The developers of space sim Star Citizen are now talking about the 1.0 launch being within sight, some 12 years after the game launched its first crowdfunding drive.
For a game that isn’t technically out yet, Star Citizen is doing very well as it continues to rake in huge sums of money, and now there’s a new way to plunk down a bunch of it at once. The new Legatus Pack, which includes most of Star Citizen’s ships and a bunch of extras, is available for $27,000 USD.
Sure, that sounds like a lot of money, but consider what you’re getting: 117 ships, including the Anvil Carrack and Aegis Sabre, plus 163 extra items like the digital soundtrack and a digital copy of the Star Citizen novella.
I don’t think that they started out intending to “scam” players. I think that what happened was that they just mismanaged a development project, and every time they slipped and missed where they intended to be, the only way to dig themselves out was to keep making more-extravagant promises and figure out ways to take in larger sums of money to “fix” things. And what actually happened was that they kept digging themselves deeper into a hole; there’s no way that they’re going to deliver something that someone who spent the kinds of money that they’ve taken in is going to be happy with, not to mention all the physical items that they’ve promised to develop and send to people and haven’t. The developer doesn’t even have a good way out if things go badly – the developer can’t cut off the process without the people who have committed money for all the promises feeling ripped off, and no one potential customer can end the process, can’t say “well, the publisher cancelled the project”.
Many years back, a traditional game development process would have had the publisher, someone familiar with the game development process, say “this project has gone off the rails” and have cut them off from more funds, but because they’re getting funds by making more promises to players, they can keep going as long as players keep committing more funds. There’s an increasingly-large divergence between promises and what they can do.
I think it just highlights why the traditional game development process makes sense. That is, there’s a legitimate reason for having the publisher raise the money, have experience with the development process, and have oversight authority and milestones on a project and a single party with the ability to cut off funds if things go badly. If you’re a developer, it may chafe to have a publisher breathing down your neck, but…
And don’t get me wrong. I totally would like to have a good new space combat game too, like a lot of people. And I think that there’s room for a business model where players who really want to see a sequel to a much-loved game are willing to commit a (limited) amount of funds towards it.
But I also think that it needs to be made extremely clear that any given project may fail, that the business model needs to involve oversight from someone like a traditional publisher with the ability to say “this project isn’t working”, milestones, someone with expertise in the field running the numbers on the financial side, and some mechanism to stop the developer from just trying to buy their way out of the hole with larger promises.
The game development process does have a certain amount of risk. Part of doing game development is managing it and relatively-gracefully dealing with failure. I think that it might be nice to have someone produce some kind of intermediate model, something where a would-be customer can choose to expose themselves to risk, but also where there’s a route to kill the project if it isn’t going well. That protects the developer as well as the players – the developer can’t commit themselves to something that they can’t do, and the players can only lose so much.
It’s been in development for about 12 years. This was 6 years ago:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/star-citizen/star-citizen-pack-27000-dollars
I don’t think that they started out intending to “scam” players. I think that what happened was that they just mismanaged a development project, and every time they slipped and missed where they intended to be, the only way to dig themselves out was to keep making more-extravagant promises and figure out ways to take in larger sums of money to “fix” things. And what actually happened was that they kept digging themselves deeper into a hole; there’s no way that they’re going to deliver something that someone who spent the kinds of money that they’ve taken in is going to be happy with, not to mention all the physical items that they’ve promised to develop and send to people and haven’t. The developer doesn’t even have a good way out if things go badly – the developer can’t cut off the process without the people who have committed money for all the promises feeling ripped off, and no one potential customer can end the process, can’t say “well, the publisher cancelled the project”.
Many years back, a traditional game development process would have had the publisher, someone familiar with the game development process, say “this project has gone off the rails” and have cut them off from more funds, but because they’re getting funds by making more promises to players, they can keep going as long as players keep committing more funds. There’s an increasingly-large divergence between promises and what they can do.
I think it just highlights why the traditional game development process makes sense. That is, there’s a legitimate reason for having the publisher raise the money, have experience with the development process, and have oversight authority and milestones on a project and a single party with the ability to cut off funds if things go badly. If you’re a developer, it may chafe to have a publisher breathing down your neck, but…
And don’t get me wrong. I totally would like to have a good new space combat game too, like a lot of people. And I think that there’s room for a business model where players who really want to see a sequel to a much-loved game are willing to commit a (limited) amount of funds towards it.
But I also think that it needs to be made extremely clear that any given project may fail, that the business model needs to involve oversight from someone like a traditional publisher with the ability to say “this project isn’t working”, milestones, someone with expertise in the field running the numbers on the financial side, and some mechanism to stop the developer from just trying to buy their way out of the hole with larger promises.
The game development process does have a certain amount of risk. Part of doing game development is managing it and relatively-gracefully dealing with failure. I think that it might be nice to have someone produce some kind of intermediate model, something where a would-be customer can choose to expose themselves to risk, but also where there’s a route to kill the project if it isn’t going well. That protects the developer as well as the players – the developer can’t commit themselves to something that they can’t do, and the players can only lose so much.