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STAR CITIZEN, Chris Roberts' (Wing Commander) New Game [$25 million funded]
- Thread starter Ashodin
- Start date
Yeah, that too.
ooo I promised myself not to back stuff on kickstarter this month ...... but technically backing this is not kickstarting it .. I mean it's not even on kickstarter .... First responder
Or you could just wait until November and contribute, that would satisfy your requirements as well.
Hey I might be without a job by then! Rather spend the money when I have it! Take it Chris & Team!
Yeah, I'm a little torn over this one. I desperately want the game described in the pitch video but a few things are off:
My big concern is the source of the remaining funds. The earliest news was that Chris Roberts would be financing the game on his own with the crowd sourcing to back it up. Has that ever been accurate? I don't want to get involved if this is only to gague interest for a real publisher since they should be funding the entire game instead of leeching money from those willing to pay more than MSRP.
Did anyone really believe that this project would rake in $5M as the stretch goals imply? In 30 days? And the vague goal descriptions have me worried about what the game will be if only the bare minimum is reached.
And WTF @ no Kickstarter. This custom site is as stable as a house of cards. I'd bet anything that this project would have made more on Kickstarter even with that 5% cut. The other strange thing is how the custom site accepts Paypal which means that funds are being collected before the 30 days are even up.
My big concern is the source of the remaining funds. The earliest news was that Chris Roberts would be financing the game on his own with the crowd sourcing to back it up. Has that ever been accurate? I don't want to get involved if this is only to gague interest for a real publisher since they should be funding the entire game instead of leeching money from those willing to pay more than MSRP.
Did anyone really believe that this project would rake in $5M as the stretch goals imply? In 30 days? And the vague goal descriptions have me worried about what the game will be if only the bare minimum is reached.
And WTF @ no Kickstarter. This custom site is as stable as a house of cards. I'd bet anything that this project would have made more on Kickstarter even with that 5% cut. The other strange thing is how the custom site accepts Paypal which means that funds are being collected before the 30 days are even up.
I think he is financing the game on his own up to this point, with possibly some slight contribution from investors.
He said that the crowd funding was to prove to investors that the market was there, and they will kicking in significantly more money depending on how large the market is.
I think he describes most of this in the video on the front page of the site, its buried somewhere in there.
This should answer this question, the stretch goals are more for showing what will be out on release. Should have clarified them more.
Here are the general theories about kickstarter. You can request to have your money refunded in full if it fails to meet its goals.
So yeah, with the recent release of Netflix in Sweden I just my first contact with Star Trek: First Contact (hurr!). Now I wanna get out into space too! Gonna have to reinstall Freespace 2 or Freelancer or anything where I fly stuff in space while waiting (for two years) for this.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
If you're into Trek, you should find a copy of Bridge Commander instead. lol
(It's too bad all those Star Trek games are pretty much lost to time and will probably never see the light of day again).
Confidence Man
Member
This is why I haven't contributed. He seems to be saying "Look at all these features! ...Which we hope to do if we get big investors on board after crowdfunding."
firehawk12
Subete no aware
So can someone explain what "Citizens cards" are and what the difference is between the 30, 35, and 40 dollar tiers?
Heh, that Takedown FPS shooter thing is going after the same model. As did Ryan Payton with his iOS game. These things are like pre-pre-orders to show investors that there is interest in the game.
They've shown more and have already done more than any other big kickstarter title.
The $30, $35, and $40 tiers are all the same.
The only difference is that the $30 and $35 tiers have limits, meant for early adopters. So if you pledge early, you can get in for $5 or $10 cheaper.
The $30 tier seems to have about 1400 spots left and the $35 tier seems to have about 4400 spots left.
So basically, it looks like about 1000 people are idiots...Or they just like paying more for the same product. To be fair, its not well explained and it might not have been explained at all on the backup site.
Zero-Crescent
Member
Interesting, looks like the opening of the main site's accounts system has enabled quite a few people to get in at the first responder level (and probably the other lower levels), making the average contribution fall to $92.70. Keeping at that average, they'll need at least 21,575 people to make the $2 million mark.
maabus1999
Member
This game looks awesome but at the same time really ambitious. Is he going to have the funding for all this?!?
EDIT: I put 30 in with the refund option to Amazon.
EDIT: I put 30 in with the refund option to Amazon.
Cameron122
Member
I've never been so excited for a game. I'll throw down like 100 in November, but for now I just put down ten. Spent a lot this month.
Black_Stride
do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Now we are talking....fucking yes!
I wonder why he went with CryEngine 3 instead of Unreal, lighting maybe?
Just went over $800,000
I was looking at some data for other crowd funding projects, and the graphs kind of worry me. The first 3 days are usually when you get the highest jump in pledges, and he basically lost all three of them because the site was down.
He had the first hours, but after that the site imploded. He said that they were on track to become the highest crowd funded project ever, but lost that when they went down. If you believe that data, than it is not too much of a stretch to believe that if he used Kickstarter, he would be above 1.6 million dollars at this point.
Something might be a little lagged since the ticker is showing 8600 backers and I just added up about 9500 backers summing the individual pledge amounts. Missing 1000 backers from you ticker could be a lot of money when they are averaging about $100 a pop.
I was looking at some data for other crowd funding projects, and the graphs kind of worry me. The first 3 days are usually when you get the highest jump in pledges, and he basically lost all three of them because the site was down.
He had the first hours, but after that the site imploded. He said that they were on track to become the highest crowd funded project ever, but lost that when they went down. If you believe that data, than it is not too much of a stretch to believe that if he used Kickstarter, he would be above 1.6 million dollars at this point.
Something might be a little lagged since the ticker is showing 8600 backers and I just added up about 9500 backers summing the individual pledge amounts. Missing 1000 backers from you ticker could be a lot of money when they are averaging about $100 a pop.
About an hour ago, the Roberts Space Industries Facebook page asked its followers to weigh in on putting "Star Citizen" on Kickstarter.
Chris Roberts' mind may be changing on the issue.
It has 308 likes as of right now.
Chris Roberts' mind may be changing on the issue.
RSA Facebook page said:
It has 308 likes as of right now.
Better streaming tech, all lighting is real-time, better handling of occlussions, better lod handling, tessellation with good performance, better multicore support.
Of course i'm talking about UE 3.95 here.
Hell yeah finaly he realized that creating fundriser alone is hard stuff. Not only his site was down for first most critical days but also it's hard to see new updates on their site.
He should lunch kickstarter and tie it with their own site. And give it a goal like 2 000 000 with 800 being already pledged. And he should errase counter on his site because it is stupid.
Man this whole thing has become a mess. If he had used the original media hype for a Kickstarter straight away, he'd be closing in on 2 million now, if not more.
Now he's got 800k locked into his own system and is still considering a Kickstarter. Then what happens to the existing backers? Besides the PR boost from using Kickstarter *at this point* will be marginal.
Most of all though it gives the impression he doesn't even know what he's doing. If he can't even build a site to handle the traffic that wants to give him money, who would believe he can pull off the perhaps most ambitious game of all time without it all ending in catastrophic disappointment?
Now he's got 800k locked into his own system and is still considering a Kickstarter. Then what happens to the existing backers? Besides the PR boost from using Kickstarter *at this point* will be marginal.
Most of all though it gives the impression he doesn't even know what he's doing. If he can't even build a site to handle the traffic that wants to give him money, who would believe he can pull off the perhaps most ambitious game of all time without it all ending in catastrophic disappointment?
He knows what he is doing. He wanted to get full 2mln not 70% of that sum.
Problem is that his site was down on most critical days.
As of kickstarter He may announce 1 mln goal to correspond with 2 mln goal on his site. And cash would be together. Meaning he can achieve 1mln on his site and 1 mln in kickstarter then goal would be achieved.
Dictator93
Member
Dont troll.- It is bad for your health
I dunno if Kickstarter will be happy with approving a project like that. Seems kinda half-assed, confusing, and questionable.
In fact, I've been horribly confused by this project for a while. Initially I thought it was a brand new game which was already in development from a publisher. Then it turns out that it's.... a crowd sourced game like all the other Kickstarter games... except it's not on Kickstarter, and instead uses a Wordpress crowd source widget. Now I'm reading that the site totally crashed when it launched (lol!), and checking up on the site itself, the reward seem confusing (why are there multiple reward tiers which all basically offer the exact same thing?), there are huge stretch goals when the initial goal isn't even remotely close to being reached, and the entire user interface just seems like a mess on the page.
I'm... not sure about this...
Yeah, he can just split the overall goal between both sites: $1.5 million on Kickstarter and $1.5 million on his own site.
It may be correct, though, that he's already lost too much momentum at this point and he'll never get enough backing, which is a sad thought. =/
Dictator93
Member
I fully endorse the decision to go kickstarter. Anything that gathers more money
How was that trolling? CE 3 is much superior to UE 3 for open world, dynamic games.
Dictator93
Member
My mistake. I read your post incorrectly! Sorry! Of course CE3 is better. I thought you were stating UE3.95 is better or something
While I agree with some of the above, the same could be said about a lot of Kickstarter projects, even ambitious / very popular ones. As I see it, it's the nature of this relatively new crowdfunding idea, where the kinks / details are being worked out as time goes by. Frankly, I don't find Star Citizen's fundraising campaign to be really all that confusing. To start with, Chris came out with a pretty impressive presentation, detailing, well, the details and actually showing assets from the game. Which, again, is more than what we usually get at the very beginning (or even months later) with a lot of other projects of the same kind. Also, the rewards seem pretty well thought-out and explained to me? What's confusing you?
With that said, the initial site crash hurt them bad, really bad. They should get on Kickstarter and think of a way to restart this whole thing. Star Citizen has to happen!
This was supposed to complete my three dream crowdsourcing projects, along with Doublefine's and Obsidian's, but I still don't feel confident pledging money at this point. The launch was a mess, the stretch goals way to high, and I have questions about what happens if they don't reach primary goal, or even if they do, since the $2m is just part of the budget.
As for their decision not go with Kickstarter, well, it just shows more bad planning on their part, since in the end it probably cost them a lot more with the sites crashes than that 5% fee.
I don't know how they would make a successful relaunch, but it would be great if it happen. From the videos they already have a lot more to show off then the majority of the projects over there, so it would easily hit $2m to $3m.
As for their decision not go with Kickstarter, well, it just shows more bad planning on their part, since in the end it probably cost them a lot more with the sites crashes than that 5% fee.
I don't know how they would make a successful relaunch, but it would be great if it happen. From the videos they already have a lot more to show off then the majority of the projects over there, so it would easily hit $2m to $3m.
I originally thought that another reason they didn't use Kickstarter was that their rules don't allow the crowdfunding goal to be part of larger investment efforts, i.e. the question is, if Roberts' nebulous investors suddenly decide they don't want to be part of it, what happens to the money raised via crowdsourcing? Is the game still getting made in that case?
Cloud Imperium Games Corporation, this is their first project.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...-melt-your-pc-with-new-space-sim-star-citizen
http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/about-cloud-imperium/
linkedin only returns two results, lol. hard to say who else is there. one of them is Roberts the other is not related. there isn't anything on the studio else where.
http://www.linkedin.com/search?sear...Cloud+Imperium&sortCriteria=R&keepFacets=true
Cool, thanks for the info. Exactly what I was looking for.
NuclearWinter
Member
We also know that they have Ryan Church and Jim Martin doing concept art, FWIW.
Idk how you are confuses. Most is explained in the video, the rest is explained in the tiers itself.
The reason there are 3 tiers with the same benefits is because the $30 and $35 tiers are for early adopters and are limited in number. Project Eternity has the same set up. I explained it earlier on this page as well.
What's the difference between 30 and 35 then?
If you just read them it will tell you, or go higher up on this page I already wrote a detailed explanation.
There are a limited amount of spots for the $30 tier, once that fills up there are a limited amount of spots for the $35 tier. After that, the regular price is $40.
All three tiers are the exact same product, the cheaper ones are an incentive for early adopters.
And if you read what you're explaining, you'll realize how silly and over-complicated it is. You only need one limited tier for that. Having more than one is just excessive.
That applies to a lot of the site design in general. It's cluttered, and visually confusing. This is not a criticism on the game pitch or anything, but just an observation of how much info overload there is on the site without communicating clear and important points to a potential contributor. When there is so much random information all over the page, it's hard to tell what are the actual important points they want to emphasize. It just looks like a mess.
One's 5 dollars less than the other. I've seen Kickstarters do this, where there's a special low price tier for getting certain rewards, but there's a limited number. In theory, early adopters all buy in at the $30 mark, then people who come later are stuck with the $35 one, like a pre-order discount, with lots more pre-. In practice, fans get confused and pay for the more expensive one with the assumption it's better than the cheaper entry.
In general though, I've got all sorts of bad vibes from this project. When I first heard about the game it sounded like he had full funding already, but his investors wanted to play a fake Kickstarter game to "gauge interest".
I'm surprised there's a wildly ambitious space game being promised without anyone referencing Battlecruiser 3000.