Meanwhile over there, they’re still making…documentaries about what went wrong.
Is there anything actually new in that or am I just going to waste 30 minutes re-hashing the known knows?
Raj Patel of Relic throws his grenade.
I just saw this - it’s mind blowing. Has any other game taken this many raw $ in terms of resources to make? I’m not talking marketing, because as far as I know except pushing people into investing they haven’t even started marketing this game yet, right? It’s just something “coming when it’s done”? Someone on Era estimated maybe Red Dead Redemption 2 could have pushed passed half a billion, but even if that’s true it would likely include a huge marketing budget AND that game actually came out.
Think of the 500m as live service revenue. The game was basically released in 2016 or so and it has been getting some updates but nothing major. That’s all there is to it and although it personally makes no sense to me, it does for many people, including in this thread.
I honestly didn’t realize it was a playable game - that’s on me for not following this title very closely in a really long time. The last I knew the only thing that could be “played” was some sort of first person prototype, but that’s probably very out-dated info at this point.
Yep. A tad out of date. I try to post info about it in this thread. But many people still think of SC as an unplayable tech demo and obviously a scam. Perceptions don’t change on a dime.
I also think that a big part that contributes from the general gaming community view for people who haven’t really followed development is that the kickstarter was very single player focused with a general pitch of an updated Wing Commander style campaign with offline support or locally hosted co-op as lead pitches:
Obviously there were also MMORPG-type aspects to the pitch, but the more traditional single player Wing Commander aspect was front and center. So I think a lot of people who have not followed the game at all don’t see the, um, increased scope and the idea of not having delivered a Wing Commander type game in 10 years for $500M seems so ludicrous.
I think people into the Persistent Universe/Star Citizen side of things can look at the project and feel that they believe the framework of that coming into shape, but for people who wanted to play the Squadron 42 offline single player game with mod support from the Kickstarter pitch it’s fair to say that it seems unlikely to ever happen and some kind of online hosted campaign may at some point exist but it’s definitely shown no sign of being close to ready.
What does your heart tell you? :D
Well tbf, it’s all three.
I don’t think anyone pays attention to why they backed it to begin with. You either like it as-is or you hate that it’s nowhere near where it should have been 10 (!) yrs later.
I think Age of Wonders 3 cost about $5 million, and iirc Paradox bought the studio for $25 million.
And AoW3 made a profit.
Planetfall cost more but also sold more. Alot of the Paradox stable bought it because it was Paradox.
It is crazy for me to consider that, quick maths check, $494 million/25 million…would get you 19 Triumph Studios.
With change.
Doing mental maths here so I may be wrong. (Edit - i was wrong, updated this with the correvt figure of 19. Which is still mad)
I know which investment I would make with half a billion.
RDR2 cost $540 million according to Take Two’s filings. I’m pretty sure this will easily blow past that amount.
The cost itself doesn’t bother me. There is always demand for splashy and massive AAA games, and people who know how to succeed in one genre or studio size and not another, etc.
The RDR2 budget includes marketing costs which were apparently in the range of half of the overall budget.
Cost relative to what has been “delivered” for that money is the concern. You can spend a billion dollars on a game and that’s cool, but I’d expect a billion dollars worth of game development to look a lot different than the average AAA game with 1/10th the budget.
I think the real reckoning for SC is going to come when CIG are forced to acknowledge that the game won’t be the grand, expansive vision Roberts sold people. Right now the dream is the product for a lot of people.
And of course, if the game is ever “finished” it’ll be fascinating to see how they actually intend to make any sustainable income from it short of being one of those giga-whale MMOs like Entropia Universe, haha.
Sure. As you’d expect with a game of that stature. Still, I think it’s fair to compare them since Star Citizen’s “marketing budget” comes out of their total funding too.
CIG spend fuck tons on marketing - it’s practically all they do. Shiny jpgs, flashy videos, endless YouTube and twitch streams, sponsored content creators, citizencon, all high quality and professionally produced - all to get new or existing players to buy in or buy more.
They just don’t go for the typical ‘side if the bus’ or ‘tv spot’ marketing the RDR2 types go for, but a significant chunk of that 500m has gone towards marketing. They have a VP of Marketing (Roberts wife Sandi).
Precisely this. And it’s why they seemingly transitioned to GaaS without actually calling it that. I mean, they had to make several ToS changes that says precisely that. But the backers who kept giving them money didn’t care. That’s OK ofc. But it’s the guys who had no say - and who can’t get their money back - that I feel sorry for. I was lucky though; they just kicked me out and gave me back my money because, you know, us loudmouth troublemakers are the worst. :)
I agree with you, but Chris Roberts has been all about how so much more of their budget goes to development vs a traditional game:
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1019681/Star-Citizen-Going-Beyond