A tidal wave of disbelief and pot-stirring is about to erupt from the gaming media. Star Citizen, the game currently under development by Cloud Imperium Games, is about to hit the gaming headlines once again. And boy-oh-boy, are some people gonna get mad about it.
From its ever-elusive release date, to scandals about refunds and even very public feuds with other game developers, it seems barely six months can go by before we see the ambitious MMO back in gaming's headlines. And it's going to happen again. Gaming media will offer up a spectrum of reactions, from mild bewilderment, to tired criticism, to full-on losing of shit.
Why, you ask? Well, Star Citizen has just hit five hundred million dollars in crowd funding.
Holy shit, right? That could buy us five seasons of Game of Thrones. But how does that stack up against other games and their costs? Cyberpunk 2077 is rumoured to have cost around $316 million. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 squeaked in at around $250 million, and Red Dead Redemption 2 at about $170 million. In other words, Star Citizen has been the most expensive game for some time now.
The problem is that a straight-up comparison is nigh impossible, even between two conventionally-funded studios. CD Projekt Red (Cyberpunk), Infinity Ward (Modern Warfare 2) and Rockstar (Red Dead Redemption 2) are all established studios with significant titles that are still driving income. It's hard to draw accurate conclusions from financial reports when most AAA games studios work on multiple titles at once, across multiple engines and with many products earning them money.
When one of the studios you are comparing is CIG, it becomes even more problematic. Star Citizen was announced in 2012 with a whopping 7 developers working out of a basement.
The crowdfunding they have received has been spent on more than just the game. It's enabled the studio's transformation from a 'what if' to an international, AAA games studio.
The basement became a studio in Austin, Texas, then one in LA, followed by studios in England and Germany (both of which are being moved to bigger, bespoke studios this year), as well as an affiliated studio in Canada. From those 7 developers, CIG now employs over 700 (695 in their 2020 financial report).
Games media will be predictable in their criticism. Predictable, but not unwarranted. CIG don't exactly have a stellar track record delivering on promises.
Once of those promises made to original backers was that of a playable beta in three years. This deadline was missed, and further deadlines have all been delayed, missed, or have stop being mentioned altogether. It wasn't until 2016 that a very basic 'hangar' environment became available to backers.
This all resulted in some backers banding together and demanding refunds, with Derek Smart as one of their more prominent figures. There is far too much in the very well documented feud between CIG and Smart to list here, but main concerns of those seeking refunds included none of the promised deadlines being met, feature creep (the promise of news features whilst those that have already been promised remain unfulfilled), and an apparent lack of progress on a technically complex game.
Recently, a feature of Star Citizen was detailed by CIG called 'bedsheet deformation tech'; the ability to mess up your bedcovers on your ship or in your apartment. For a game where the core gameplay is still largely missing, it seems like a strange thing to concentrate on.
Yet games media largely manage to miss the point. There is continued support amongst the game's backers. Many of those who have supported the game still find reason to pledge, and the game has a steady influx of new backers to keep things healthy. There are now over four million individual game accounts according to CIG's website
And in the last 6 months, there have been an influx of larger content creators to the game. Where the main Star Citizen Youtubers are lucky to have 200k subscribers, these new personalities are bringing millions of subs, and they all have optimistic viewpoints on the game.
They see what backers see - Star Citizen's potential. Sure, game loops are missing. Game loops are always missing when a game is in Alpha. But what's there shows that CIG are capable of fulfilling their vision.
What is being developed in this game is like nothing we've seen before. It's why I created a channel dedicated to exploring the game, to exploring its development, and to bringing my Naval experience to bear on some of their larger ships.
Once you begin to grasp the scale of CIG's vision, you begin to understand the challenges faced at CIG. The single system that currently exists in the game - Stanton - is so large that to explore its main locations and key sights, including crashed space ships, abandoned mining sites and major landing zones would take longer than most would be willing to dedicate to a single gaming session.
Games Media will universally miss this. Slow progress and broken promises has rendered them unable to see what the game has become. I don't think we can blame them;
$500 million in funding and over 10 years in development is significant and the game as it stands certainly doesn't reflect that.
But you have to wonder how much their current coverage is a reflection of their past reactions. After all - $500 million !!! Each year is seeing an increase in crowdfunding, not a decrease, which some time ago made Star Citizen the most crowdfunded... well... anything outside of crypto currencies. Nothing is certainly, especially in the realm of crowdfunded projects, but I would have thought that there would have been more media interest in why people had so much faith in the project.
And I do. And those that I talk to do as well. Maybe I should take a look at why in a future post. The fact remains that when I play Star Citizen I get a sense of something more. I feel what CIG are driving toward. I'm captivated by the depth and engagement you can experience from simply mining - either from ships, in buggies, or with a gadget you can wield whilst on foot.
There's a saying I can't quite get out of my head. We were born too late to explore the planet and too early to explore the universe. Star Citizen is coming the closest to letting us do the later, at a level of detail gaming has never known before.
Don't take my word for it, though. CIG run a free-fly period toward the end of October/beginning over November. You can download the game for free and try a whole bunch of ships without spending a thing. And I'd be happy to introduce you to the 'verse. Listening to a new player's sense of wonder as you show them around is honestly my favourite thing to do in the game right now.
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