So let me explain where I stand on Star Citizen based on a handy graph I found online. It looks enough like a scam to be easily filed away as such. Not an unreasonable assumption, though mitigated by the long series of unfulfilled promises that has generated hate and suspicion of the game. I am sure somebody will read this and assume it is more Star Citizen hate. It will be now and forever a niche live service spaceship game.Īnd I don’t even know what to say about Squadron 42, save that it hasn’t even made it that far yet. But there is no point in the future when Star Citizen is going make some magical transition and like Pinocchio, wake up and find itself a real boy. Old bugs may get fixed and new ones introduced as new features arrive. Chris Roberts has shipped a quirky, buggy, niche live service spaceship game. So the pretense of the game being only in Alpha (the usual immediate response when people find fault) with an idea of it shipping at some future date is just a smoke screen. In fact, for some early access titles, like Ark: Survival Evolved, leaving early access seems to be synonymous, “We’re mostly done here and moving on to another project.” That was the actual game launch, not the declaration that it is now 1.0 and ready. As it turns out, your core player base will show up for early access. There is no big surge of new players in most cases. I make this statement both on my observation of the CIG business model, which is in part to fund raise base on promises of future features, something that goes away if they ever declare the game “done” or whatever, and also on the history of early access titles over the last decade.Ī title moving from early access to live is almost a non-event. It may change and evolve and the release numbers may increment, but it is already on the market. There will never be some point where it ships and suddenly becomes a “real” game, whatever that means. Star Citizen is what it is at this point, a live service spaceship sim. As I noted, Diablo IV made $666 million in its first five days and nobody is comparing THAT number to the budget for Red Dead Redemption.īut after some thought, I decided what I really objected to was the idea, as implied by the notion that the $600 million number was a budget, that Star Citizen hasn’t shipped, that it is still in development, that the fact that CIG calls it an Alpha means that we have to accept that it is as yet an unreleased title that is not subject to the judgement of the market. So my initial objection was that this was a comparison of budgets on some titles versus the revenue of another, not something one would normally equate. That number is, rather, the measure of CIG’s revenue model. We don’t know what those budgets look like except in the most vague way, lacking the details to make those numbers meaningful. (Also, Derek Smart has since jumped into the comments, so the wild ride has commenced.) Chris Roberts’ $600 million intake does not represent the budget for making Star Citizen, or even Star Citizen and Squadron 42. I wrote a comment over there objecting to the comparison not being apt. It only feels like this has been going on for that long
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