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Almost 18 Million on an idea and counting?!?!
FoeHammerJT
Member Posts: 148
Does this scare anyone else even a little?
I was early on this kick starter and I hope this works out but I just did some math.
$17,974,396 raised by 244,874 Star Citizens.
This means on average players have already spent 73.00 each on this game. It wont even release for another year+ and who knows if it will even be good in the end?
Is this a product of too much disposable income?
Boredom in the gaming community?
Also...
Does everyone realize there's no guarantees here?
A less scrupulous team of 5-7 people could each walk away with millions of freely given money using a simple tech demo...
This is just incredulous to me. Certainly speaks to a distinct void in the gaming market if you can raise these serious dollars and not even have a playable game yet..
Comments
And we're past 18 million and well on our way to 19.
There are no guarantees in crowdfunding, this is true. Like you said, it's quite possible for a conman to take advantage of people's enthusiasm, which is why you should take the time to research any project you're thinking of funding. As far as Star Citizen goes it has an increasingly large team of industy veterans building it, headed by a man who's made some of the best games of this particular genre in the past as well as having experience producing Hollywood movies and all that entails when it comes to planning, budgeting and so on and so forth. They didn't present the project to the public until they had already been working on it for a year and produced a rather impressive looking demo. In short, Chris Roberts and CIG did their homework and laid down a proper prepwork foundation for what they wanted to make, then they ensured the loyalty of their backers by showing an unprecedented level of transparency and a way of handling their community which every other dev and producer could stand to learn a lot from.
Another important point is the fact that the space sim genre had been on life support at best for a decade, declared a dead genre by the big publishers who are only interested in the making the next COD they can milk until the cows come home. PCs? PCs were declared a dying platform worthy only of sub-par console ports. In short the demographic Star Citizen aims itself at were being ignored and discounted by the publishers, and it's a demographic with a higher average age than the average gamer, and therefore by and large a higher level of disposable income to spend on a game when someone shows them they are being taken seriously.
The result? Well, we're seeing it. I think for many the amount they're pledging is at least partially a deliberate "big middle finger salute" to the publishers and their beancounters who have been deciding what games are viable for the last decade.
So true. And the way they give out the modules like the hangar and end of this year the dog figth part, its easy to put the trust in this game/dev team. They very open and upfront with the com. So I trust them. If some one can pull this off then its CIG fore sure!
I think its bizzare too
Sure this guy has a good reputation, but seriously, this is a bit much.
I highly doubt he will deliver, this will be an epic disaster
if you want money in this world the only thing you have to do is promise people what they want.....politicians have been doing it since time immemorial.
personally I think that if those 240k people want to pay 100$ each to play Wing Commander online 3 years after they paid for it, then all the more power to them.
i'll just wait for the Steam sale. tks.
Never really believed in funding an idea with no certainty of a return, it's like putting stock into a company you have absolutely no true idea if they will sink or swim, you just believe it will work. And like the Batman saying... I believe in Chris Roberts! I shelled a large amount on kickstarter, granted explaining to my wife why I spent money on something she cannot see yet was difficult. But now with the Hangar module, even she was impressed by the shear quality of the ships and beautiful graphics. And now we might get planetside style FPS ground combat? I mean come on!!! I'm about to shat myself in amazement.
TwitchTV: iNeoki
=P
Ideas and early prototypes get funded all the time, with much larger sums of money. How do you think games and movies are made?
In this case, each "investor" will be losing only a small amount of money if the project fails.
Now I know why nobody wants to pay monthly subs for MMO's anymore.
They've given all their money to Kickstarter projects for games they can't play yet, so they need all current games to be F2P until their project of choice is completed...
Yep, no guarantee, people know this.
What amazes me is that people worry about what other people do with their money, and feel the need to act like their accountant.
No, I have not given to this game, or any other kick starter. but if something did stand out, I could see doing so. Most people give $20-50, that is not life changing, and if the idea they loved gets completed, I am sure it would be well worth it to them.
I imagine most, if not virtually all people that give money approach it as, if the idea fails, they will be disappointed, but life goes on.
If Avatar was more like UO2, I would of probably given money to it myself.
I'm an original backer/Founder from day one and as you know not everyone is average and I spent much more than $1000 on this game and I feel many others are happy to invest this into an idea which we all want to see come true. If it fails then personally I don't give a shit about my invested money as I just go earn some more and spend it where I want. So after speaking and meeting thousands of other investors in Koln about two weeks ago I think they feel the same as I do.
I also gave up 9 hours of my day to help them set up and patch their hanger module so that everyone else could see it on that evening and I did this for free. I normally charge £50 per hour for my fees so you do the maths
I'm sure if you ask other people they would give their time for free too just to see this work. But the thing which impresses me the most is how amazing the community is on the forums and in person everyone is like close friends and that is priceless for me.
The real question you should be asking is, do people free they are getting value for money! The only way to answer that is to join the community and see for your self. I would be happy to buy additional items if I feel it supports the team, however I am also conscious that we are boarding on pay to win and that's not what I invested for and they are addressing this to keep it real.
See you in the Verse!!!
AKA Debt Collector
Asbo
I lost pretty much the same amount of money when I purchased the finished and playable Force Unleashed 2.
Star Citizen may have started as an Idea but right now I have a small piece of that idea on my Hard Drive that I can load up and play around with. Also the transparency of all of the Dev team is phenomenal. I'm not talking about a PR front here either. I can go onto the RSI forum right now and post a question to any of the Developers working on this game and get an answer usually within 24 hours. Also we hear a lot of "Chris Roberts this and Chris Roberts that" but almost all of the Devs working on this game are industry veterans with very outstanding histories when it comes to PC games. These aren't just some fly by night Indy guys you've never heard of.
I for one expect great things to come from this outstanding development team that Mr. Roberts has assembled around Star Citizen. I have no doubt there will be a pretty awesome game at the end of this ride. Even if there isn't the guys at Cloud Imperium Games have already given me so much content that I still feel it's money well spent.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
Well, i can't speak about all crowd funding games i do know a little of this one and i feel it was a lot of foolish spending.
This guy had literally nothing to show,yet people threw money at him based on what?talk,chatter,promises?
If a stranger asked to borrow 5 bucks 99.9% of the time you say no or ignore him,yet when a stranger like this guy asks for a total handout people give it over,makes little sense.
The gimmicks that go along with this type of funding also annoy me,they are BRIBES,give me more and i will give you better perks than the other players.
I have seen a lot of foolish investments over time and have noticed there are a lot of rich people looking to invest near anything.Point being,if you have a decent product with something to show,chances are you get some funding.Here is where it gets tricky,SC may have some outside funding,you will never know about and still take your free handouts.Also if they don't have any investors,then why would you trust them,if people with lots of money to invest won't ?
Everyone is free to spend their money wherever they want but from my perspective,it seems foolish to fund games unless you have money to burn.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Well these guys clearly have gotten thier hands on a fair sum of dollars. It would be a legendary lessen to gaming if they fail to deliver a launch based upon the amount theyve accumulated.
While I have the money to throw at them among countless others, I choose to sit on the sidelines and watch the story unfold.
The value of the product has been conveyed well and the scope of the project seems within reason for the sum collected. However, I do question the process of rollout and development/ investor involvement in relation to final release. Its seems incedibly risky to allow this amount of transparency to the population at large. A wrong step, retraction of intial intent or a broken promise could be seen as falsehood and destroy trust in dev and damage the value of the brand. Not to mention I fear that too much involvement of end-user input and the possibility of open broadcast discontent early on (or in any stage this soon in the game dev) could radically change the inital vision.
Clearly I'm on the fence about this title. I want so badly to trust that this game will revive the space sim market. EVE has been played out. Im done with speadsheet space backgrounds. E&B has been long gone for years. Jumpgate EVO vaporized into thin air and gamigo or whoever it was buried it alongside the original JG with the Netdevil team. STO is a sham and BS Gal is a steaming pile. Theres not much left to fill the space but empty space itself right now.
To say that this game NEEDS to release I think is an understatement. But how long will it take and at what point can it be considered playable before a bench sitter like me finally forks over some money?
I think they have a ways to go. I also hope they pull it off. Good luck to them.
Here's the thing I don't think those who criticize backing projects like Star Citizen understand: It's a risk. We know this. We are perfectly aware of it, at least those of us who buy in early on. Later in the process you get those who didn't really do the research and buy in on hearsay from someone else, then get angry when they realize what they gave money to was a space sim and not a third person platformer, or whatever. You'll always get some of these people, but for the most part we know the risk. We know the game might never happen. You know what? Everything is a risk. Getting up out of bed in the morning is a risk. You could slip and fall, cracking your head on the nightstand and die horribly. The world could end tomorrow in nuclear fire. The devs could have been planning a scam all along and are just laughing as they run away with the money.
It's a risk and what you have to ask is it a risk worth taking? Do you feel the likelyhood of success is greater than failure? I feel it is. I've taken the time to inform myself about the game and the people making it. I feel they can be trusted, as much as one can trust anyone who is not oneself. I also have not spent any money I cannot afford to lose without noticing it at all. I make a comfortable living. I probably spend more in a month or two on shitty junkfood and other pointless, useless things which give me far less than Star Citizen has already given me. This is not a financial burden for me, and as such I couldn't give a damn if the game never happened and I was out X amount of dollars. I wouldn't care about that. I would merely be disappointed an awesome game I was hoping to play never happened. And if noone was willing to take a chance on the project like myself then that game would never have happened either, and I would still be disappointed, so why not back something I feel would be cool so that both I and others who may not have the financial freedom like myself can maybe get to play a cool game somewhere down the line?
As for the accusations of the game being too ambitious because noone has made something with as wide a scope yet, to that I call bullshit. If we were to decry and mock every developer of something ambitious we'd still be playing Pong. Hell, we'd be playing tic-tac-toe. No, screw that! If we were to always listen to people who say "it's too ambitious" we'd still be living in caves and look askance at those weird types messing around with that newfangled fire thing, which will never catch on by the way and have you heard of those morons who tie pieces of sharpened flint to their pointy sticks? Never going to work, mark my words. Really, people have become so used to being told to be satisfied with the "lowest viable amount of content" in their games they happily lap up the sub-par shit spewed out by publishers whose only priority is to get the most amount of money for the least amount of work so their accountants and shareholders will be happy.
TL;DR I can afford to back Star Citizen without it even registering as a blip on my financial radar if it fails. I think the concept of the game is awesome and fantastically ambitious. I've been waiting for this genre to make a return for a decade. I feel the devs have shown they are trustworthy enough for me to back them. Anyone who has a problem with that can bite my wrinkly arse.
He had a quite impressive Tech demo that he not only showed a very impressive trailer created using it with all in game assets but loaded it up and showed himself actually playing it in real time during the reveal before he asked for one red cent. Literally nothing to show huh? Maybe you should do some research on the subject before you come into a thread and start talking out of your anal orifice.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
Bren
I thought I remembered there being more than just an idea. A tech demo and a reputation is pretty much what developers take to investors in traditional funding attempts, so the only difference here is that the "investors" are the people who would be playing the game anyway.
Though it's not really investing in the traditional sense. Investors in the traditional sense expect a return on their investment, and a profit. In this case, the only return on investment from the crowd funding is the game itself, and the developer gets to pocket the rest. Which is fine, since the people investing aren't going to be out any more money than they would than if they just bought the game.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Come on, let's face it. If they pull this off, it would be every space/scifi gamers wet dream, no doubt. Right now they have this neat hangar demo, but it isn't quite enough to open my wallet - though it is very nice looking. Besides, it looks like they've got this money thing covered already - they don't need my pennies.
Sure I'll chip in if the game ever arrives on my lifetime.
Yeah, here is the entire video of the reveal at GDC 2012.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}