Windows Star Citizen

That seems to be the case in general: lots of people who have not put any money down being vocally offended on behalf of the people who have (who for the most part are just waiting for the game and playing other stuff in the meantime).

 

Squadron 42 roadmap has landed. "Letter from the Chairman" published.

CIG have published their 2012-2017 financials & taken $46m from 2 VC companies, apparently to cover marketing S42 to "non-citizens".

 

Anyone taken any pretty pics? let's see them ships!

 

ATTENTION!

As of 7am today (Friday Dec 21st), Star Citizen Alpha 3.4.0 is LIVE!

Patch notes

EDIT:- There may well be a 3.4.1 later today or over the weekend.

 

So they've raised $200m or some ungodly sum, but still need nearly $50m more from private finance for marketing?

 

As predicted, a 3.4.1 PTU was released approx 3 hours ago.

 

If I read their financials right, for the last three-ish years they've never had more than enough money to continue operating for the next two or three months at a time. I can see why that would motivate them to keep the hype train going as much as possible.

 

I disagree.
Witcher 3 cost around $80 million to make and that was in low wage Poland, so Star Citizen which is several times more ambitious than a regular AAA game not doing too well with "only" ~$200 million is no surprise at all.

 

They probably won't be able to sustain it, the only out I see for them is scale back the ambition... (because the ambition was always far beyond the budget, even before they embarked on a frivolous money wasting mission with bs like celebrity voice actors) of course that is unlikely to happen so your prediction of it ending in crash and burn will still come to pass.

 

Meh. Rockstar games (the contemporaneously 3rd biggest studio worldwide?) releasing their 5th iteration of a celebrated game built on the back of the GTA IV engine, and it still cost $285m? Apples-to-apples, really? Same as comparing CIG with cd projekt red. To me what CIG are attempting, and their funding methodology, stands firmly on its own (and perhaps deserves different evaluative criteria).

On the one hand it is good to see they have been spending the money earned on development and not, as has been claimed by some, siphoned out to fund lavish lifestyles or small islands. On the other, this new investment for marketing shows they are concerned about their backer's goodwill, patience, and willingness to keep digging deep on nonexistent spaceships for a game that equally doesn't exist.

Yes we can speculate. Again, certain people have claimed they have been "finished" for the last 4 years, and maybe those predictions have been close to being true, maybe not. Arguably, attracting new backers could keep them going *as is*, or help them earn more.

My hope is this situation finally convinces them to pull their finger out and stop with this infernal passion project philosophy. Start treating it like a publisher would. Goodwill time is long since gone - draw firm lines on what is feasible and achievable and the release a ****ing game before this digital money pit is abandoned entirely.

 

Doesn't really matter if you pick Witcher 3, GTA 5 or some other AAA game... the point with both is that CIG "only" has a "normal" AAA budget while attempting to produce something far more ambitious.

 

Unless Roberts has a rocking horse that sh*ts gold bullion it ain't gonna happen, after all, has anyone ever seen a rocking horse sh*t (let alone one with gold producing abilities)?

 

Nope. I am simply saying it is not apples-to-apples. For example, Rockstar have other IP they work on at the same time; RDR2 has been the pipeline for 8 years alongside GTA V. GTA V was not constructed from scratch out an engine not fit for purpose (ala SC/SQ42 and Cryengine). Indeed, it was built from a very similar engine derived from it's predecessor; that itself was derived from GTA SA. Their development costs were not factored in to the $265m. Moreover, looking at the broad similarities of RDR2, I'd say they use a derivative engine for that, too. They are clearly sharing assets all over the place. CIG were starting from scratch.

In other words the comparison is somewhat moot. What CIG are attempting, the type of games they are *trying* to build are different than an iterative franchise which, while continual improvements are obvious, has not redefined a genre since perhaps the original GTA III on PS2. That is what CIG and CR are now, post 2012 kickstarter, claiming to be trying to do: redefining the PC space game (SC) and immersive, character driven gameplay (SQ42), regardless of whether it works out or not; and I am quite sceptical at this point. The companies relative scale and what each have had to do i.e. CIG building their company, workforce, infrastructure etc, while producing their respective games, is very different.

Edit: I see your explanation of apples-to-apples now. Understood.

 

From the backer email (and presumably on a blog post too somewhere): the separate VC fundraise for marketing was because one of the crowdfunding pledges was to use the funds from crowdfunding for development only, not marketing.

 

Was doing some hunting and ran into this big guy, offloaded absolutely everything I had and not a damn thing got past the shield… (Tis a Hammerhead) So much bigger I actually landed on top of it at one point and even the Hammerhead is tiny compared to some other ships!

 

You'll probably see a lot of Hammerheads over Xmas, it's the subscriber's "Ship of the month".
(Subscribers get a free ship (or several) for each month, January's will be all 4 variants of Freelancer)