Greetings Citizens,
Four years ago today the initial Crowd Funding Campaign for Star Citizen came to a close with equal amounts of exhilaration and exhaustion.
I am always humbled by the incredible response that Star Citizen received from space sim fans and PC gamers. The groundswell that swept up the project from its announcement and carried it forward ever since has been something the team and I have never taken for granted.
Thanks to all of your support, weve been able to expand the scope of Star Citizen to create a living, breathing universe. No other game tries to deliver the scale and fidelity that Star Citizen does with its detailed worlds that can have you walking through a dense jungle, wandering the dark alleyways of a futuristic city, landing on a space station orbiting a moon, or piloting a space ship across vast star systems teeming with activity, all from a seamless first person viewpoint.
One of the first Star Citizen concepts ever revealedOne of the first Star Citizen concepts ever revealed
Your contributions have enabled us to hire some of the best and brightest in the video game business. The planetary tech we showed at Gamescom and CitizenCon is a prime example of something that only became possible with your continued support. We now stand at four internal studios and 377 employees all dedicated to building the best game we can. We are not building something to be played for a week and then discarded, we are building Star Citizen to be an online destination that can grow and flourish for years to come.
With this ambition comes a price. Not just in the salaries of the hundreds of people pouring their hearts into the project, but in the unpredictability of the groundbreaking technology that we need to develop to achieve a game of this scale and detail. We have taken a lot of flak over the last couple of years for the extending timeline of Star Citizen, but the simple fact is that game development, especially game development on the scale of Star Citizen, is complicated. If you talk to any developer that works on large titles they will tell you that schedules, especially early in the development cycle, move all the time. Most people never see this because a publisher wont announce a project publicly until it is very far along; normally at least in Alpha, with all the technology and gameplay R&D completed. Even then, the timelines can be unpredictable as can be seen in the delays on big name titles from publishers.
With Star Citizen, we never had the luxury of developing behind closed doors until all the technology has been built. Weve been public since before we opened the doors of our first office in early 2013.
Having the participation and feedback from all of you as we build Star Citizen block by block is vital to making a game that will stand the test of time. Polish and iteration help make good games great and we have the opportunity to do this with the participation of an engaged and active user base. Thats a luxury that most other games dont have.
Open Development does have its drawbacks. Not everyone understands the process or how difficult it can be. We have always tried to be open and share our progress. We refactored Around the Verse to focus more on developers showing and talking about their work to help give insight into the process. Our monthly reports have more information than any monthly report I had to do for Electronic Arts or Microsoft when at Origin or Digital Anvil.
The only thing we currently dont share is internal estimates on completion and dates.
As you know weve not been keen to give hard dates on the project after the initial set of dates which we had estimated when the project was a lot smaller in scope. When Ive talked about releases, Ive always qualified any discussion of timing with were hoping to or the goal is to give a rough timeline for people, but unfortunately some people often tend to forget the qualifiers and treated my comments nonetheless as a promise.
Because of this we have been reticent to share our internal timelines, even with caveats, as it always seems to cause trouble; one section of the community gets annoyed because things are perceived as late while another gets annoyed wondering why we shared dates at all if they arent solid. Of course even when we dont give dates we have yet another part of the community getting annoyed because they feel left in the dark and have no idea when the next build will drop.
Basically it is a Kobayashi Maru.
Ive reflected long and hard on this dilemma and have concluded, to quote another Eighties film, the only winning move is not to play.
What if we didnt give you just an estimated date, but instead shared our internal schedule? No filter, no hedging. You see what we see.
Whether or not to share this kind of information has been a long running debate among the team here at Cloud Imperium Games. Target dates are not release dates, and everything you see will shift at some point, sometimes slightly and sometimes wildly. The danger in doing this has always been that casual observers will not understand this, that there will be an outcry about delays every time we update the page.
Weve taken stock, thought through everything and decided that, while that is a risk, above all we trust the community that has given us so much support. The community that has let us focus our passions on this incredible project. You have allowed us to take this journey, you have tracked and followed so much of how game development works
and now we think it is right to further part the curtain and share with you our production process.
