Star Citizen Backers have reached the 72 million dollar mark.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 745.343
That is again approx 1100 new Star Citizens per day and +1 M$ in 6 days.
Lots of new info about dirtside operations (e.g. shopping on planets, fighting on planets, going to a clinic, planning a navigational route, having a drink etc.) has been made public. I recommend to watch the PAX South Townhall videos if you want to know much more about Star Citizen than the current dogfight module.
"The February Subscriber Flair is the Gladius ship model, by Takuetsu Starships the most trusted name in ship models. Subscriber flair is a small gesture of our appreciation. The ship model should already be in your hangar!
This realistic ship model of the Gladius is the fifth in a collection of Star Citizen’s ships. Display your Gladius with pride, and then collect other models to complete the display. Includes stand and collector’s box.
The Gladius is an older design which has been updated over the years to keep up with modern technology. In military circles, the Gladius is beloved for its performance and its simplicity. A fast, light fighter with a laser-focus on dogfighting, the Gladius is an ideal interceptor or escort ship.
Takuetsu Starships is a leading die-cast model spaceship manufacturer based in Fujin City, Centauri founded in 2894. They hold the reproduction licenses from spaceship manufacturers and engineering companies such as RSI and Anvil Aerospace. Takuetsu are well known amongst collectors to make superior, highly detailed models. They produce perfect replicas of personal, commercial, military and even alien spaceships in various scales."
Originally posted by Elsabolts I would like to see alittle more game and a little less pledgeing?
They have already shown more "game" than any other space sim knock off.
So far we have Arena Commander arena PVP and PVE and we get the FPS module in January or February.
We have seen FPS working.
We have seen the persistent universe working.
We have seen planetary landing and walking around working.
We have seen multicrew ships working.
We have seen avatars working.
We have seen racing working.
We have seen NPC characters working with AI.
We have seen ship outfitting working.
And a bunch of other stuff I´m too lazy to list.
Can´t wait until it reaches 100 million $ of pledges, the console-only fans, publisher agents and other game advertisers who don´t want to see SC succeed will probably implode with rage.
Nope matter of fact i posted a video comparison of the three big boys about 3 weeks ago or so and one that i can't remember the name of now looked really good and will be doing more and looked to be the best product imo.Mainly because it had to do with landing on planets and doing stuff on planets.
No Man's Sky is one of those games that will give it a go.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
No Man's Sky is one of those games that will give it a go.
NMS will be cool once they let you meet other players above the level of reading their name in a "Discovered first by ...." line. And NMS very much needs some kind of overall story, even if its only the archetypical "Find the ancient alien race ...."
as an example of game-changing (sic !) highly successful crowdfunding campaigns:
"Over the course of the past five years, the crowdfunding industry has grown from a fringe phenomenon, allowing indie artists to monetize social capital, to a multibillion-dollar industry. Now, video game designers raise enormous sums to develop games well in advance of their release (Star Citizen), multibillion-dollar corporations look to crowdfundng campaigns for innovation and acquisition targets (Oculus Rift), universities fund ambitious research projects, including an unmanned mission to the Moon (Lunar Lion), and at least one SuperPAC has raised millions to end all SuperPACs (Mayday). Riding the wave, in 2012 President Obama signed the CROWDFUND Act (as part of the JOBS Act), allowing individual investors access to early-stage investment deals, an opportunity that has been reserved for the wealthy since the 1930s."
More and more the non gaming press discovers Star Citizen as an economic example and world record setter:
"Star Citizen marks an important step in the crowdfunding industry, because it extends a campaign well beyond its initial objective and incorporates major crowdfunding mechanisms into the creative dynamics of the project itself. This case study lifts the hood on the $22 million campaign (and counting!), tells us more about its successful mix and delivers some key learning on the crowdfunding industry current and upcoming trends."
Star Citizen Backers have reached and passed the 78 million dollar mark (78,476,442 $)
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 866.510 and growing.
669.324 of those have supported the game with a pledge package (and therefore own at least one ship).
Current highlight:
gift of REC in game currency units to SC subscribers (enough to test many ships and equipment for months to come) - we are talking a few hundredthousand REC for early backer-subscribers.
There is a new (March 02, 2015) in depth interview with Chris Roberts on stretch goals, milestones and A LOT MORE. I suggest you take a look - lots of useful (some new) information in there. I highlighted some interesting parts in green.
With $74 million raised and a universe of promises made to more than three-quarters of a million people, some may wonder just how realistic Chris Roberts' vision for the all-encompassing, but still unreleased space simulator Star Citizen is.
While bits of the massively multiplayer game featuring space combat, mining, piracy, trading, first-person shooting and a persistent universe have been released, a bulk of the game remains to gamers little more than promise.
Meanwhile, Roberts Space Industries continues to prime interest in the game and feed the funding with a steady release of new ships sold like cars on a car lot for the in-progress game. Roberts says the company pulls in $3 million to $4 million a month and that 200 to 300 people a day buy the game.
So shortly into our meeting early this month, I ask Roberts what seems to me to be the obvious question: "Do you worry that Star Citizen could become a Ponzi scheme, that you're taking money for things now that you promise to produce down the line but never do?
"If the money stopped today would you be able to get all of the things out that you promised?"
Absolutely, says Roberts, creator of Wing Commander and Freelancer.
"For a start, people can only back for a ship when we have it in production," he says. "Right now there is a list. You can go onto the site and there is a whole bunch of ships that players know the name of and the stats of, but we haven't started the conceptual design phase, let alone the 3D modeling phase.
"It's not like we're selling stuff we still have to pay for down the road. By the time we end up like saying this week we're going to have the mining ship sale, it's like, we've already done a lot of the work on it and the remaining work is basically covered by what we bring in."
And those ships remain fertile ground for future funding.
"A bunch of people, they're not interested at all in combat, so they don't want that," he says. "They might be holding out for the mining ship. That will probably be, not hundreds of thousands of sales, but we tend to sell 7,000 to 8,000 of those ships.
"The ships are basically one of the core things that subsidize the building of the game," he says. "Definitely ships cost us money to make and a lot of our cost is a massive amount of people working on ships. But ships are one of the things helping us make the game."
So Roberts is very clear that the ships being sold on the site aren't made available until the company is sure they can be completed. But what about the game itself, the space those ships will fly though and the experiences they'll take part in?
To understand how Roberts is going to deliver such a vast game it helps to understand how the game is being rolled out. Star Citizen is being delivered in updates each building on the last, adding layer like a seemingly endless collection of Russian nesting dolls.
That first tiny doll given to players appeared to be a simple virtual hangar, but it was also the kernel of the game. Next came a ship inside the hangar and the ability to go inside the ship. Then came the first serious interactive part of the game: Arena Commander, which gave players the ability to hop in ships and get into space dogfights.
To get that playable element into the hands of gamers as soon as possible, RSI released it as a simulation within a simulation. That means the combat doesn't fit into any sort of persistent universe; damage taken, wins earned, losses accrued have no impact on the universe itself.
To make that work within the fiction of the game, RSI delivered Arena Commander as an experience accessed inside a holodeck inside the hangar, inside the game. As the game continues to grow, adding doll after doll, RSI will build on experiences separately until finally an update will tie everything together and set it live inside a persistent universe.
Roberts walked me through how that will all come about.
The stars and the moon
"Right now you can play Arena Commander, which is sort of the space combat and that is limited at the moment to the single sort of seater ships and it plays very much like Wing Commander, like any space combat sim," he says. "This [month] we're going to release the first-person shooter part of the game to backers."
The shooter will initially launch with two modes. Roberts describes one of the modes as being sort of like Counter-Strike on a space station. The other, he says, is an Ender's Game sort of battle arena.
"So basically you can do all of those zero-g push-pull stuff," he says.
What made Star Citizen possible, or at least what pushed Roberts to give developing his dream game a try was Minecraft.
"The inspiration for what I did in Star Citizen was Minecraft," Roberts says. "Not necessarily because I was like, ‘Oh my god, look at the graphics.' It was the model that was used for development, this sort of intriguing basic game that would have never ever lived anywhere, no publisher would have ever agreed to back, but that came out of this grassroots community.
"Notch put it out there and basically says, ‘Can you give me' whatever he asked for and of course it was just him so he didn't need that much money, but he used the money to continue to add features and he was listening to the feedback to his game. He kept adding features, then he could afford to hire people and he sort of organically grew it out."
While RSI did eventually seek some funding through Kickstarter, that wasn't the initial plan.
"My original plan was that I was going to raise some money from private investors to build a sort of alpha that didn't have everything I wanted in it," he says. "It would have been enough that I could give it to someone and they could play it and they could give me a reduced amount of money and I would use that money to continue adding features until I built it to my final feature set."
"The inspiration for what I did in Star Citizen was Minecraft."
In other words, the Minecraft system.
"That was my plan," Roberts says. "I was six months into planning that and had already lined up the investors and then Double Fine Adventure came along on Kickstarter and I looked at that and I was like, ‘Maybe I could advance that.'
"That was my sort of epiphany of, well maybe I don't have to wait until alpha, maybe I could get the people in sooner."
Even under this new plan of getting more seed money from Kickstarter and crowd-funding on the game's website, Roberts didn't think he'd get much money. Instead, he thought, he'd raise just enough cash to prove the level of interest to investors.
"I talked to the investor and says I wanted to do crowdfunding," he says. "It was a bit risky because if no one showed up they wouldn't have given me any money."
At most he hoped to bring in $2 million to $4 million with crowdfunding and add in another $10 million from investors to pay for a functional alpha. Then he planned to use that to start bringing in revenue which would be used to finance the rest of the game.
"It was 100 percent originally inspired by the organic growth Minecraft had," he says.
Instead, Star Citizens initial fundraising campaign brought in $6.2 million and nearly $40 million last year, astounding everyone, including Roberts.
Now, well into development on Star Citizen and with plenty of feedback from players, Roberts says he's happy going the route he did. A big issue with things like Steam Early Access, he says, is that despite how clear it might be that people are paying for an unfinished game, some players are still confused.
"Even on Steam Early Access you still get people thinking they're buying a final game and they kind of complain about it," he says.
Because the Star Citizen team spends so much time communicating with the community and because almost all updates talk about how early the game is in development, Roberts says they don't run into an overwhelming amount of complaints. And when those complaints come, it's usually the community that explains things to the players.
"I still see people on forums complaining about things broken ... and there's always a bunch of other people going, ‘It's an alpha, that's the definition of an alpha. You're here to help make it better, not to necessarily play a finished game.'
That clear communication, even though it may boil down to semantics, is a big part of why the Star Citizen community is the way it is, Roberts says.
"It's the way you enter into any contract with anyone," he says. "It's about setting expectations. As long as you deliver on those expectations than it goes well.
"For us that's the nice thing about the relationship we have right now," he says. "The community feel like they are part of the development team and they give you feedback and they make the game better. Then we go back and reiterate and drop versions to them and they say, ‘This is balanced better' or ‘You fucked up the missiles now.'"
The development cycle of release, listen to fans, change and release again is bolstered by the game's tight release schedule.
"Every two weeks we do a patch," Roberts says. "Every two weeks we are dropping new functionality in or new balance in or fixing something. Sometimes a big update drops, like the first-person shooter update which includes a whole bunch of new content and features. And then there will be another patch two weeks after that and that might fix the bugs we didn't know about when we did the first one."
The reason a game like Star Citizen might be able to release new content with bugs without spurring fan outrage is because of that relationship both developers and players agree they have, Roberts says.
"Halo: The Master Chief Collection's multiplayer is a complete disaster, right?" Roberts says. "We've definitely had situations where our multiplayer has been a complete disaster when we give it out to backers, but they're understanding because it's pre-alpha and they're like, trying to help you out so they're supportive.
"Once you move across that line into, here's the finished game pay me $60 for it and things don't work, people are like, ‘Fuck you, mother-fucker.' Which is kind of what you've seen this year, you've seen a bunch of games like that."
The reason Star Citizen doesn't run into that anger, Roberts says, is because of the understanding the developers have with the community. It's a different sort of relationship than what people purchasing Halo might have with those developers.
"You're paying the same amount of money, so it's 100 percent semantics," he says. "The thing that works really well for Star Citizen is that this is the contract that in their mind they made with us and it is the contract I feel they made with us. So they don't have an issue with that."
Those expectations are also a big part of how Roberts will decide when the perhaps perpetually-in-development game makes the leap from an alpha or beta to a game that can be sold as "complete."
"That's kind of my thinking of how I want to take Star Citizen across the finish line," he says. "When you go from people being backers to people being pure straight consumers, something changes in the way they view that relationship.
"I don't want to do that switch until I've had enough time with the backers to make the game as good as possible and everyone goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, that's pretty good.'"
His hope is that the shift from beta to no-longer-in-beta will be, as with Minecraft, not that noticeable.
"That's what we think will happen towards the end of 2016 because that's when we think we will have finished the content and get most of the polishing in," he says. "We are saying before then we think it still be rough around the edges and have issues."
The most noticeable difference once the game is retail, he says, will likely be a change in the way the game will be priced.
"We will remove the crowdfunding aspects of it, and that will probably be the point where we do some proper marketing," he says. "At some point, once it is finished, we would probably do a push to get the general gamer in. Right now we're still hitting only a certain segment of the game population"
Galaxy Builders
Currently there are about 320 people, including contractors, working out of six studios developing the game, Roberts says.
"The way I look at the way we run the business now is we size our staff and what we're working on based on what we bring in every month," he says. "So if we're bringing a good amount, which we have been doing for quite awhile, then OK, I can afford to have a 300 person team working on it. If we didn't bring in the same amount it would have to be 200 or 150, which is still a lot."
Of the six studios working on the game currently, four are internal. Los Angeles is the corporate headquarters and is working on space combat, he says. A studio in Austin, Texas is primarily leading work on the persistent universe. A studio in Manchester, run by Roberts' brother, is responsible for Squadron 42 and helping with space combat. And a new studio in Frankfurt is working on the game's core technology, like its use of the Crytek engine, and is helping with the other elements of the game.
On top of the internal studios, Illfonic, based in Denver, is taking lead on the first-person shooter mechanics and Behaviour Interactive in Montreal is helping with operations, the persistent universe and is tasked with building a lot of environments with all of the different planets. That team is also woking on future concepts for the game which include iOS apps and things like Hololens, Roberts says.
On top of that, they have contractors working out of China and Mexico. Every studio helps out with building ships, he says.
"We are trying to split up each studio so they have a focus and lead they do so we can kind of work in parallel, so there is some crossover," he says. "We have about 200 or just under on staff and about 120 or so on contract.
The U.K. team in Manchester was formed with the help of Roberts' brother who was working at TT Fusions on Lego games.
Roberts says he and his brother had talked about working on Star Citizen from the beginning, but his brother had a solid job and Star Citizen was still a wild dream.
"I didn't want to say, ‘Hey, join me on this Kickstarter thing that I don't know if it is going to raise one, two whatever million dollars.' Once we got into the fundraising, though, it was pretty clear what the trajectory was.
"[My brother] says, ‘There are only so many Lego games you can do and this is the sort of game I want to be doing.' So we basically hired him and 40 people from that team, the core. They resigned and opened Foundry 42.
And with Foundry 42, Roberts didn't just land a team of developers who have worked together for years and led by his brother, a lot of those developers had a history making games similar to Star Citizen.
"A lot of the people working at 42 built Starlancer and Freelancer 2 a long time ago," Roberts says. "It's fun for them to come back to the genre and do that."
Making space combat cool again
Space combat seems to be cool again. The massive success of Star Citizen should be proof enough of that, but it's not the only proof. Eve Online, of course, has had a long running, if not mainstream, success as a space game. No Man's Sky has captured a lot of interest. And then there is the success of Elite: Dangerous.
When I asked Roberts if he thinks Star Citizen helped revitalize the genre of space combat, he declined to have the game take the credit, but did say that often all a genre needs to return is a bit of proof.
"I think it's one of those things that someone just had to do it and then everyone says people want this and then all of a sudden for whatever reason the prejudice changes," he says. "There was this prejudice that no one wanted these kind of games anymore, no one was interested. Finally, I think the thing Star Citizen did was show what you could do with today's technology.
"All of a sudden that changed the perception then I think other people feel safer committing to it," he says.
Roberts likens the shift to how people once felt about first-person shooters.
"It was all very sort of like Doom and Quake and fantastical and stuff and cool and fun and then there was Call of Duty," he says. "It was World War II and everyone was like, 'Aw yeah man, awesome, I remember shooting nazis in Wolfenstein. Fuck yeah, I want to go around in World War II. The first Call of Duty sold well but not 20 million units and it sort of built from there.
"But until that moment people weren't thinking of historical first-person shooters."
Another example, Roberts says, is World of Tanks.
"I swear to god you could have gone to any publisher and says 'I want to do a World War II tank game' and they would go, 'Well, do you want to sell 5,000 copies? We're not in that business get the fuck out of here.' Now World of Tanks has 40, 50 million people registered and they bring in huge amounts of money. And now you have Armored Warfare and everyone else going into the tank sim genre."
Too much stretching
With all of Star Citizen's new funding now coming to the company directly through its website, Roberts is in a strange position for a crowdfunded game: He's concerned about asking for more money for more features.
"We actually kind of backed off from doing stretch goals recently just because we've done so many of them and there is always a bit of a debate," he says. "First of all, we're starting to run out of ideas and second of all we have a lot to do and people started complaining."
So instead of stretch goals tied to new features, RSI is now offering up more behind-the-scenes looks at the game and its many parts.
"We shifted," he says. "Instead we'll do a deep dive every million; instead of a new feature, we're going to talk about how we're going to be doing something, the design, and reward people that way."
The studio has, in fact, already received funding through stretch goals of everything the team dreamed up before launching the project.
"A stretch goal was like if I drew out a big road map for this project, it's get out the base functionally and then go beyond what I wanted," he says. "Go beyond what I wanted is kind of where we are at now.
"We definitely have the funds, the resources to do that."
Moving forward, Roberts says, any sort of stretch goal would have to substantively add to the game.
And no wonder, look at just one place Star Citizen's lofty goals have it headed, future missions that are the ultimate expression of Roberts' grand vision for the action portion of the game.
"So for instance, one mission could be like, capture the Idris frigate," he says. "The first stage would be coming in and getting rid of fighter cover. Then you would need to shoot the defense guns off. And then you would go into the ship, board it and take it over. Basically, seamlessly going from flying around in space to getting aboard the ship and getting into a first-person shooter fight.
I wonder at which point the game will actually start to make money to put aside or for profit, as it sounds there is enough content planned out to eat up all of the future budget too, with three full single player campaigns and all the stuff they want to add when the initial game goes live
Star Citizen Backers will reach the 79 million dollar mark in a few hours.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 872.088 and growing (up from 866.510 from the 78 M$ mark).
673.386 of those are backers with a pledge package and therefore at least one ship (up from 669.324 from the 78 M$ mark).
The highlight this week was the founding of the new CIG studio in Frankfurt (speciality: Cry Engine).
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PS:
>>>>>
I wonder at which point the game will actually start to make money to put aside or for profit, as it sounds there is enough content planned out to eat up all of the future budget too, with three full single player campaigns and all the stuff they want to add when the initial game goes live
>>>>>
There is that old promise that every $ from the crowdfunding campaign will go into development of SC and running the servers and operations of the Persistent Universe. That would mean the profit would come from normal sales of the finished product shortly before, during and after game launch and any sales from Mission "Discs" and the in game shop. As Chris Roberts said in the long interview quoted in a post above, the crowdfunding campaign and selling of pledge packages (including ships) will stop at game launch of the (Full) Persistent universe (end of 2016ish).
Star Citizen Backers have reached the 80 (!) million dollar mark.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 880.411 and growing.
Number of UEE Fleet Captains with at least one ship : 681.661
The highlight this month was the introduction of the "Grabby Hands" cargo handling concept and the long awaited line of modular cargo ships MISC Hull A-E.
has at least one ship as part of the pledge package. Which makes him a UEE captain. "Fleet Captain" = Captain of the UEE Fleet (scroll down CIG homepage for current number of UEE Fleet members)
However, once the game has launched you do not have to own a ship to be able to play the game. You could be a crew-member of a multi-crew ship and/or a space marine close quarters specialist. That means the number of "Star Citizens" that earned UEE citizenship through military service will be higher than the number of UEE captains.
While Roberts makes money the game in the moment is an obvious fail, with just a hope that maybe one day could succeed and people trying to give "good reasons" for people do not play. I wouldn't be so sure that all the phantom backers have only good reasons to do not play the game. I think that they are in its majority pissed of with the project and how it became a cash grabbing focus only. The attitude of CIG of going deep and deep to praise whales, even when promises need to be broken, just show to me that they are more and more grabbing in who still believes on them and ignoring all the rest, with no hope that will ever be able to convince the others, the great majority of backers who do not listen to their excuses all the time.
While some game still comes out, a lot of people will end scammed by Roberts. Many already were, many still will be. Yes. Because they basically believed in what Roberts said in their sales approach, so, they can't our couldn't have crystal ball to imagine that a 20-year experienced CEO would be so amateur, irresponsible or just a liar willing to cash grab and saying whatever is necessary for that.
CIG basically confirmed that don't care with their legal responsibilities on not doing deceptive marketing one of these days.
They also do not want to let people to talk about the risks of lawsuits in their forums, and consider that "offensive".
In other words, letting customers knowing about their rights and the responsibilities of the company is something "offensive" for the company and must to be punished by a "probation", "ban hammer".
Someone worried that the company's mistake could lead to lawsuits where they would have to pay indemnities with the backer's money, instead putting it into the game, is "offensive".
Those people have no clue about the shit of what they say. The price that they pay when they hire fanboys to put in their Staff team. They just keep adding proof again and again of a bad faith attitude on business (regardless if they have a bad faith purpose, they would have serious problems to save themselves of such accusation in a court of law with so many "mistakes", quotes in purpose, made), of their tries to dumb down the customer base and so on. More and more food for the interested attorneys, that definitely are going to jump in their throats as soon as CIG gather more millions, so in this way, their slice be bigger.
But anyway... people are waking up... 2 years later after some people had noticed their behavior and had given the feedback to CIG about that, and they did not listen and basically burned who tried to give such feedback in the past... but later is better than never:
At this rate, will Star Citizen become the most expensive MMO ever made ?
And not only that, but will it simultaneously set a second record: No outstanding loans/debt at launch ?
1. No. Not even close to the most expensive.
2. SC will have the greatest debt of all to repay . . . that of hype and expectations. It's easy to make back money and pay off a financial debt - you might not be hugely profitable, but the debt can be recovered. Hype though, can get quite high, sometimes almost impossible to fulfill.
Comments
Star Citizen Backers have reached the 72 million dollar mark.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 745.343
That is again approx 1100 new Star Citizens per day and +1 M$ in 6 days.
Lots of new info about dirtside operations (e.g. shopping on planets, fighting on planets, going to a clinic, planning a navigational route, having a drink etc.) has been made public. I recommend to watch the PAX South Townhall videos if you want to know much more about Star Citizen than the current dogfight module.
Have fun
New flair item in game ... the Gladius ship model.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14500-February-Subscriber-Flair
"The February Subscriber Flair is the Gladius ship model, by Takuetsu Starships the most trusted name in ship models. Subscriber flair is a small gesture of our appreciation. The ship model should already be in your hangar!
This realistic ship model of the Gladius is the fifth in a collection of Star Citizen’s ships. Display your Gladius with pride, and then collect other models to complete the display. Includes stand and collector’s box.
The Gladius is an older design which has been updated over the years to keep up with modern technology. In military circles, the Gladius is beloved for its performance and its simplicity. A fast, light fighter with a laser-focus on dogfighting, the Gladius is an ideal interceptor or escort ship.
Takuetsu Starships is a leading die-cast model spaceship manufacturer based in Fujin City, Centauri founded in 2894. They hold the reproduction licenses from spaceship manufacturers and engineering companies such as RSI and Anvil Aerospace. Takuetsu are well known amongst collectors to make superior, highly detailed models. They produce perfect replicas of personal, commercial, military and even alien spaceships in various scales."
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Star Citizen Backers have reached the 73,5 million dollar mark.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 761.130
That is approx 800 new Star Citizens per day and +1.5 M$ in 20 days.
The highlight this month was the in depth look at mining in Star Citizen. Including the new massive 170 (!!) m long mining ship named Colossus:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14518-Rugged-Colossus-Orion-Mining-Platform
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Star Citizen Backers have reached and passed the 74 million dollar mark.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 766.258
Thats + 5128 new backers, or approx. 1000 a day.
The highlight this month was the "Wonderful World of Star Citizen" - the show BY the community FOR the community, with some top videos
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14527-The-Wonderful-World-Of-Star-Citizen-Episode-1
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Nope matter of fact i posted a video comparison of the three big boys about 3 weeks ago or so and one that i can't remember the name of now looked really good and will be doing more and looked to be the best product imo.Mainly because it had to do with landing on planets and doing stuff on planets.
No Man's Sky is one of those games that will give it a go.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
NMS will be cool once they let you meet other players above the level of reading their name in a "Discovered first by ...." line. And NMS very much needs some kind of overall story, even if its only the archetypical "Find the ancient alien race ...."
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Star Citizen Backers have reached the 75 million dollar mark.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 797.238 and growing.
Thats + 30.980 new backers, or approx. 2582 (!!) a day.
The highlight this month was the Star Citizen "PAX East 2015" presentation "The First Person Universe"
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14576-PAX-East-Presentation
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Haters gunna hate I guess.
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 851.558 (up from 797.238) and growing.
The highlight this month was the Star Citizen Version 1.1 (ex Arena Commander 1.1) Patch.
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Star Citizen Backers have reached the 77 million dollar mark.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 855.643 and growing.
659.992 of those have supported the game with a pledge package (and therefore own at least one ship).
Upcoming highlight: test drive next week for free the Aegis Gladius
http://i.imgur.com/F3AFWqO.jpg
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Once again (20 FEB 2015) Star Citizen is mentioned on "Forbes" (author Jed Cohen):
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theyec/2015/02/20/the-future-of-crowdfunding-what-the-next-5-years-will-bring/
as an example of game-changing (sic !) highly successful crowdfunding campaigns:
"Over the course of the past five years, the crowdfunding industry has grown from a fringe phenomenon, allowing indie artists to monetize social capital, to a multibillion-dollar industry. Now, video game designers raise enormous sums to develop games well in advance of their release (Star Citizen), multibillion-dollar corporations look to crowdfundng campaigns for innovation and acquisition targets (Oculus Rift), universities fund ambitious research projects, including an unmanned mission to the Moon (Lunar Lion), and at least one SuperPAC has raised millions to end all SuperPACs (Mayday). Riding the wave, in 2012 President Obama signed the CROWDFUND Act (as part of the JOBS Act), allowing individual investors access to early-stage investment deals, an opportunity that has been reserved for the wealthy since the 1930s."
More and more the non gaming press discovers Star Citizen as an economic example and world record setter:
http://www.crowdsourcing.org/search?q=Star+Citizen&c=0
Its being presented as an example and case study in business analysis circles
http://crowdfunding.cmf-fmc.ca/case_studies/star-citizen
"Star Citizen marks an important step in the crowdfunding industry, because it extends a campaign well beyond its initial objective and incorporates major crowdfunding mechanisms into the creative dynamics of the project itself. This case study lifts the hood on the $22 million campaign (and counting!), tells us more about its successful mix and delivers some key learning on the crowdfunding industry current and upcoming trends."
Have fun
Star Citizen Backers have reached and passed the 78 million dollar mark (78,476,442 $)
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 866.510 and growing.
669.324 of those have supported the game with a pledge package (and therefore own at least one ship).
Current highlight:
gift of REC in game currency units to SC subscribers (enough to test many ships and equipment for months to come) - we are talking a few hundredthousand REC for early backer-subscribers.
Have fun
There is a new (March 02, 2015) in depth interview with Chris Roberts on stretch goals, milestones and A LOT MORE. I suggest you take a look - lots of useful (some new) information in there. I highlighted some interesting parts in green.
http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/3/2/8131661/star-citizen-chris-roberts-interview
"Building galaxies in Star Citizen's expanding universe
By Brian Crecente @crecenteb
on March 02, 2015 at 4:00p
With $74 million raised and a universe of promises made to more than three-quarters of a million people, some may wonder just how realistic Chris Roberts' vision for the all-encompassing, but still unreleased space simulator Star Citizen is.
While bits of the massively multiplayer game featuring space combat, mining, piracy, trading, first-person shooting and a persistent universe have been released, a bulk of the game remains to gamers little more than promise.
Meanwhile, Roberts Space Industries continues to prime interest in the game and feed the funding with a steady release of new ships sold like cars on a car lot for the in-progress game. Roberts says the company pulls in $3 million to $4 million a month and that 200 to 300 people a day buy the game.
So shortly into our meeting early this month, I ask Roberts what seems to me to be the obvious question: "Do you worry that Star Citizen could become a Ponzi scheme, that you're taking money for things now that you promise to produce down the line but never do?
"If the money stopped today would you be able to get all of the things out that you promised?"
Absolutely, says Roberts, creator of Wing Commander and Freelancer.
"For a start, people can only back for a ship when we have it in production," he says. "Right now there is a list. You can go onto the site and there is a whole bunch of ships that players know the name of and the stats of, but we haven't started the conceptual design phase, let alone the 3D modeling phase.
"It's not like we're selling stuff we still have to pay for down the road. By the time we end up like saying this week we're going to have the mining ship sale, it's like, we've already done a lot of the work on it and the remaining work is basically covered by what we bring in."
And those ships remain fertile ground for future funding.
"A bunch of people, they're not interested at all in combat, so they don't want that," he says. "They might be holding out for the mining ship. That will probably be, not hundreds of thousands of sales, but we tend to sell 7,000 to 8,000 of those ships.
"The ships are basically one of the core things that subsidize the building of the game," he says. "Definitely ships cost us money to make and a lot of our cost is a massive amount of people working on ships. But ships are one of the things helping us make the game."
So Roberts is very clear that the ships being sold on the site aren't made available until the company is sure they can be completed. But what about the game itself, the space those ships will fly though and the experiences they'll take part in?
To understand how Roberts is going to deliver such a vast game it helps to understand how the game is being rolled out. Star Citizen is being delivered in updates each building on the last, adding layer like a seemingly endless collection of Russian nesting dolls.
That first tiny doll given to players appeared to be a simple virtual hangar, but it was also the kernel of the game. Next came a ship inside the hangar and the ability to go inside the ship. Then came the first serious interactive part of the game: Arena Commander, which gave players the ability to hop in ships and get into space dogfights.
To get that playable element into the hands of gamers as soon as possible, RSI released it as a simulation within a simulation. That means the combat doesn't fit into any sort of persistent universe; damage taken, wins earned, losses accrued have no impact on the universe itself.
To make that work within the fiction of the game, RSI delivered Arena Commander as an experience accessed inside a holodeck inside the hangar, inside the game. As the game continues to grow, adding doll after doll, RSI will build on experiences separately until finally an update will tie everything together and set it live inside a persistent universe.
Roberts walked me through how that will all come about.
The stars and the moon
"Right now you can play Arena Commander, which is sort of the space combat and that is limited at the moment to the single sort of seater ships and it plays very much like Wing Commander, like any space combat sim," he says. "This [month] we're going to release the first-person shooter part of the game to backers."
The shooter will initially launch with two modes. Roberts describes one of the modes as being sort of like Counter-Strike on a space station. The other, he says, is an Ender's Game sort of battle arena.
"So basically you can do all of those zero-g push-pull stuff," he says.
What made Star Citizen possible, or at least what pushed Roberts to give developing his dream game a try was Minecraft.
"The inspiration for what I did in Star Citizen was Minecraft," Roberts says. "Not necessarily because I was like, ‘Oh my god, look at the graphics.' It was the model that was used for development, this sort of intriguing basic game that would have never ever lived anywhere, no publisher would have ever agreed to back, but that came out of this grassroots community.
"Notch put it out there and basically says, ‘Can you give me' whatever he asked for and of course it was just him so he didn't need that much money, but he used the money to continue to add features and he was listening to the feedback to his game. He kept adding features, then he could afford to hire people and he sort of organically grew it out."
While RSI did eventually seek some funding through Kickstarter, that wasn't the initial plan.
"My original plan was that I was going to raise some money from private investors to build a sort of alpha that didn't have everything I wanted in it," he says. "It would have been enough that I could give it to someone and they could play it and they could give me a reduced amount of money and I would use that money to continue adding features until I built it to my final feature set."
In other words, the Minecraft system.
"That was my plan," Roberts says. "I was six months into planning that and had already lined up the investors and then Double Fine Adventure came along on Kickstarter and I looked at that and I was like, ‘Maybe I could advance that.'
"That was my sort of epiphany of, well maybe I don't have to wait until alpha, maybe I could get the people in sooner."
Even under this new plan of getting more seed money from Kickstarter and crowd-funding on the game's website, Roberts didn't think he'd get much money. Instead, he thought, he'd raise just enough cash to prove the level of interest to investors.
"I talked to the investor and says I wanted to do crowdfunding," he says. "It was a bit risky because if no one showed up they wouldn't have given me any money."
At most he hoped to bring in $2 million to $4 million with crowdfunding and add in another $10 million from investors to pay for a functional alpha. Then he planned to use that to start bringing in revenue which would be used to finance the rest of the game.
"It was 100 percent originally inspired by the organic growth Minecraft had," he says.
Instead, Star Citizens initial fundraising campaign brought in $6.2 million and nearly $40 million last year, astounding everyone, including Roberts.
Now, well into development on Star Citizen and with plenty of feedback from players, Roberts says he's happy going the route he did. A big issue with things like Steam Early Access, he says, is that despite how clear it might be that people are paying for an unfinished game, some players are still confused.
"Even on Steam Early Access you still get people thinking they're buying a final game and they kind of complain about it," he says.
Because the Star Citizen team spends so much time communicating with the community and because almost all updates talk about how early the game is in development, Roberts says they don't run into an overwhelming amount of complaints. And when those complaints come, it's usually the community that explains things to the players.
"I still see people on forums complaining about things broken ... and there's always a bunch of other people going, ‘It's an alpha, that's the definition of an alpha. You're here to help make it better, not to necessarily play a finished game.'
That clear communication, even though it may boil down to semantics, is a big part of why the Star Citizen community is the way it is, Roberts says.
"It's the way you enter into any contract with anyone," he says. "It's about setting expectations. As long as you deliver on those expectations than it goes well.
"For us that's the nice thing about the relationship we have right now," he says. "The community feel like they are part of the development team and they give you feedback and they make the game better. Then we go back and reiterate and drop versions to them and they say, ‘This is balanced better' or ‘You fucked up the missiles now.'"
The development cycle of release, listen to fans, change and release again is bolstered by the game's tight release schedule.
"Every two weeks we do a patch," Roberts says. "Every two weeks we are dropping new functionality in or new balance in or fixing something. Sometimes a big update drops, like the first-person shooter update which includes a whole bunch of new content and features. And then there will be another patch two weeks after that and that might fix the bugs we didn't know about when we did the first one."
The reason a game like Star Citizen might be able to release new content with bugs without spurring fan outrage is because of that relationship both developers and players agree they have, Roberts says.
"Halo: The Master Chief Collection's multiplayer is a complete disaster, right?" Roberts says. "We've definitely had situations where our multiplayer has been a complete disaster when we give it out to backers, but they're understanding because it's pre-alpha and they're like, trying to help you out so they're supportive.
"Once you move across that line into, here's the finished game pay me $60 for it and things don't work, people are like, ‘Fuck you, mother-fucker.' Which is kind of what you've seen this year, you've seen a bunch of games like that."
The reason Star Citizen doesn't run into that anger, Roberts says, is because of the understanding the developers have with the community. It's a different sort of relationship than what people purchasing Halo might have with those developers.
"You're paying the same amount of money, so it's 100 percent semantics," he says. "The thing that works really well for Star Citizen is that this is the contract that in their mind they made with us and it is the contract I feel they made with us. So they don't have an issue with that."
Those expectations are also a big part of how Roberts will decide when the perhaps perpetually-in-development game makes the leap from an alpha or beta to a game that can be sold as "complete."
"That's kind of my thinking of how I want to take Star Citizen across the finish line," he says. "When you go from people being backers to people being pure straight consumers, something changes in the way they view that relationship.
"I don't want to do that switch until I've had enough time with the backers to make the game as good as possible and everyone goes, ‘Yeah, yeah, that's pretty good.'"
His hope is that the shift from beta to no-longer-in-beta will be, as with Minecraft, not that noticeable.
"That's what we think will happen towards the end of 2016 because that's when we think we will have finished the content and get most of the polishing in," he says. "We are saying before then we think it still be rough around the edges and have issues."
The most noticeable difference once the game is retail, he says, will likely be a change in the way the game will be priced.
"We will remove the crowdfunding aspects of it, and that will probably be the point where we do some proper marketing," he says. "At some point, once it is finished, we would probably do a push to get the general gamer in. Right now we're still hitting only a certain segment of the game population"
Galaxy Builders
Currently there are about 320 people, including contractors, working out of six studios developing the game, Roberts says.
"The way I look at the way we run the business now is we size our staff and what we're working on based on what we bring in every month," he says. "So if we're bringing a good amount, which we have been doing for quite awhile, then OK, I can afford to have a 300 person team working on it. If we didn't bring in the same amount it would have to be 200 or 150, which is still a lot."
Of the six studios working on the game currently, four are internal. Los Angeles is the corporate headquarters and is working on space combat, he says. A studio in Austin, Texas is primarily leading work on the persistent universe. A studio in Manchester, run by Roberts' brother, is responsible for Squadron 42 and helping with space combat. And a new studio in Frankfurt is working on the game's core technology, like its use of the Crytek engine, and is helping with the other elements of the game.
On top of the internal studios, Illfonic, based in Denver, is taking lead on the first-person shooter mechanics and Behaviour Interactive in Montreal is helping with operations, the persistent universe and is tasked with building a lot of environments with all of the different planets. That team is also woking on future concepts for the game which include iOS apps and things like Hololens, Roberts says.
On top of that, they have contractors working out of China and Mexico. Every studio helps out with building ships, he says.
"We are trying to split up each studio so they have a focus and lead they do so we can kind of work in parallel, so there is some crossover," he says. "We have about 200 or just under on staff and about 120 or so on contract.
Roberts says he and his brother had talked about working on Star Citizen from the beginning, but his brother had a solid job and Star Citizen was still a wild dream.
"I didn't want to say, ‘Hey, join me on this Kickstarter thing that I don't know if it is going to raise one, two whatever million dollars.' Once we got into the fundraising, though, it was pretty clear what the trajectory was.
"[My brother] says, ‘There are only so many Lego games you can do and this is the sort of game I want to be doing.' So we basically hired him and 40 people from that team, the core. They resigned and opened Foundry 42.
And with Foundry 42, Roberts didn't just land a team of developers who have worked together for years and led by his brother, a lot of those developers had a history making games similar to Star Citizen.
"A lot of the people working at 42 built Starlancer and Freelancer 2 a long time ago," Roberts says. "It's fun for them to come back to the genre and do that."
Making space combat cool again
Space combat seems to be cool again. The massive success of Star Citizen should be proof enough of that, but it's not the only proof. Eve Online, of course, has had a long running, if not mainstream, success as a space game. No Man's Sky has captured a lot of interest. And then there is the success of Elite: Dangerous.
When I asked Roberts if he thinks Star Citizen helped revitalize the genre of space combat, he declined to have the game take the credit, but did say that often all a genre needs to return is a bit of proof.
"I think it's one of those things that someone just had to do it and then everyone says people want this and then all of a sudden for whatever reason the prejudice changes," he says. "There was this prejudice that no one wanted these kind of games anymore, no one was interested. Finally, I think the thing Star Citizen did was show what you could do with today's technology.
"All of a sudden that changed the perception then I think other people feel safer committing to it," he says.
Roberts likens the shift to how people once felt about first-person shooters.
"It was all very sort of like Doom and Quake and fantastical and stuff and cool and fun and then there was Call of Duty," he says. "It was World War II and everyone was like, 'Aw yeah man, awesome, I remember shooting nazis in Wolfenstein. Fuck yeah, I want to go around in World War II. The first Call of Duty sold well but not 20 million units and it sort of built from there.
"But until that moment people weren't thinking of historical first-person shooters."
Another example, Roberts says, is World of Tanks.
"I swear to god you could have gone to any publisher and says 'I want to do a World War II tank game' and they would go, 'Well, do you want to sell 5,000 copies? We're not in that business get the fuck out of here.' Now World of Tanks has 40, 50 million people registered and they bring in huge amounts of money. And now you have Armored Warfare and everyone else going into the tank sim genre."
Too much stretching
With all of Star Citizen's new funding now coming to the company directly through its website, Roberts is in a strange position for a crowdfunded game: He's concerned about asking for more money for more features.
"We actually kind of backed off from doing stretch goals recently just because we've done so many of them and there is always a bit of a debate," he says. "First of all, we're starting to run out of ideas and second of all we have a lot to do and people started complaining."
So instead of stretch goals tied to new features, RSI is now offering up more behind-the-scenes looks at the game and its many parts.
"We shifted," he says. "Instead we'll do a deep dive every million; instead of a new feature, we're going to talk about how we're going to be doing something, the design, and reward people that way."
The studio has, in fact, already received funding through stretch goals of everything the team dreamed up before launching the project.
"A stretch goal was like if I drew out a big road map for this project, it's get out the base functionally and then go beyond what I wanted," he says. "Go beyond what I wanted is kind of where we are at now.
"We definitely have the funds, the resources to do that."
Moving forward, Roberts says, any sort of stretch goal would have to substantively add to the game.
And no wonder, look at just one place Star Citizen's lofty goals have it headed, future missions that are the ultimate expression of Roberts' grand vision for the action portion of the game.
"So for instance, one mission could be like, capture the Idris frigate," he says. "The first stage would be coming in and getting rid of fighter cover. Then you would need to shoot the defense guns off. And then you would go into the ship, board it and take it over. Basically, seamlessly going from flying around in space to getting aboard the ship and getting into a first-person shooter fight.
"That's the dream. That's the dream." "
Have fun
Star Citizen Backers will reach the 79 million dollar mark in a few hours.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 872.088 and growing (up from 866.510 from the 78 M$ mark).
673.386 of those are backers with a pledge package and therefore at least one ship (up from 669.324 from the 78 M$ mark).
The highlight this week was the founding of the new CIG studio in Frankfurt (speciality: Cry Engine).
Have fun
PS:
>>>>>
I wonder at which point the game will actually start to make money to put aside or for profit, as it sounds there is enough content planned out to eat up all of the future budget too, with three full single player campaigns and all the stuff they want to add when the initial game goes live
>>>>>
There is that old promise that every $ from the crowdfunding campaign will go into development of SC and running the servers and operations of the Persistent Universe. That would mean the profit would come from normal sales of the finished product shortly before, during and after game launch and any sales from Mission "Discs" and the in game shop. As Chris Roberts said in the long interview quoted in a post above, the crowdfunding campaign and selling of pledge packages (including ships) will stop at game launch of the (Full) Persistent universe (end of 2016ish).
79 Million !!
to be exact $ 79,006,860
Star Citizens
872,556
Star Citizen Backers have reached the 80 (!) million dollar mark.
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 880.411 and growing.
Number of UEE Fleet Captains with at least one ship : 681.661
The highlight this month was the introduction of the "Grabby Hands" cargo handling concept and the long awaited line of modular cargo ships MISC Hull A-E.
Have fun
Anyone who supports the project with a pledge package
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge
has at least one ship as part of the pledge package. Which makes him a UEE captain. "Fleet Captain" = Captain of the UEE Fleet (scroll down CIG homepage for current number of UEE Fleet members)
However, once the game has launched you do not have to own a ship to be able to play the game. You could be a crew-member of a multi-crew ship and/or a space marine close quarters specialist. That means the number of "Star Citizens" that earned UEE citizenship through military service will be higher than the number of UEE captains.
Have fun
Star Citizen Backers have passed the 81 million dollar mark (81,416,634 $)
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 885,753 and growing (up from 880.411).
Number of UEE Fleet Captains with at least one ship : 692.426 and growing (up from 681.661)
The highlight this week was the new Arena Commander tutorial and the upcoming Star Marine FPS module.
Have fun
Star Citizen Backers have passed the 82 million dollar mark (82,001,640 $).
Number of Star Citizens is currently at 889,743 and growing (up from 885,753).
Number of UEE Fleet Captains with at least one ship : 696.443 and growing (up from 692.426)
The highlight this week was again the new Arena Commander tutorial and the upcoming Star Marine FPS module.
Have fun
At this rate, will Star Citizen become the most expensive MMO ever made ?
And not only that, but will it simultaneously set a second record: No outstanding loans/debt at launch ?
More telling that this counter that CIG shown in his front page is the data gathered from their leaderboards:
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/260416/graph-arena-commander-player-participation-5-13-update/p1
While Roberts makes money the game in the moment is an obvious fail, with just a hope that maybe one day could succeed and people trying to give "good reasons" for people do not play. I wouldn't be so sure that all the phantom backers have only good reasons to do not play the game. I think that they are in its majority pissed of with the project and how it became a cash grabbing focus only. The attitude of CIG of going deep and deep to praise whales, even when promises need to be broken, just show to me that they are more and more grabbing in who still believes on them and ignoring all the rest, with no hope that will ever be able to convince the others, the great majority of backers who do not listen to their excuses all the time.
While some game still comes out, a lot of people will end scammed by Roberts. Many already were, many still will be. Yes. Because they basically believed in what Roberts said in their sales approach, so, they can't our couldn't have crystal ball to imagine that a 20-year experienced CEO would be so amateur, irresponsible or just a liar willing to cash grab and saying whatever is necessary for that.
CIG basically confirmed that don't care with their legal responsibilities on not doing deceptive marketing one of these days.
They also do not want to let people to talk about the risks of lawsuits in their forums, and consider that "offensive".
In other words, letting customers knowing about their rights and the responsibilities of the company is something "offensive" for the company and must to be punished by a "probation", "ban hammer".
Someone worried that the company's mistake could lead to lawsuits where they would have to pay indemnities with the backer's money, instead putting it into the game, is "offensive".
Those people have no clue about the shit of what they say. The price that they pay when they hire fanboys to put in their Staff team. They just keep adding proof again and again of a bad faith attitude on business (regardless if they have a bad faith purpose, they would have serious problems to save themselves of such accusation in a court of law with so many "mistakes", quotes in purpose, made), of their tries to dumb down the customer base and so on. More and more food for the interested attorneys, that definitely are going to jump in their throats as soon as CIG gather more millions, so in this way, their slice be bigger.
But anyway... people are waking up... 2 years later after some people had noticed their behavior and had given the feedback to CIG about that, and they did not listen and basically burned who tried to give such feedback in the past... but later is better than never:
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/260733/questionable-business-and-policy-practices-by-cig
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/261112/i-think-this-needs-to-be-said-it-s-not-about-the-lti
1. No. Not even close to the most expensive.
2. SC will have the greatest debt of all to repay . . . that of hype and expectations. It's easy to make back money and pay off a financial debt - you might not be hugely profitable, but the debt can be recovered. Hype though, can get quite high, sometimes almost impossible to fulfill.