There was plenty of speculation this would crash and burn in December, driven by people apparently in the know from insiders and such. Certainly turns out that is not the case and it is not fair for those speculators to keep pushing the goal posts back 30 or 60 days at a time and claim sales are getting them through month to month. Much more likely their sources to begin with were indeed full of crap, not in a real position to know the truth, or made it up.
Got to agree with Timex on that point.
If it crashes and burns, it crashes and burns, but placing stock in those still crying it is imminently doomed at this stage seems a poor bet.
I definitely don’t like the business practice SC represents, but I am not a backer. Whether it fails or not, it affects me only in that I’d rather not see that business model held up as a paragon of future game financing.
Not sure where to link to this article, but this thread might be the most appropriate.
Aceris
2625
The CIG marketing and revenue model is effectively a whale hunt based around nostalgia for wing commander and desire for a spiritual successor to Privateer and Freelancer, so talking about sequels is incredibly disingenuous.
The CIG variant on the whale-hunt business model doesn’t work at all for anything that isn’t a sequel to an incredibly loved franchise.
Timex
2626
Eh, they have like a million people signed up with them, so I’d suspect that they aren’t really depending upon the small group of whales who have given them mountains of money.
Every report about whale/long tail funding models (which this definitely is) suggests that the biggest 10% of spenders contribute half to two-thirds of the overall funding. That’s about $500 each for the top 10%, which is less than I would have guessed.
That’s not entirely true Timex. They have 856k paying users (the fleet number), so an average per user of around $110. With a normal buy in value of about $50, only about half of the revenue (less, actually) can be justified with base players.
Now, the median will probably be higher than $50 (this changes with sales), but we don’t know that number. Assuming a median of, I don’t know, $75 (but this is a wild guess), you would have still around 30% of total revenue being generated by the higher paying users. While that’s way better than normal whale hunting models in the F2P crowd (which are the 50% to 66% quoted above), it’s still a significant percentage funded by whales.
And the game is not even out.
I would say doubts on the funding model are actually warranted, at least until we see how the paying scheme in the real game goes. Right now the push towards whales is limited, since there’s no game for whales to compete in. This might get more extreme once the game is out and the big ships are flyable. Or not, but I think there are grounds to be wary.
But it is a very weird project, somewhere between traditional crowdfunding and F2P whale hunting, for now (and traditional crowdfunding can be also whale funded. Many small Kickstarter projects get more than 20% funded by a handful of individuals).
Lantz
2629
I think that’s high? I have some account something that a friend gave me that was free with whatever tier he kickstarted. I’m sure I’m included in that 856k. Factoring out people like me it’s probably a higher number for paying users.
Not by much: Only about 700 people got packages to give a friend in the KS, some double, some quadruple, about 850-900 packages given away, unless I’m missing something, so the number of people like you seems to be insignificant statistically. During the last months the average per fleet user has remained really constant, and they have increased over 100k new paying users (the fleet number), so I’d say those numbers are somewhat solid (given all that we don’t know, of course).
Of course maybe a huge number of players are buying ships and giving them away to friends, but that seems a bit paranoid/unjustified unless somebody has data. Big increases in paying users are very consistent with sales of entry packages, and even more correlated to big news events (which suggest these are indeed new users attracted by marketing)… I think everytime somebody writes a big article critizising the game they get a few thousand haters and a few thousand paying users. But yes, there are a lot of unknowns…
Man, I would love to take a peek at their real data.
Timex
2631
I think this everything you said here is reasonable. One thing that will be interesting is what happens when the game actually comes it in a more complete form.
Given that you will be able to host your own servers and do whatever you want on them, and even in the public server everything in the game will be available through purely in game means, I’m not really that worried about the business model at this point.
Their post-launch monetization strategy has only been hinted at thus far in interviews given by Chris Roberts and his community managers. As of now their stated intention is to stop selling ships and start selling in-game currency with a monthly cap once the game is released. You would pay a standard retail price for the game itself and start with an Aurora (which currently sell for ~$25).
The cheaper available starter package (that includes an aurora) is $50. The $25 is the price of an aurora if you already have access to the game. So the expected retail price seems to be around that range.
Lovely answer from Cliff:
“I’d buy a full copy of Star Citizen”
My guild has a whale who is considering getting some of the largest ship to support ‘guild actions’ in game. He recently gave away 4 starter packages to other players, but I suppose some of the more expensive packs include ‘freebies’ to give away.
Yea, as I admitted above, I absolutely want THIS game developer’s rotted corpse of a Ponzi scheme to be buried with an epitaph that reads “Don’t do this shit!”
I hope Gary Oldman and Mark Hamill got paid in money and not ship jpgs.
I take it that your problem is with stretch goals lasting years after the formal crowdfunding campaign has ended? It does seem that more and more developers are now choosing to accept pledges up until launch day, and in Bard’s Tale IV’s case these ‘slacker backers’ count towards stretch goals that weren’t reached during the Kickstarter. Kingdom Come: Deliverance added a few more stretch goals on their website to incentivize more pledges/pledge upgrades but, as with Star Citizen, they have now discontinued stretch goals to lock down the feature set and build their game.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these trends in crowdfunding were influenced by Star Citizen’s financial success, and I certainly think the reception of the final product will decide whether or not these practices are widely adopted going forward.
Aceris
2637
To clarify, I don’t have doubts about the funding model for star citizen, it’s clearly been a success, but I dont see how it can be applied to other products because of the huge “Wing Commander nostalgia” element. I don’t like the model, because I think it produces perverse incentives for CIG, but it’s a successful model.
I have doubts about the development model for Star Citizen. It just doesn’t seem like something likely to produce a particularly coherent or performant experience. Time will tell.
Even if something playable is finally published, I doubt CR will be able to shake the criticism that he could have done it faster and/or cheaper. The criticism will also be fairly sharp if the published product isn’t the Second Coming of gaming. People have invested in the meta-game of seeing this fail; the anticipation of the schadenfreude (or “Nelson Ha-Ha” effect) is just full on.
Personally I think we are going to get something published - however it will fall far short of the promises and some whales will get burned.
Editer
2639
Perhaps they could use some of that $100 million to hire someone who’s heard of differential patches?
Downloading 2.1 “PTU” and it’s about 30GB again. Seriously? Taking forever on my crappy DSL. And heaven help people with bandwidth limits.
KevinC
2640
They just need one more stretch goal, man.
Aszurom
2641
When they were doing their Christmas stream, all I could do was look at the furnishings of the room, the art on the walls, and think “we bought that for them.”
If I were Chris, I’d have some fancy accountants stashing as much as I could skim off of this into some hidden offshore thing that I could disappear with.
Yea, they sure had nice offices from that stream they showed.
