Star Citizen has passed half a billion in funding | Hacker News Reader

Star Citizen has passed half a billion in funding

robertsspaceindustries.com

57 pointsortusdux71 comments

Who is still giving money to this project? I don't have a dog in this fight, I just don't understand what one is paying for at this point.

Basically the same people as the "whales" who sink thousands of dollars into gacha games to get their preferred waifu.

And, IMO, it's a damned shame that most of the whales really can't afford to be spending that money.

We picture whales as oil barons and sheiks, but the reality is that most of them are you and me, with a psyops-created addiction.

Are you sure? There are lots of people with six-figure salaries, people who are increasingly single and childless. They can afford a hobby or two, and becoming a Star Citizen whale is still cheaper than taking up skiing or hobby flying.

Development is ongoing and the game gets steadily more featureful (and presumably, more fun—I’ve never played it myself). Every year, it makes more money than the year before. Average spent per account has been fairly consistent at <$200 during that time. [1]

The funding really shot up in 2020, probably due to the pandemic, but also due to increased attention from streamers. That also corresponds to an increase in gameplay; there are now several gameplay loops (combat, hauling, mining, “make your own fun” org battles) and lots of fleshed out and beautiful locations. The core technology is also pretty jaw-dropping, despite bugs, with seamless flight from ground to space, vehicles inside of vehicles, massive capital ships, docking, etc., all in first person and with no loading screens after the first.

So I think people are paying for the fun they’re having now and the promise of something even better in the future.

Edit: Here’s a recent video showing the state of the game and the kinds of shenanigans orgs get up to. Not my cup of tea, but seems like they’re having fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeeWo6Zd-WE

[1] Fan-made crowdfunding tracker: https://ccugame.app/star-citizen-funding-dashboard/funding-d...

I tried it about a year ago. Graphically it's the most impressive space sim I have ever played. The immersion is superb.

Gameplay-wise it feels more like a very polished tech demo than a game. There's no story and nothing to achieve.

I think that critics should take a closer look at what they really are trying to achieve and what they have done so far.

This is not a typical AAA game; the scope is closer to that of a metaverse-level space sim.

At this stage, nobody can tell if they are on the path to succeed or to fail.

I've seen what development hell look like from the inside and the outside, and I think they had a lot of issues but they somehow managed to solve many of them.

Even if they fail to achieve all their goals, I think the development process they used and the technical and organizational lessons they gathered along the way are going to be extremely valuable for the future metaverse building projects.

A lot of these critics didn't invest in a metaverse, they paid for a hardcore space MMO that still doesn't exist, 10 years later. If Cloud Imperium wanted to make a metaverse, they should have finished their other projects first and then focused on it afterwards. As it stands, conflating this 'metaverse' concept with the idea of Star Citizen has only threatened it's development status and jeopardized the original investors of the game.

> Even if they fail to achieve all their goals, I think the development process they used and the technical and organizational lessons they gathered along the way are going to be extremely valuable for the future metaverse building projects.

I really hope future projects don't follow their example. The way their communicated with their community/investors was disgusting, their monetization model is abhorrent, and most of all, their time estimation skills are terrible. They're developing a proprietary product, none of their 'technical and organizational' lessons will benefit the public, not that they'd be useful in the first place. These are the same people who claimed Star Citizen was so big that it needed a custom engine, I don't think many educated, pragmatic developers will be studying their development philosophy in the years to come.

To me it looks like an other vaporware product with moving goalpost and ever inflating budget. Think of Duke Nukem Forever...

Haven't followed it to deeply, but what I have understood it is rather disjointed pieces. With some of the meat for actual game missing.

I've closely followed both Duke Nukem Forever and Star Citizen and the development process and transparency level has been completely different.

Star Citizen is regularly updated with improvement, content and features, and it is slowly becoming something.

Yes. Something.

Some tech demos that showcase simple gameplay loops similar to other games might satisfy the common backer to keep waiting or throw more money at them but everyone who's got any experience in the industry knows, that this is hardly indicative of anything.

Pretty textures and shaders is not the main problem a game like SC must solve, neither are FPS or Dogfighting mechanics. These are important parts but don't bring you any closer to a tightly knit, interconnected universe, which is their main selling point.

In the past 10 years, I've seen nothing from them that indicates that they have made any progress on providing a stable multiplayer experience, even on something like sharded servers. Let alone one huge, interconnected universe.

Come on, give them some slack. Their latest update adds incredible new features like "AI Coffee Shop Vendor" and "New Ship: MISC Hull-A". It sounds like they're making major strides towards a completed metaverse!

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link//18636-Star-Cit...

As someone who has been working in the videogame industry, I have to agree that pretty graphics is almost the easiest part, even if this is also a very difficult job it can be done mostly on the engine side and be disconnected from the game problems.

The most difficult part is the world simulation, and in this case, a distributed, extremely complex and high-fidelity simulation.

Again, you should take a closer look and talk with people in the community.

I am not a backer, but I've been regularly following this project for a long time, and my intuition is that they are going to succeed.

At least, IMHO they are much more likely to succeed than Meta, with much less money.

I have talked to people in the community, the friend I used to play with had backed it since 2015. He stopped playing around 2018, mostly frustrated by the lack of progress and repeatedly pushed-back release date. Maybe you mean the new community though, I'll admit that I have no idea what their sentiment is towards the game. If it's anything like the 'metaverse' investors of Solana and Terra though, they probably wouldn't know a metaverse if they lived in one.

It's been 8 years since they said Star Citizen (the game, not the metaverse) was originally going to release. Until they actually finish one of their products, I'll have a hard time believing in any "success" of theirs, especially when their technical progress only reflects ineptitude and inexperience.

> they paid for a hardcore space MMO

Uhm, no. I’m a backer of the Original KS and IndieGogo campaign, you know what the campaign says?

> Real quick, Star Citizen is:

> A rich universe focused on epic space adventure, trading and dogfighting in first person.

> Single Player – Offline or Online

Literally the second bullet point is about single player, multiplayer is only mentioned a few more points down.

> This is not a typical AAA game; the scope is closer to that of a metaverse-level space sim.

It is convenient to compare it to something that no company achieved yet.

Rather than say it's a failed game, it is an aspiring hard-to-define thing.

> Even if they fail to achieve all their goals, [...] lessons they gathered along the way are going to be extremely valuable [...]

That's what I tell myself if I have a job that I don't believe in, but don't want to tell myself I'm wasting my time.

Ongoing related thread:

List of most expensive video games to develop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32915940 - Sept 2022 (11 comments)

Things that have happened since this game raised their initial funding:

- 11 Call of Duty games released

- Donald Trump launched his campaign for, won, sat, and lost a presidential term

- SpaceX flew their first commercial mission

- Covid has been and "gone"

- Russia annexed Crimea

- Snowden dropped his secrets

- Bin Laden was killed

- Windows 8, 10, and 11 released

Maybe these types of products actually need constraints? Either someone making sure something is actually shipped. Or not endless amounts of money and resources?

Why?

There is a lot of uncertainty in this kind of highly ambitious projects, but the money is used to pay skilled people to build something that could be great.

What is wrong with that? This is some kind of gambling, but nobody is forced, and I expect that most of the backers are aware that they are not getting the money back.

I find it much more objectionable to see people sinking money into crypto or NFTs, as the work output of those is simply no-existent.

Because without them, they get their release date pushed back 8 years?

Does it matter?

I can understand that people are upset by such a delay, but this is a cool experiment, I am glad that it could be attempted.

Not the typical game development process, for sure, and it could fail to deliver, but there are many games made "by the book" if this is what you are looking for.

They're welcome to experiment however they want, but Star Citizen was pitched as a game, not a science project. Their ambition was an afterthought, once they saw how much money they received in their initial round of funding.

They deliberately deceived investors by pitching one thing and building another. If you aren't offended by this, I'm glad. It's still deception, and it still erodes my trust in them as developers.

> They deliberately deceived investors

I don't think deliberately is fitting for that. Horribly mismanaged and feature creeped, sure. Deliberately misled, no.

There's no point in looking at it other than as a "live service" game where content is added, changed and deleted, just like League of Legends. Any other approach is futile.

This has cost more than actually launching rockets into space.

Rather impressive considering they have been in Alpha for over 7 years.

This is the year of Star Citizen on the Desktop!

So far, the cost of development of Star Citizen is about 5% of the money spent by Meta (ex. Facebook) to build the metaverse.

Not too bad if you compare the results.

Wait, did either you or I mess up the maths or has Meta spent $10,000,000,000 (ten billion dollars) on Metaverse? Good grief

10B, yes, that is accurate. That is what Zuck (Meta) already spent on his vision of the metaverse.

I think Zuck stated that Meta had made firm commitments to spend at least $10B over several years on building the metaverse, but some of that hasn't actually been spent yet.

Are you counting the $2B that Facebook paid for Oculus, and the investments into Oculus since then?

My understanding is that the $10B investment number doesn't include the original Oculus aquisition but does include Oculus product enhancements going forward. The main point though isn't the specific dollar amount, but that Zuck considers this strategically important and will spend as much as it takes to win. Get rich(er) or die trying.

To be fair, Star Citizen isn't a hardware product that's already 2 gens deep and sells like hotcakes.

What exactly is it that sells like hotcakes? I’m actually curious, this is not asked in a snarky way.

I imagine it's the Oculus Rift, or whatever its descendants are called

I'm talking mostly about the Oculus/Meta Quest. It's easy to shit on Facebook's software products (I could do it all day), but the Oculus team that Facebook bought still seems to be doing impressive stuff. Whether or not you like Facebook as a product, it's hard to deny that the Quest is really solid hardware for the ~$400 price point. My dream is that someday someone will make a privacy-respecting custom OS for them, so you can simply use it as a cheap tethered headset. John Carmack supposedly stuck his neck out for allowing custom firmware at a hardware-level, which is pretty cool!

Facebook is indeed a shit company, so it makes sense that they'd want to dump all their R&D money into a cool digital trinket. Regardless, I don't really see the proliferation of the Quest as a bad thing. Hopefully some day, like-minded nerds can turn it into a better thing(?)

Carmack himself does not seem to believe that much in the future of this project, and I think this is a strong hint.

I wouldn't either. The software side of it is pretty awful, and just about what you'd expect from Facebook.

Again though; the hardware/firmware/techology is pretty amazing. It's one-of-a-kind when you compare it to other inside-out tracking headsets, and there aren't many other headsets in it's weight or price class. If the community pulls through with a custom software layer, then the Quest might be the best headset you can buy.

FB announced the pivot ~18months ago. 18 months into development Star Citizen had absolutely nothing.

Ironically the more people spend prior to the game coming out the less desirable the game is to actually play.

Seems like people would be star citizens if they used that money to solve real problems in their communities.

That seems like it should be a Onion.com title?

No way this is real... right? They're inflating their numbers for some reason?

Well the game sure isn't real.

I say that not as a troll, but as someone would loves the idea of the game star citizen is striving for.

It'll never get there, unfortunately.

The game seems real? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z5IklhRFyo

Sure, there's a roughly playable form of the game available.

That has yet to deliver on a fraction of the promised design scope or content.

Personally, having "played" the "game", I'd consider it a tech demo of the millions they've tossed into systems, not a game.

So odd no-one's eaten his lunch yet. His moat is engine modifications that take more work than indies will do. I guess maybe Starfield from Bethesda will retake the space game genre.

How about No Man's Sky then?

I'd suggest Elite: Dangerous as a worthy competitor.

"Real" is a bit of a floating target. Cloud Imperium Games has done a good job at delivering small chunks of demo software, but the actual promise of Star Citizen is still a good ways out. If you've ever worked at a professional software company, it's immediately apparent that they aren't building much of anything when you read through their changelogs. They have 500 million dollars, plenty to hire dozens of the best full-time developers for decades to come. Instead, their team seemingly spends the majority of their time building more-and-more stretch goals, and funding their development by announcing even more stretch goals. It's a vicious cycle, and one that's gone on far too-long without having real content to show for it.

The actual gameplay of Star Citizen is fine, but not unprecedented. I've played on a couple occasions (friend's accounts), and it does play like other hardcore space-sim games. Again though - when it comes to 'things to do', you'll run out of content within an hour. It promises Eve Online-style digital politics and dogfighting, and what you get is an unfinished space insurance simulator.

Here's a fun experiment, compare the changelogs of No Man's Sky and Star Citizen, and tell me which one is getting more meaningful content updates:

- Star Citizen: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/patch-notes

- No Man's Sky: https://www.nomanssky.com/release-log/

Hello Games works with ~25 developers. Cloud Imperium pays over 180.

> and it does play like other hardcore space-sim games

I've been looking for an alternative to SC, something that plays similarly. What do you suggest? Elite Dangerous has been brought up before but I found it isn't quite there yet.

No Man's Sky is quite fun nowadays, it scratches my Star Trek "to boldly go" itch whenever I boot it up. It isn't Star Citizen, but it also never promised to be. In a sense, No Man's Sky is to Elite Dangerous what Breath of the Wild is to Elden Ring. Similar games with very different approaches that lead to much different experiences. That being said, it's not very hardcore unless you play it on the harder difficulties. Even then, the cartoony/comic-book aesthetic might rub you the wrong way (totally understandable).

I'd also recommend Rimworld, though it's a completely different kind of game from Star Citizen. However, I think a lot of the people who enjoy the ideas of tightly-interlocked systems would get a real kick out of it. It's heavily management-focused and doesn't have any space combat, but it's in a highly-complete state with thousands of really well-made mods. If you're looking for oodles of procedural sci-fi storytelling, this is where to get it at.

Can also highly recommend Rimworld, if you're into colony/town simulators or like Drwaf Fortress.

> doesn't have any space combat

No space combat, out of the box, mods to the rescue[1].

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=19099141...

I do dig NMS and I just noticed the last time I played E:D was almost five years ago, probably time to try it again.

Rimworld is a gem!

There are test servers that can (poorly) handle a few dozen people and have little to no gameplay loop, but the game that was actually advertised and that still isn't done yet was a single-player campaign in the style of Wing Commander plus a space MMO similar to Elite Dangerous.

The server instances are currently set to 100 people, up from 50 earlier this year. Not sure where you got “a couple dozen” from. It’d been at 40-50 for years, IIRC.

Interestingly, when they increased the size, performance increased, because they were running fewer instances per server.

At this point could it be considered a Ponzi scheme?

Is anything of monetary value being transferred to the initial backers?

No. The suckers in Ponzi schemes are expecting to get money payouts from the founders -- and the early ones usually do, payed from investments from the later ones. This doesn't resemble that structure at all.

I think its just a regular con, no Ponzi structure needed.

I don't think a con at all, just mismanaged to an extreme degree.

Still less than half a billion people waiting for that game to arrive so they'll struggle on.

I thought this was going to be a story about Star Micronics and Citizen printers.

"There's a sucker born every minute." - PT Barnum

Chris Roberts is actually a visionary - he invented NFT's (Concept Art Spaceships) before it caught on.

Those are centralized though, right? Digital art that you can own existed in many forms before NFTs.

GNU Hurd has better chance of being released than this boondoggle.

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