Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Tuco

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Are there any clear design docs for this game since it's kickstarter? I know there were a lot of details released a few years ago, but with some much extra shit they've been doing, have they put out a concise vision again?

Is this still a pseudo MMO with tons of instancing/sharding/whatever?
No, no, probably.

With the pace and problems they had for the last few releases I don't have a lot of faith in any design document they put out. Besides they are kinda creating a new genre here, or rather bringing several genres together. I think the first open world game they show to the first alpha group will be very different from what they release in 2016 when I pay attention to the game.
 

Variise

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Haha you said release in 2016.
I doubt even CR has a clue when the game will launch. So many pipelines in the work that they are guessing. The only thing propping them up is the insane talent they have on hand. The average game studio would have folded already or would keep this game in the oven for 8 or 10 years with 1/4 of the features.

I'm not all too worried about having their staff poached because they fucking hate the big studios except for Disney. They lost their best concept artist to Star Wars who is now the lead on that franchise. But that's fucking Star Wars. Would anyone say no to that? I bet Disney and others have tried to poach their other staff since they get air time and can see their work. Risks of having an open development process. Hopefully it doesn't cripple production if too many leave.
 

Draegan_sl

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What insane talent? The Online Game genre has yet to have any insane talent. Most online games are mediocre or accidents.
 

Vitality

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FWIW Wheeler did a pretty good job with Cyrodiil, but the rest of the team took a shit on it.

**Most online games have small cliques of insane talent and then their efforts promptly get completely mutilated by plebian lead devs that round the game down to the denomination that we've been subjected to recently**
 

Variise

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What insane talent? The Online Game genre has yet to have any insane talent. Most online games are mediocre or accidents.
I'm talking about individuals working on the game. I'm thought I was fairly clear in the example I gave but I guess not. For example Chris has a lot of people from the film industry helping with everything from concept design to sound and many things in between. Having seen their work it's not surprising that many of them had their work feature prominently in movies like District 9, Elysium, Avatar and many others. I also had coder friends comment to me how AC is coded like a AAA product based on their first hand experience and how well it handles system utilization both CPU and GPU. Perhaps that says more about the Cry engine than anything else. I wouldn't know.

I realize what you ultimately mean. The end product. However the end product is a sum of its parts and since we don't have an end product I'm referring to what we do have which is its parts. I'm specifically referring to the parts actively worked on by people with established end products that are at least in my book true AAA quality.

Hopefully that clears up any confusion in what I meant.
 

spronk

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if you got in on the newegg amd radeon glitch (pay $1 for gold key) the star citizen keys are now up on the AMD website even though they haven't sent out any emails
https://www.amd4u.com/radeonrewards/splash

Redeem it against the RSI website and you are able to run the game installer, its downloading the 19 gig game for me right now. AMD did send out yesterday the alien isolation keys if you got that too
 

Running Dog_sl

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In the early days of Star Citizen, backers received ships with lifetime insurance (LTI, as it's known by players), which effectively protects investments forever without the need for payments. But in November 2012 CIG stopped selling ships with LTI to newcomers. 12 months later it stopped selling ships with LTI to all players. This, as you'd expect, created a huge demand for those ships that had it. According to Drevan, it was this change around LTI that caused Star Citizen trading to skyrocket.

Drevan tells me of one high-profile example of this. The Vanduul Scythe, coveted and infamous within the Star Citizen community, is a ship originally sold by CIG for $300 during the Kickstarter campaign. It came with LTI included and only about 500 were ever given out to players. It is no longer for sale. Half a year ago they were selling "like hotcakes" for, wait for it, $2000 each.
Inside Star Citizen's grey market Eurogamer.net
 

Mahes

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That was a pretty good article. I told my wife about it and she just could not believe that such an economy could exist for virtual items that do not even exist yet. Never mind that these are digital items but these are digital items that do not exist yet. It is amazing what people will pay for. She then looks at me and assumes that I am considering buying a ship. I just laugh and say " No thank you". I will wait for the game to release, though I understand to an extent that kickstarting it at least had a purpose. Now it appears to also be an experiment to see how much money a game can make just from the hopes of it being released.
 

Jimbolini

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I have said it before, but it bares repeating....

These guys can sit on this "game" for years and make 100 million....amazing.
 

Tuco

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I wonder what the legal ramifications would be if they budgeted their shit assuming the ship gravy train would keep rolling in indefinitely, then the gravy train dried up and they weren't done with the game enough to release.
 

Yukiri_sl

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The hardcore backers I dont think will ever dry up. They make such a spectacle about almost every ship sale that the big spenders feel almost compelled to buy it. This Friday marks the on sale of a long discussed and advertised ship that will run $600 each. I imagine they will make nearly a million on Friday alone (there's a chart on their front page that shows their day to day earnings, it'll be fun to watch). It'd take a big misstep somewhere to push that crowd and their spending away.
 

Variise

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Just to clear up the question about continued funding, Chris Roberts was actually asked this question very recently. Despite rumors to the contrary he isn't diving head first into a vault filled with gold coins and swimming around in it.

He has set aside enough capital to complete the game but at a significantly reduced capacity. He said he built a lead into the spending so it wouldn't have immediate effects but they would have to significantly scale back staff if funding stopped today. It would basically kill R&D dead so less innovation in how the game engine will work. This will also mean that some things he talked about wanting to add will simply not make it into PU 1.0 or if they make it in it will be bare bones or added post PU 1.0.

This is because he scaled the team into the future based on the expected capital he thinks he can maintain through current funding. This is why a significant part of his teams are contractors. If funding dried up tomorrow he would have to spin down most of the outsourcing and cancel the current contracts. The web team and AI team would likely remain since they are a couple of people each and are mission critical but lots of other teams would get the bad news. Any other teams likely to stick around like the FPS team would have most of their project scaled back to bare bones but they would likely remain until release.

So yeah no secret slush fund other than an emergency capital fund to complete the game and get it out the door with a lead built in just in case everything goes tits up. Sounds smart to me.
 

Tuco

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No offense, Variise, but nobody can really clear anything up about funding. Your post could be summed up as, "When asked a very important question about whether people should continue giving money to buy fake space ships they can't even use for years, Chris Roberts said a bunch of assuaging things."
 

Variise

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As for the ship sales tomorrow. Look some of us want the big ships. I'm getting an 890 Jump and I'm excited for it since I'm hoping it will be our Org's slick HQ where we can woo clients and impress... well probably nobody but it should still be cool to have a mobile HQ. I melted some ships to get it.

I'm actually far more interested in the other ships and variants coming out tomorrow. The Cutlass commercial is likely to play so we should get the variants for it. I'm hoping to snag a few utility variant upgrades but will see. I'm also hoping we end up seeing something about the Avenger. The 890 Jump might be a cool Org level ornament but it's not something one person can take out for a spin and be useful in.

Actually I'm even more interested in the Deep Space Fighter which is currently being voted on for the Wave 4 ships.

This is the closest someone has gotten to making a heavy fighter concept for Star Citizen. It was done by a fella named Mateja Petkovic consequently for Star Citizen. I just thought it would be cool to share it. It's not official.

http://www.igorstshirts.com/blog/con.../mateja_01.jpg
 

Variise

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No offense, Variise, but nobody can really clear anything up about funding. Your post could be summed up as, "When asked a very important question about whether people should continue giving money to buy fake space ships they can't even use for years, Chris Roberts said a bunch of assuaging things."
Since we are pointing out the obvious...

Well with that logic you can basically dismiss anything anyone says about anything.
 

Tuco

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If he said, "We have 20 million saved and budgeted for core development over the next 4 years" that'd be something.
 

Variise

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If he said, "We have 20 million saved and budgeted for core development over the next 4 years" that'd be something.
I'm just going to quote him directly. Make of that what you will.

Source:Letter from the Chairman - Roberts Space Industries


I sometimes get asked why continue to raise money. Haven't you already raised enough to make the game? The answer is that Star Citizen isn't a normal game. It's not being developed like a normal game and it's not being funded like a normal game. I've had to toss aside a lot of my knowledge from the old way of developing and embrace a completely new world. There is no publisher. There is no venture capitalist wanting a massive return in three years. There is no need to cram the game onto a disc and hope we got it all right. Star Citizen is not the type of game that will be played for a few weeks, then put on a shelf to gather dust. Instead of building a game in secrecy we can be fully open with you as a community who have made this game possible. We can involve the future player base in the creative feedback loop as we develop and iterate core systems. As a group we are all involved and united in our quest to make the best game possible.

I have a lot of industry friends pat me on the back and say, "Wow, it must be so great to be operating in profit even before you ship!" Their look usually turns to incredulity when I explain that my intention is for all the money we bring in before launch to be spent on development. It is the community, from the existing backers who continue to support the game, to new members who join every day who are setting the level of ambition and budget for Star Citizen. Every effort is about enriching the game's vision. Funding to date has allowed us to go so far beyond what I thought was possible in 2012. You're still getting that game, no question, but it will be all the richer and so much more immersive because of the additional funding.

Long ago I stopped looking at this game the way I did when I worked for a publisher who gave me a fixed budget to make a retail game. I now look at our monthly fundraising and use that to set the amount of resources being used to develop this game. We keep a healthy cash reserve so that if funding stopped tomorrow we would still be able to deliver Star Citizen (not quite to the current level of ambition, but well above what was planned in Oct 2012). If you combine our in-house staff and outsourced developers, we now number more than 280 people. Your support has created a significant number of jobs in the gaming industry. (And no matter what you might have heard, only a small number of our team is tasked with designing new ships!)

If we had raised the original amount and no more, we wouldn't be able to deliver involved capital ship systems or the level of FPS gameplay that we are now planning for planets in the Persistent Universe. Nor would have the time or budget to continually upgrade the game with new features like Physically Based Rendering (PBR), or continually strive to make the art assets better. Just compare the Hornet from October 2012 to the current PBR Hornet in Arena Commander. Our ability to iterate in Arena Commander, to try different flight or targeting schemes, or add new game modes that are test beds for future Persistent Universe gameplay is all due to our increased funding, as is the ability to deliver FPS, Planetside and Squadron 42 as modules or episodic content for the community all before the game is "done." And in the process, you're giving us the time to get it right, and you're giving us more opportunities to share our work with you.

I know some people are afraid of "feature creep" and the game never being finished as we keep adding functionality and content to the mix with increased funding. I would say that this would be fair criticism if we were delivering this game at retail and on disc. However, we are online and already pushing out builds, well before Star Citizen reaches what anyone would consider a "finished" stage. Just because we haven't implemented a planned feature or built a certain asset yet doesn't prevent us from sharing the game with everyone right now. It's this evolved process which gives us the Hangar and Arena Commander and so many modules yet to come. We're sharing the game as it's being built and it's an amazing opportunity for everyone who has backed, to have input on the direction the game is going. You just don't get this in the traditional game business.

Ship sales and new members of our community are the two main fund raising sources. I want to stress that no one has to or should contribute more than the basic amount for a starting package. Everything is earnable in the game with enough time (and skill). However, if you like the direction we are taking and want to contribute more to the development of Star Citizen, then purchasing different ships with diverse roles are a great way to give back for this support. The new ships add interesting new gameplay and populating the future Persistent Universe with a range of different ships, flown by players pursuing all kinds of professions, will only add to the richness of the game once it's fully live.

That's what Star Citizen is about: the creative freedom to build something unlike anything that has been done before and the ability to do it with the support of a community that is as passionate about this game as I am. We want to make the Best Damn Space Sim Ever, and with your continued support I know we will.
 

Soygen

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I got my AMD ship and installed this last night. The hangar and ship look awesome. I'm glad I didn't spend any money to run around in my hangar though. I flew around a few minutes in the battle module. Elite looks way better in that regard.