A while back Massively OP had a post about Cloud Imperium Games approaching the $600 million mark in backing for Star Citizen, which spent time comparing that number to the budgets of some major AAA video games.
It only feels like this has been going on for that long
I wrote a comment over there objecting to the comparison not being apt. (Also, Derek Smart has since jumped into the comments, so the wild ride has commenced.) Chris Roberts’ $600 million intake does not represent the budget for making Star Citizen, or even Star Citizen and Squadron 42. We don’t know what those budgets look like except in the most vague way, lacking the details to make those numbers meaningful. That number is, rather, the measure of CIG’s revenue model.
So my initial objection was that this was a comparison of budgets on some titles versus the revenue of another, not something one would normally equate. As I noted, Diablo IV made $666 million in its first five days and nobody is comparing THAT number to the budget for Red Dead Redemption.
But after some thought, I decided what I really objected to was the idea, as implied by the notion that the $600 million number was a budget, that Star Citizen hasn’t shipped, that it is still in development, that the fact that CIG calls it an Alpha means that we have to accept that it is as yet an unreleased title that is not subject to the judgement of the market.
That ship sailed a long time ago. Star Citizen is what it is at this point, a live service spaceship sim. There will never be some point where it ships and suddenly becomes a “real” game, whatever that means. It may change and evolve and the release numbers may increment, but it is already on the market.
I make this statement both on my observation of the CIG business model, which is in part to fund raise base on promises of future features, something that goes away if they ever declare the game “done” or whatever, and also on the history of early access titles over the last decade.
A title moving from early access to live is almost a non-event. There is no big surge of new players in most cases. As it turns out, your core player base will show up for early access. That was the actual game launch, not the declaration that it is now 1.0 and ready.
In fact, for some early access titles, like Ark: Survival Evolved, leaving early access seems to be synonymous, “We’re mostly done here and moving on to another project.”
So the pretense of the game being only in Alpha (the usual immediate response when people find fault) with an idea of it shipping at some future date is just a smoke screen. Chris Roberts has shipped a quirky, buggy, niche live service spaceship game. It may get better over time. Old bugs may get fixed and new ones introduced as new features arrive. But there is no point in the future when Star Citizen is going make some magical transition and like Pinocchio, wake up and find itself a real boy.
This is its final destination. It will be now and forever a niche live service spaceship game.
And I don’t even know what to say about Squadron 42, save that it hasn’t even made it that far yet.
I am sure somebody will read this and assume it is more Star Citizen hate. Not an unreasonable assumption, though mitigated by the long series of unfulfilled promises that has generated hate and suspicion of the game. It looks enough like a scam to be easily filed away as such.
So let me explain where I stand on Star Citizen based on a handy graph I found online. I forget where it popped up, I just saved it off. If it was yours, I’ll add in credit and a link.
The nine segments of the debate or something
I definitely fall in the Skeptics slice of the pie. I have felt that the whole thing was over promised since very early on. The ongoing delays, the problems, the constant changes of dates and timelines, the forgotten features, the unintended consequences of new features, this is all the chaos of a project that owes more to Brownian motion than any sort of well executed plan.
I am personally in for a $20 pledge, made shortly after the Kickstarter campaign closed some ten and a half years ago. I have taken three serious runs and finding some fun in the game, failed completely each time, and have moved on.
I haven’t bothered to write about it because bugs pulled me up short on two of those runs, and I wasn’t in the mood to get into the usual “well, it works for me” sort of retorts from the truly faithful. The entire Star Citizen discussion ecosystem is entirely too toxic. I would rather debate League of Legends strategies on Reddit most days of the week. It makes the EVE Online ecosystem look like the Care Bears Christmas Special. I am also not that invested in it one way or another, so why start?
And yet I am wading into the whole thing with this post. Why is that?
Well, first, because of the whole idea that $600 million is the budget for this game, a ludicrous and disprovable proposition, even with the minimal financials we get to see. But also because I think it is illustrative of a few aspects of the crowd funding genre and video games in general.
First, you get one launch. A few very fortunate titles, like FFXIV, have managed a successful relaunch. And occasionally a game like Among Us will find a post-launch moment of fame. But for most titles you get that first moment when your core base of players rushes into try your game… and after that it is them, the friends they can convince, and a slow trickle of people wandering by. Star Citizen has had that. There will be no future rush to play it.
Second, vision is bullshit. I have been suckered by vision too many times in the past. Vision, and ideals, and promises are mere vapors in dawn’s rosy light. What matters is what actually gets delivered.
Third, shipping something is better than shipping nothing. Maybe? That is a hard one, because there are titles that should clearly have never have shipped, or should have delayed shipping. But in the case of Star Citizen, despite the constant stream of missed dates and broken features, it has shipped enough to keep its core audience engaged. Good for them. I compare this to Camelot Unchained, which publishes a regular newsletter and features and updates in a tone that sounds like they have shipped something, when in fact nobody can play the game. It is still locked up on servers in Virginia while whatever audience the game had a decade back has mostly melted away.
Only one of those scenarios has had a $600 million revenue stream over the last ten years.
It reminds me a bit of Shroud of the Avatar, or perhaps what Lord British wanted it to be. SotA is a niche fantasy sim that goes into painfully deep detail on so many things. Star Citizen is a niche spaceship simulator that, likewise, wants to dig deep on every possible feature, seeking a level of complexity mere mortals would rightly shy away from. It has just made the trick work.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 