After raising 300 million dollars, Star Citizen is running out of funds. - Sensationalist Headlines

Skyrim's budget was $80mil and it's one of the best games ever made. GTA V was $130mi and it's one of the best as well. The Witcher 3 cost $81mi. Star Citizen could do much with less. All I see is greed and personal enrichment, seeing Chris Roberts employing his family members and sharing a part of the millions they "steal" from gamers. It's no rule as you said, but I think these figures contradict you much. SC is one of the most expensive games to be made because Chris Roberts keeps coming up with things they NEED to do to justify the funding they ask for. It's ridiculous. As other people have said in this thread, if they kept with what they originally planned and set those other projects, such as S42, as side projects, SC would be in a much more playable state than it is right now.

Wut Skyrim wasn't even the best game released that year.

Ok so not only you're wrong, you're being decieving and you're still making zero substancial points. You have zero understanding of budgets and costs of production. And your numbers are bs. You're comparing established studios, with publishers and parent companies, and only counting developement budget. CIG was created for Star Citizen, had to build entire new studios with all the costs associated with that, pay for the marketing and publishing costs themselves which you conveniently ignored. GTA5's official release budget is $265 million with marketing, and that's ignoring the budget of the years of updates after that. And don't tell me "the game was successful so it doesnt count", we're talking about budget not profits. And again you're comparing established studios with either publisher support, existing lucrative games to finance future developpement, or game stores owners like GOG and CDPR, and a new mostly crowdfunded studio. Different projects have different costs for a wide variety of reasons. CDPR gets away with paying their employee low wages because the cost of life is very low in Poland. If the game was made in a gamedev center like Montreal, LA, SF, the developpement cost might gave doubled. And all of this is irrelevant because if theses games had more budget, they would have been better. You're still making zero point as to why SC having a large budget is something terrible. Some games cost more, some cost less, CIG is completely transparent as to where the money is going, get over it.

Those games were relatively cheap for what they are...but I guess you must have missed the part where this is a game aiming to revolutionize a lot of aspects of PC gaming, that at least has a goal for what's potentially the highest level of graphics and technical achievements so far, that started with pretty much nothing but a basic concept, that had to set up multiple companies and expand over several years, that didn't even have a fully suitable engine and had to put a lot of work into figure that out, all while not having the backing of a publisher and being entirely crowdfunded. Other big games being done for cheap doesn't mean the situation here is inherantly bad. You saying "They should have just kept the original plan and did SQ42 as a die project!" really, really shows you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. The initial plan was SQ42 as a very limited, cut-back version of the game, that they'd work on and release to get more funding to then be able to properly make the "Star Citizen" part but still having to do so them seperate projects, which would complicate things greatly in the long run. The plan was "We can't afford to do the actual game yet, so we're gonna make the small campaign first to help fund it" and then once the kickstarter went far beyond what they expected, they realized that they could actually do it how they were hoping to in the first place and work on it all at once: We intend to build the game that Chris Roberts described at GDC Online regardless, but without additional funding we are going to have to do it one piece at a time, starting with Squadron 42, rather than as a single larger production. With more funding we can include more ships, systems, unique locations, animations and cinematic sequences.

Skyrim didn't have to develop entirely new technologies from scratch just to get core gameplay functionality working the right way, with dozens of iterations from ideas on scratch paper to a playable product, inside of its $80m budget. Star Citizen wants to have a gameplay experience larger than GTA V's... meaning more story, more visuals, more gameplay area... for each possible career path. And GTA V's budget was $260m. The Witcher 3 was made in Poland by sorely underpaid developers working inhuman hours. It's a fantastic game but even for how good it is it cannot compare to Star Citizen in terms of scale and depth. The project has budget problems but there's no great scam and it's going to take a tremendous amount of money to bring the game to completion with everything - or even half - of what they have envisioned. Destiny's budget was $500 million, including the technologies developed for that game. Guess what? Game development is fucking expensive, and the more you deviate from the beaten path, the less existing tech you use, the more shit costs.

I'm always going to remain cautiously skeptical of this game, but if and when the full game (Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe) is actually feature complete and out I'll be sure to shell out some cash for it. I always roll my eyes whenever I see one of my friends calling it a scam. There's too much work put into it and actually play right now to call it a scam.

Not a huge feature but I do admit it was neat when the equipment I got on my character such as grenades and magazines actually physically appeared on my character's chest armor for real. It's such a minor detail but so many other games just fake it outright or never show it. Other stuff like 100% accurate character collision, smooth transition from walking to EVA, environmental interaction, all that stuff was very jank but I'm impressed with all the systems working underneath the hood and it's easy to imagine all of the finally coming together perfectly once the game is out of alpha and they can finally focus on the bugs.

Man, sometimes it'd be better to just drop an argument when you clearly know very little about a given subject.

Calling SC fraud is wild The only thing I can really say is that I'm not 100% sure about the direction, and that I'd like them to be much more transparent about their financials, but they're clearly working on what they're being paid to work on. If it were cheaper I'd probably be willing to throw in a bit, given my love of this genre I'll probably at least get my money's worth even if it's a massive disappointment.

Here, have their report they from December https://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/corporate/cfo-comment-2012-2017-financials

Well, this thread's really living up to the sub-forum title.

What about 2018? Although, to be fair, without nitpicking how often it could be published like public companies publish their financials, that's still better than basically all crowdfunded companies. Props to that.

2018s isn't due till march 2019 for the IRS, so it probably wasn't 100% known for sure, and it would be illegal for them to publish wrong numbers.

A lot of companies (e.g. all publicly owned ones) publish statements every 3 months. But they are likely operating under different rules so idk.

Before rebranding the UK and Frankfurt studios under the global studio brand, Cloud Imperium was not required to disclose its financials at all except for the UK offices, who have to submit paperwork to the government tax authority just as all other UK corporations do. The crown publishes its corporate tax filings for the public to review. I don't know what the global rebrand did to this situation but at minimum the UK studios will still be submitting their docs as usual and maybe the global operations will have to as part of becoming the same entity as the UK operation but I have no idea. We'll find out after the next submission/publication interval I guess. The US studios obviously have to submit tax filings to the IRS, but as a private corporation there is no obligation for them to publish this information anywhere and the IRS is bound by confidentiality unless someone subpoenas/FOIAs the records. In terms of voluntary disclosure over and above any UK obligations, I imagine that CI is not in a rush to publish their hot, going financials because that's sensitive information that can influence things like their office leases, what kind of credit lines they have with banks, etc. They published the 2012-2017 financials without too much sweat because that's historical data, not live corporate health data. They're striving for transparency but they're not insane. We don't get to have a live webcam feed of Chris Roberts' office in the name of transparency, and naked disclosure of live corporate internals is also unreasonable. Why wouldn't they pay their employees? What would they be spending the money on if not paying their employees to work on the game? Is this PUI? According to your arguments, because The Blair Witch Project cost an estimated $5 million to make, Destiny's budget being $500 million must mean that Bungie execs were wildly overpaid and bought yachts with the money. ...????????????? I, too, consider selling a product to be theft. I would like to press charges against Steam for hundreds of counts of credit card fraud because of all the games on my account. SC would be in a "much more playable state" but you would be nailed to your ship's chair, procedural gen planets would be a dream, not an implemented feature, and you'd be playing Elite Dangerous But Not. Elite Dangerous, four years after launch, is still fundamentally the exact same game it was when it left beta and the only major changes were adding the ability to land on atmosphereless planets, adding the hot-and-cold scanning minigame, and extending the engine to support multiplayer crew on ships and sharing missions with crew. Since 2014, Star Citizen went from isolated single-player hangar mini-environments and a dogfighting module in a 20x20x20km box of a map to a star system at least 70 million kilometers across featuring two 1:10 scale superearths and nine moons, all with atmospheres of varying density, with two major city environments with large and intensely-detailed walkable spaces. SC now has almost 90 flyable ships with fully-fleshed out interiors you can walk around (and even get lost in, in the larger ships), and ships have their own internal physics grids which allows them to maintain artificial gravity and a local sense of "up" while flying in total 3D freedom. The planets and moons have outposts and installations sprinkled over them and missions that involve those installations for various purposes. And as others have pointed out to you, Squadron 42 was never a side project, it was the original project that was going to bootstrap funding for the development of the online component, because the first step is to build an offline game, then make it online. When crowdfunding turned into a jackpot that didn't stop paying out, they didn't have to do the one-at-a-time process because they had the funding to work on both. You have the causality backwards: backers provide funding, then Chris says "wow with this money we can afford to do X", and this pleases some whales enough to make them whale even harder on top of the funding coming from new signups, which means six months later Chris goes "wow now we can afford to do THIS". But even that hasn't been true for a few years, because now at this point funding comes in and Chris uses it to pay for everything they've already promised in their hyperambitious vision. WontLurk, you are the guy who heard that James Cameron was making Titanic and built a gigantic flooded sound stage so he could actually sink a life-size model Titanic and throw actors off to their (imaginary) deaths and went "why the fuck does it matter, just throw the bitch into a swimming pool and CGI out the background and finish the movie already!" You don't have to like Star Citizen but have the decency to stfu about things you know nothing about when having an adult conversation.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-05-03-star-citizen-development-reportedly-troubled-by-mishandled-money-micromanagement

Cool, that's just a rewrite of the Forbes article in the OP?

The fact that they're just now getting around to all the feature creep features they were adding to the game during the initial drive not excuse that it was feature creep in the first place. I was there for the whole backing campaign. I was following this game before it was even formally announced. I was already getting nervous about the features they were adding to the game at the 4 million mark. I was starting to get upset at the features they were adding by the 20 million mark. That was not the game that I backed. It was not the game that was announced. What was announced was a straightforward successor to Wing Commander, with a neat little Freelancer-esque MP mode if they made 2 million, which they thankfully did and I was happy about. To me, 2 million mark was mission accomplished, I'm happy, they could cut off their features and I'd get exactly what I wanted. Obviously in the cult of Star Citizen I'm a minority, as anybody who is still left has fully bought into the revisionist history of "no feature creep". You could argue that this was Chris Robert's plan all along, but I would counter it with that was not what was official. What was official was that if they get more money they'll add more feature and nerds more hardcore than me just wouldn't stop giving him money. When they put up the poll of "should we stop adding new features" of course the majority of people are going to ask for more if you give them the option. I didn't. I didn't want to see this game get feature creeped into oblivion, but again, I am a minority. The nicest thing I can say about Star Citizen these days is that I admire its technical ambition. I have serious doubts that it'll ever shape up to be a polished and stable game (at best I expect it to be as janky and buggy as ARMA), but I do think it makes a hell of a tech demo.

The way you've worded it saying it was a "straightforward successor to Wing Commander"is wrong. That was the side project, it consisted of a very small campaign mode. The part of ""Star Citizen" as a multiplayer universe with all those non-ship based features was what was announced as the main thing. Here's the original page: https://web.archive.org/web/20121019115057/https://robertsspaceindustries.com/ Here's the FAQ: https://web.archive.org/web/20121018170629/http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/ It's still along the same lines as "Star Citizen" is now - an online persistent-universe game with a huge amount of variety and detail, with some secondary single-player components. The main game was still "Star Citizen" as a connected online universe with other players. There will be public servers that we host for the main universe/game. So we’ll always be adding data, stories and campaigns as well as reacting to the needs and actions of the players. Fully dynamic economy driven by player actions - If too many people fly iron ore to the smelting plants of New Pittsburg, steel prices will drop. Buy low… sell high… you hope. It had optional private servers: A central server system for the persistent universe will be required to assure security, prevent cheating and other bad behavior. We also plan to provide a version that allows private servers similar to Freelancer to be maintained and run by the pilot communities. These would support single and multiplayer space combat battles where teams could hone their skills without having to use the public servers. The offline part was SQ42 still, in a much more limited capacity. Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want Playable offline or online, co-op with friends, you sign up for a tour of duty with the UEE fleet, manning the front lines, protecting settlements from Vanduul warbands. The initial funding gameplay aspect was: Star Citizens will receive access to the Squadron 42 campaign (18 months) 3 mil goal had: Star Citizens will receive access to the Star Citizen universe for online persistent play (30 months) Privateer-like gameplay Multiple Star Systems to Explore – 40 star systems The big online universe with all sorts of other stuff was what was announced. The Wing-commander style part was part of "Star Citizen" as its campaign, but that was not the main game.

It seems to me that all of the replies to my posts are from people that spent hundreds of dollars on a game they know will never be finished because of Chris Roberts mismanagement and lack of "hey let's do X first, release and then move o to Y", opting instead for "hey let's do everything we can do at the same time!" and are butthurt because of it, because truth hurts. I've worded it badly but what I meant was that if Chris Roberts did one thing at a time instead of coming up with new ideas every week to ask for more crowdfunded money, Scam Citizen would be in a good shape and I'd even consider agreeing that it's not an absurd amount of money that was taken off your wallets. As someone said, the lack of a publisher to keep Chris in line is what's damaging SC and it's going downhill in the future. also, let me remind you that it's $300mi backed by the community and several millions from their investors. I wouldn't be surprised if the cost is already over $1bi. To me and several others it's just RSI finding new "issues" or "features" to keep taking money from you, making the game always seem incomplete.

That quote does not say it's a subscription game, at all. In no way does it even imply that. Considering you said that, alongside calling it "scam citizen", it sounds like you don't care about the game or actually know anything about it.

I don't read the star citizen threads. I don't go on the star citizen forums. My only knowledge of the game and its community comes from when it's brought up in the news or when I see videos of people showing off new space ships. At first I thought elix's long winded, overly detailed responses were needlessly defensive. I thought it was weird he felt the need to respond to nearly every complaint about the game, but it's starting to make more sense to me. Again and again I see people refer to him and others in that community as fools, cultists, and morons who're falling for a transparent scam. And it just fucking isn't, and they aren't. People are not idiots just because they want something different from what you want. They believe progress is being made on SC not out of blind faith, but based on real, measurable improvement. CI is not, and as far as I'm aware never has been, dishonest about the state of the game or the speed at which progress is being made. When they fuck up, they admit it. When they show the game off, they don't attempt to cover up its flaws. Is it physically possible that Star Citizen can't be made more stable than it is currently? Sure. Do you have any knowledge that indicates that's the case? Do you have a background in a relevant field that informs that opinion? Is that opinion based on the view of a reliable source? All I'm looking for is even the slightest reason to believe you aren't just pulling shit right out of your ass. And so far I've been given nothing. So please, enlighten me.

I will give you the Squadron 42 being a "side thing". That's not how I remember it, but you appear to be right. Either way, I stand by what I said about Star Citizen itself. I'm sorry, but that FAQ reads to me as Star Citizen being a pretty straightforward open world space sim, just with a focus on MP. I don't see anything in there about the FPS combat, walking around in enormously complex and asset dense cities, full scale pseudo-procedurally generated planets to fly around on, going shopping for clothes, waiting for a train, literal pets, having to hire and manage god damn flight attendants to pass out drinks to passengers, or any other number of ridiculous features added on later. The hospitality mechanics being detailed for the Starliner was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. It was the moment where I felt that "this has to stop," and that Star Citizen had lost its way. I went from becoming an increasingly skeptical supporter of Star Citizen to the jaded asshole I am now about it that typically keeps his mouth shut because I can't be bothered to upset its fanbase. Seriously, I wish I had the imagination to make this stuff up: The MixMaster is connected to eight different beverages and has a rotating set of nozzles. Pressing one of the eight associated buttons causes the corresponding beverage to dispense until the button is released. Alongside the seat of the passenger that ordered the drink and the time remaining before a reputational penalty starts to accrue is the formula for the desired concoction. A formula such as 1-1-4-8 would indicate that two parts beverage 1, one part beverage 4, and one part beverage 8 are required. The quality of the drink – displayed on the MixMaster – is determined by how accurately the portions were allocated. If the player isn’t happy with the quality of the drink they can simply press a key to discard it and start anew, but ships carry a limited supply of beverages so this tactic should be used sparingly. Upon acceptance of a drink it is moved to a conveyor belt on the side. Thus, players can prepare multiple drinks in a row and then move to deliver them, or one player can mix the drinks and another can focus on getting them where they belong. Again, I admit to being in a minority because so much of the community just eats this shit up, but that's not what I signed up for. I just wanted a spiritual successor to Wing Commander and Freelancer.

My only worry is about the universe, I get told and have read a lot of the background lore and its just..dry.

Things like the pets were stretch goals, but the FPS combat and the associated aspects were not - that as there from the very start. It's always been a game where you're more than just a ship, it was intended for you to be a character the whole time. The whole "FPS gameplay was a stretch goal!" thing gets bought up a lot, but it is entirely wrong. These were from early on during the Kickstarter: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11wivt/i_am_chris_roberts_creator_of_wing_commander/c6q8d5f/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11wivt/i_am_chris_roberts_creator_of_wing_commander/c6q7x90/?utm_content=permalink&utm_medium=front&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=IAmA https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/11wivt/i_am_chris_roberts_creator_of_wing_commander/c6q7k8k/ And other parts of the early gameplay articles mentiong stuff about boarding (and thereforeFPS gameplay too), with the earliest mention of it outside of those reddit posts being the 3.5mil stretch goal letter where it say it's to "expand the boarding mechanic" - not add it. The FPS gameplay is a very important part of the game overall, it isn't some secondary aspect or something that can be seperated from the core game - it is just as important as the ships are. The drink dispenser stretch goal stuff is a bit absurd, though.

I was an early backer. Here's my 2 cents. I'm highly disappointed that it's taken this long to get my hand on something aproaching something that remotely resembles what they were selling me on. Ive seen art, I've seen ships, I've seen design docs, I've played the modules. Up untill the last few months I had been seriously doubting that the game would evolve past a 600+m/s space joust simulator. Or that any of this would be anything more then the musing of type of person who'd start a thread for a new source mod idea starting with "I'm not a programer or mapper I'm an ideas guy" except with a job to do so. Though what I'm beginning to see is a game coming out of tech hell and proper design taking root. I have serious question for Chris on wasted effort. My doubts have been raised.

"oh but you literally don't have a clue what you're talking about, we paid hundreds of dollars for an incomplete game that only recently got space flight done after 7 years in development!!! stop please you're making me mad" Turns out SC might be the new Anthem after all, it just needs to be acquired by EA and have a manager that treats the developers like slaves. The hardest part, which is not knowing what you're going to develop, is already done. And it was caused by Chris Roberts deciding to do everything at the same time instead of focusing on substantial features. My opinion: it was advertised as an open-world space simulator. only after it reached a good amount of pledges they decided to create the FPS shooter part of it.

What a good way to discredit everyone arguing against you without actually doing anything to dispute their arguments. That's fantastic. Do you expect anyone to take you seriously? Even if you were interpreting that statement correctly, which you're not, that's ancient as fuck news btw, the game is and has been for a while confirmed to be pay-once-play-forever. Needing to spend tons of money for years keeping servers up is one of the reasons they're trying to gobble up as much cash now -- they need to build up savings for when the ship sales stop. I'm quoting this one line rather than blowing up my post size by quoting the entirety of one or all of Why485's posts on this page and this response should be considered general, not specific to this line. I'm also not really responding directly to you so apologies for talking about you like you're not here. I'm sympathetic to the complaints from people like Why485 and a non-FP friend of mine who backed during the kickstarter at the very beginning and only wanted the game that was pitched right then and there, with some of the stretch goals being pretty cool if they have time to deliver on them while satisfying the promised release date. That release date was blown out of the water by the project budget going from around $20-25 million (private investment was planned to supplement the $6 million crowdfunding goal; this was unnecessary) to over $220mil six and a half years later. The timeline exploded and anyone who wanted the simpler game they were promised have to get a refund or chump up and come along for a ride they never asked for. That's not a fun experience. I'm on team "fuck yeah go big" but I know that the original, simple Star Citizen vision is (or at least was) as important to Why485 as the "full" vision the game is trying to accomplish is to me, and if the tables were turned I'd probably be pretty sour because I'd be lamenting all of the robbed ambition so I can sympathize with being dragged along for a wild bull ride through a cactus farm when you were promised a pony walk around a pond. Unfortunately, you can't make a game twice (I mean you can but that's even more insane than any plan Chris Roberts has actually voiced out loud to backers) so everyone's stuck on the long train, but on the other hand everyone who backed early is getting so much more game than they thought back in 2012 -- hopefully the dragged-along crowd can at least find some enjoyment in the giant mutated beast when it finally crosses the finish line. People may not notice but I typically don't argue with Why485 about Star Citizen when he rolls into a thread about it and voices his (usually negative-leaning) opinion, and there's a reason: He knows his shit about the project and is criticising it from an educated position. He may not be 100% on the ball with every detail every single time (fuck he's only human) but when I see him complaining about this or that with SC, typically how it's blown up into this giga-project because Chris Roberts isn't satisfied with shooting for the moon in his whale-powered rocket, I don't have to roll in and vomit a whole bunch of info correcting misinformation and disinformation because he's accurate with his barbs at the project. I may not always agree with his positions but I know they are based on reason and reality and he doesn't need me to well ackshually! to correct a sub-Kotaku awareness of things. See, I have to create wordwalls because people don't know what they're talking about. In their defense, keeping up with SC news and keeping track of things devs say about revisions to design notions and all that is practically a part-time job and I don't blame anyone who just does not have the time commitment for it. But I'd appreciate it if people wouldn't disregard me when I try and inform them just because I wasn't able to deliver all of the information they need to know to understand even their own argument, let alone my rebuttal, in a tweet. If you didn't want anyone to challenge your uninformed opinion go start a blog and disable comments. Even I think the drinks-serving minigame is too much autism for any game that's meant to be profitable, at least as it was described in the Genesis Starliner concept materials.

Nope. Not even. By using containerization and procedural/determined systems for everything, the game(s) are inherently front-loaded with work, and the current level of dev undertanding and technical limitations that's just how it is. Did they have to do this? No. No they did not. Has every other game that used this level of procedural methodology failed hard? Except for Just Cause, yes, yes they have. Does this mean is autodoomed to failure? No, no it does not. These technologies have been used successfully before, 6/18dof has been used before, just not all at the same time and for universal usage. nested scripting for all the things worked just fine in DooM ]I[, 6dof worked just fine in Shattered Horizon, Full body persistence works just fine in [Skyrim mod here], containerization works just fine in [Skyrim mod here] procedural systems playing nice with each other works fine now in No Man's We Finally Fixed It, putting them all together with a coat of Chamfered PBR is a absurdly ridiculously astronomically herculean task, but it is not impossible. Putting it together by 2020 might be impossible, but saying it can't done at all is simply bullshit. Lots and lots game studios are already moving in this direction, but none of them can take the risks CI is, because shareholders and Marketing Leads hold all the keys.

Why485 gets my stamp of approval even though he's become disillusioned and disenchanted by Star Citizen and what it's become. I don't agree with everything he says concerning SC's development and their chances of success, but he has spent a lot more time paying attention to the project than the average critic. His criticisms about the flight model and flight dynamics in particular have been accurate and prescient for years, in particular. I don't always like what he has to say but he's usually on solid footing when he says it.