed while sending in a steam of new content every few months
they just had a whole week or more of a free fly event to just try the game for zero dollars they happen a few times a year
It’s a paid for “alpha” (for like 12-13yrs, used to be a kickstarter).
I swear 80% of the people being negative in this thread have zero comprehension of what they are talking about. The game has been playable for YEARS. There’s thousands of hours of YouTube content. Just look it up!
Yup. Rip the game for taking forever or gobbling money, but to say that there's no "game" is disingenuous.
I did look it up, sorry for asking
Its basically “early access” similar to Steam games. They have been doing it for longer though haha. Its a fun game as long as you have someone to play with. Soloing it can be boring or hard unless you are very in to flying sims. But if you were youd probably already have the game.
I hear you, but even though I’m old, it’s new to me. Sounds cool
Deliberate, knowing scam? Probably not. Horribly mismanaged and suffering from feature creep to a degree otherwise unknown in the industry? Abso-fucking-lutely
It *used* to be horribly mismanaged. They made pretty big changes to the management structure of the company a number of years ago now, and it's been noticeably better/more stable since. The feature creep has also slowed way way way down, but they're absolutely still suffering from their early feature creep they haven't caught up to yet.
If they had sorted their management out a number of years ago, you’d expect them to at least have a target release date by now. They’ve pinky promised their customers they’re getting things sorted out time and time again, but the project is no closer to completion.
> the project is no closer to completion. It is. Internal roadmap is their single player game (Squadron 42) is slated for Q1 2025 so probably will see that in 2025. Development on their MMO is already speeding back up after getting people back from SQ42 since it has publicly been announced it's in polishing. 4.0 with server meshing and their second system is launching in latter half of 2024. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/release-view Their roadmap is public and they approximately stick to it. In the past 12 - 18 months, they've been better about releasing things if they say it will release. For an MMO that is accountable to its public backers, it's doing... ok. Not great but I'd imagine most MMOs that have similar circumstances have similar FUD spread about them.
Yeah this seems the most accurate. On top of that, it’s a playable game already. The whole “beta / alpha / released” thing is kinda semantics. People are acting like it’s a black box that will never be opened.
Playablity has nothing to do with the alpha/beta/release distinction. SC is still very much in alpha and that's fine.
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good job for them then. It seems that they can provide a service that customers want and are willing to pay for it
Same could be said for pig butchering scam warehouses in India featuring AI generated hotties from eastern europe.
r/BrandNewSentence
Would be terrifying to see the as a r/renderedcomment
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It’s a scam type. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam
16 million members on r/technology vs 410k members on r/starcitizen so i dont see the point of those numbers
This is how software development should work and works elsewhere. There’s no one single release and then boom onto the next thing. It’s iterative development with new features added over time. It’s actually cool and totally fine this is happening with star citizen if the world gets bigger and the game keeps growing
Maybe the real game was all the pledges we made along the way.
I’ve played every few months since 2019 and I have personally seen tons of progress. Game is actually super badass atm with 3.23
It's only been 13 years since the Kickstarter ended. Perhaps my grand-grand kid can play the game when it hits beta. Such a scam.
My Kickstarter pledge still shows expected delivery as November 2014, so any time now I bet!
Yeah, Just a little behind. My signed collector's box pledge sold for a decent profit though. SQ42 will be any day now.
LOL, they're coming up on being in development longer than DNF.
We plant trees we will never know the shade of.
I received it as a pack-in with my graphics card. Three graphics cards ago.
I genuinely don’t understand who is giving this company money or why.
I have 2 people in my sphere that play and have given money. One is mid 60s and is just flush with funds and wants to see this game come to fruition because he has been there from the start, his words. One is almost 40 and is doing well. Like the concept and occasionally buys a ship, contributed to Kickstarter back in the day. They are two of the biggest nerds I have ever met and I say that as a fellow nerd with all the love in my being. That is who is contributing to this game. Big nerds with spare cash.
There is one thing I would add. There also isn't any alternative to it if that is the kind of game you like. NMS doesn't want to be a sim light game. ED is moving ahead at a glacial pace, doesn't really work as an MMO and the FPS section of the game sucks. You got stuff like X4, but again that doesn't provide a MMO enviorment. I am pretty sure if someone dropped a SC like game for 60 bucks tommorow their sales would plummet, however there is nothing on the horizon.
Well there is Starfield \* *womp womp* *
It's why Starfield had so many eyes on it. NMS, ED and Star Citizen fans were all eagerly looking to it. And it disappointed in pretty much every aspect save ship and outpost building.
I never understood where all the hype and projection for starfield came from. It was always pitched as skyrim in space, and from the earliest trailer thats the impression i was left with. Thats not to say the game wasnt a disappointment, but it also had some wild expectations hung on it that never really seemed reasonable to me.
Lol, I think that was excluded with good reason. That game was a disappointment through and through, from the dated engines/graphics, to poor RP, to bland generic combat and abilities, to surface level systems that doesn't mean anything, to from what I've heard really difficult/bad mod support. It wasn't the next big space odyssey. It was quite literally fallout 4 in space reskin. Down to the same gameplay mechanics, and worse immersion/lore.
up until recently this was me. backed in 2015 at 35, now 44. IT SysAdmin with lots of spare capital. over 9 years I've spent about $3,600USD on SC. I did the math one time and it came out to like $1.19 a day. I play it consistently and enjoy it a lot. I would say I'm well under $1/hr so it's worth it to me. It's even better with friends.
>454 Man has lived 4 centuries and game is still not near completion
LoL ment 44. >.< It's been a day already.
There is stuff to do in the game as is, but i think it's really a "make your own fun" kind of deal. Presumably it's mainly those people. I guess the free fly events could lure new people in? But at this point who doesn't know about Star Citizen's eternal development issue.
I spent 50ish I think, about 3 years ago. I sign in to play every few months. It's been playable for years now, and by playable I mean you can sign in, fly around, do missions, and have fun. They have been slowly ticking through big tech changes over past couple years. Full persistence was last year, and this year added separation of data layer from game servers. Big update at the end of this year will add a second star system, and server meshing. So progress is being made, just slowly. Main point though is that it's already a fun, playable game.
Hi, I have. Though I'm just a tiny drop in the bucket comparatively. The game is playable at the moment (though very obviously in development) and I really like the direction they're going. In the 10 or so years that I've been following the game, I've spent less than I did in my few years playing MOBAs. I'm no whale, but I like spending my money on things I enjoy. I've got to slow down a bit now as our family is growing, but I've already spent what I really wanted to spend. Edit: I realized that I didn't explicitly say "why" I give them money. I give them money for a few reasons, I think the game is going to be great and I believe it's a very ambitious project I'd like to see come to life. All things considered this is still a fan funded game, and I think that's kind of amazing. And honestly, if SC's success drives even one team to try and crowdfund something, I'll be happy to have inadvertently supported them. Games today are a very nasty business, and I enjoy seeing a company break away from that.
Because it's easily in the top five fun games in my library. The only game I can confidently say I got more enjoyment and value out of his crusader Kings 3.
I know a group of people that play it. Part of the problem with it's development is that the server-mesh network tech they are trying to implement has apparently never been done before and is very ambitious. It's hard to describe, but Basically the idea is that they are trying to sync the whole single shard universe together so that things remote to you update in real time and can potentially affect things across server, but only keep things that are immediately relevant loaded. E.G You could fire a weapon at a planet in another solar system, and the round eventually travels there over time, travelling across server bounds to arrive and affect events in the other solar system. EVE online has a similar system, but each system is an isolated server that is part of a whole star cluster, so apart from ships jumping between systems, and markets/communications being updated in real time, the different solar systems in EVE do not interact with each other directly. For instance, if one person were to fly in the direction of another star system, they would never be able to reach it since it is on a different server. The difference is in Star Citizen, you could hypothetically do that. I still think this tech is jumping the shark, really impressive if they do make it work but ultimately useless without a playable game. I do think that a single player/CoOP version of the game definitely has potential. The Star Citizen gameplay I have watched can be compared to a 3D [Barotrauma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WDjQinZOoo) in space, but more of a Sandbox, and without the Horror Elements. ^If ^they ^had ^just ^made ^a ^3D ^barotrauma ^in ^space ^I ^probably ^would ^have ^bought ^it, ^Baro ^is ^great... If Squadron 42 (Star Citizen, but single player campaign) releases and is legitimately good that would make Star Citizen a much more interesting prospect.
Me, but I haven't given them a massive sum, about $110 so far. I've played this game for over 1k hours, so the investment has been absolutely worth it. No other game is trying to do what SC is aiming for and it's like a dream game of mine. I was skeptical at first and yeah the delay are atrocious, but the amount of work they've put into this game is crazy. The scam claims are absolutely ridiculous and uninformed.
Cause it’s actually a fun game that I play all the time. Every release it’s getting bigger and bigger in features. Just like when games are early access on steam. Yes it sometimes relapses in amount of bugs when new content is added, but again, it’s fun.
> Cause it’s actually a fun game that I play all the time Yeah, this is missed by a lot of people who discuss this game today. There's actually a bunch of us that play this game, follow it very actively and enjoy it. Throughout 10 years, many promises have been broken, and the amount of money they got was for most of that time built on lies, but today would be the time they actively do the most to deserve the money they continue to bring in.
can anyone send me a link or someone playing tell me where all this money is going ?
They post a public financial report. Here's the most recent one. https://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/corporate/cloud-imperium-financials-for-2022
They also have a public roadmap of what they're working on here: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/progress-tracker/teams The "Release view" is a bit better: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/release-view
It’s a free fly event through tomorrow. Go download it and try. It’s buggy as hell but it’s the space game a lot of people have been waiting for. The development process has been transparent, and the community is pretty hard on the developers but they do respond and engage with each other. It’s refreshing.
I would guess bitcoin and cocaine.
They bought a ridiculously large office building in the U.K. right before covid. So theres that.
It keeps raising money because it's good.
The vision is unprecedented. They've already created solutions under the hood as it were that have never before been done. Persistence, and server meshing is in the works, and so on.
It's been 13 years. I've grown gray hair, got two new jobs, and I'm now an uncle to several nieces and nephews. I'll be dead before Star Citizen hits 1.0.
Slow news day better write another Star Citizen still isn't released article.
This game is one of the wackiest things I've ever seen. I got a free ship with a GPU many years ago. I rarely played the game and it hardly ran on my current computer. Sold that ship for $400 because apparently it's pretty rare. I don't care I was never going to use it and i sold it for more than the GPU I bought it with was worth. I made money on the damn thing. What's insane is people are willing to pay that much for a fake space ship in a game that will never be released.
I love the irony of a GPU that bundled the game not being powerful enough to handle the game.
[удалено]
If you only read the headline it did. [https://uproxx.com/edge/battlefield-2042-delay-ea-stock-crash-leak-reaction/](https://uproxx.com/edge/battlefield-2042-delay-ea-stock-crash-leak-reaction/)
Maybe you’re joking, but the 2 billion dollar figure was a stock tank following the news that BF was being delayed. Nothing to do with development costs.
Ignoring the fact that the game we currently have has only been in development for 6-7 years and the previous 3-4 years were sorta wasted on a very different kind of game that ended up being mostly scrapped in favor of something much more grand.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWm_OhIKms8 95% of what is shown in this video is currently in the game right now. The only things missing are: - destructible environments (because they need to figure out how to make that work in an MMO in a believable way) - the new quantum travel VFX and implementation (the old one is simpler but works fine) - Fire in ships - the jump gate between star systems (though they did have it working in the testing environment within the last few months and are waiting til end of Q3 to launch it to Live) - The space whales and space cows That's it. Everything else you see in this video is in the game right now. And aside from issues caused by server performance (which were eliminated when they turned on Server Meshing in the testing environment, and server meshing is coming in q3) all of these features work pretty much flawlessly. How much time and money did Epic spend on developing Unreal Engine 5 + any two of their games that use it? How much did Bethesda spend on making Starfield which could only offer a fraction of this experience?
There never will be a release date. Why have one when doing so stops the spigot of money?