12 Years and $700 Million Later, What's Going on With Star Citizen's Development?
12 Years and $700 Million Later, What's Going on With Star Citizen's Development?
Speaking with over a dozen sources about the turbulent development of Star Citizen at Cloud Imperium Games.
$700 million is the estimated development cost of the Falcon Heavy.
Not a game, not a space simulation, but the actual Falcon Heavy rocket. A rocket that can actually go into space.
I know they're different things but I thought I'd leave this here to put things in perspective.
That is $700 million is revenue for Star Citizen, not development costs. More and more players are joining by trying it and sticking around, and CIG is making more money every year because it's genuinely a fun game now. If it wasn't, they wouldn't have $700 million in revenue from a growing base of paying customers after ten years. But that doesn't get clicks from ignorant salty cynics. "IT BAD SCAM" is a more profitable headline than "fun game enjoyed by many".
When videogame "journalists" are drumming up controversy, you always have to take it with a grain of salt. Lord knows we have enough of it.
I spent a grand total of $45 dollars on this game and I have had hundreds of hours of fun. Imagine buying a game for less than the cost of a new AAA game, playing it, enjoying it for dozens of hours or more for ten years, then someone who has never played it starts telling you how you have to spend thousands of dollars and actually didn't have fun and it's not a game, it's a scam because you heard this one guy spent his life savings on imaginary space ships and regretted it. That's how Star Citizen players feel; it's very confusing.
As of 2022, according to its financials, the company has spent $637 million on development, with 2020 – 2022 averaging over $106 million a year. Assuming that the company continues spending around $100+ million a year, it doesn’t take a mathematician to realize that the $790 million raised so far at the time of writing is on the verge of, or has likely, run out.
No, the article is claiming $700M in development costs—based on $637M spent by 2022–and $790M raised. They’re speculating that the company is going to run out of money soon.
but only as in the modifications to Falcon 9 to make Falcon Heavy, right?
I don't think so, SpaceX claimed (and NASA apparently verified) that the development costs for the Falcon 9 were $300 million. It's in the Wikipedia article, also here: https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2022/10/23/how-much-would-falcon-9-have-cost-if-it-was-developed-by-nasa/?amp=1
I was under the impression that the Falcon Heavy was a ground-up development. But in any case the Falcon 9 was cheaper, so go figure...
Vaporware until proven otherwise. I've given up on caring
Stat Citizen has its problems, but it's literally not vaporware since there's something available that you can download and play with.
It is the exact opposite of vapourware, even. They have over a thousand employees in multiple studios across the globe pushing out regular, massive updates.
Yeah, and it’s sad bro. I put about 900 hours into Elite: Dangerous, which I enjoyed a great deal, but it still left me longing for something with more depth. Back then I thought Star Citizen would be the next leap forward in my career as a space trucker who dabbles in bounty hunting and deep space exploration. I wanted to have games worthy of justifying a home cockpit setup, and now it seems like a lost cause.
I really hope someone picks up the torch. Even if it’s just Frontier making a generational leap with the Elite IP.
Elite:Dangerous is sad for its own reasons, too, and I have a similar count of hours logged. Glacial pace of development and a lack of strong game design / sense for balance. I'm still stunned by how much of a selling point the background simulation was, and how limited it actually is in practice (it did get some love over the years, but far too little too late IMO.)
I haven't played E:D so I can't really make comparisons, but maybe X3/X4 can pique your interest?
I don't think they can justify a home cockpit setup, they're also kinda hard to get into (especially X3, you can't get far without a guide), but hey, there's a combined 1.5% chance that you haven't heard of them and that you'll enjoy at least one of them if you don't care much about graphics. Or voice acting. Or UI/UX.
I sold my pledges off 9 years ago, the reason I even made a reddit account in the first place. Was getting disillusioned with it back then and I was super excited when I initially backed it, had a decent amount of ships in the hangar at the time, but felt like I was only ever going to see them in the hangar
All bs and scam atuff aside. This is what happens when you have a leader who never gets told no.
Dude never finished and feature krept freelancer too before Microsoft kicked him to the curb and finished it themselves.Yep, feature creep is basically this entire dev cycle. Dude just keeps adding more and more and never really finishing anything. I grabbed the game on sale a few years ago, I have maybe 15 hours into it. It's got stuff to do, but not what I would expect from the money and time that's been spent on it.
At those time frames it's not just feature creep you have to worry about, but tech- and social creep as well. Think back what games were popular 12 years ago and what hardware we had. That's why usually in longterm, large scale projects you have a technological freeze, where you essentially ignore all progress made outside of your project for the sake of completion, which Star Citizen clearly hasn't done.
Roberts is relatively well-known in and out of the Star Citizen community for being a perfectionist at the best times.
In a parallel universe, Roberts would have been allowed to continue working on Freelancer, and it would still be in development hell in 2024 with no end in sight.
I imagine that the news headlines of the future will be:
12 Dyson Spheres and 700 Million Years Later, What's Going on With Star Citizen's Development?
I backed it with about 60$ on the Kickstarter and have tried a few alphas. It's nice but unpolished. I don't care about the drama and by this point, if they release a game, I'll be happily surprised - and if not, meh.
Same for me, though I did splurge a bit ($150 I think) to get the game on a USB key shaped like one of the starships in the game. I will never get that USB key…
If they ever get done I will consider spending more time with it, I don’t really care for early access into an unfinished game.
I should have asked for a refund when we had the chance…
Oh, wait, it was 30 usd. And i backed Shadowrun Online for 66, so Star Citizen might even be the better bet :)
Why finish the game when you can sell "ships" for hundreds of dollars each?
12 years of early access. Thousand dollar DLC spaceships. Remaining players "happy".
This is as close to a cult as you will find in gaming.
They aren't listening to their community is what. I play almost daily, and all they fucking talk about is 'wait for 4.0, it's going to be so much better!' But they refuse to fix major problems, performance sucks, and the recent 3.24.2 patch may or may not have borked the game in many ways.
They need to perfect the game that already exists, fix the issues and iron out the code before working on more fucking mechanics. I swear it's so bad. The article calls Chris a perfectionist, but that couldn't be furtfrom the truth, he is a dreamer, that says put this amazing thing in then forgets about it and moves on to the next thing overnight. The game will go nowhere until he's gone.
Edit: fixed a spelling error and added some basic formatting.
The interesting part is, if they say the game is complete or at least in "1.0" shape, it will suddenly mean that people will judge it as a product and not just a vision. CIG won't call it finished as long as they possibly can.
Bug fixes don't bring in new whales with investment money, new silly features does.
The point ceased to be about making the game years ago and became about attracting new money because that's easy and making good games is hard.
It was a scam then and it's still a scam now.
Apparently the player base is happy with how things are and the only people complaining are doing from outside
Who tf is Erin Roberts?
pay to win pay to shit your pants pay to get ripped off