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Vapourware Scam Citizen - Only people with too much money can become StarCitizens! WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?
- Thread starter Wirdschowerdn
- Start date
rusty_shackleford
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2018
- Messages
- 50,754
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2012
- Messages
- 9,020
Kingston
Arcane
Morkar Left
Guest
Maybe it's more mercyful for him when not...
Remember:
HMM HMM HMM
HMM HMM HMM
Perkel
Arcane
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2014
- Messages
- 15,875
SQ42 milestones
Star Citizen milestones
Those are not complete from 0 to 100% but current state and next milestones before release.
3.4 seems like will be released rather soon as everything is in polishing phase.
Finances from 2012 till 2017
They are sitting on about 100mln in cash right as of 2017 just from pledges
500 people
pledges didn't fall but stayed at the same level past 3 years
about 50mln extra money from third party sponsorships, investements etc.
another 50mln from recent stake buyout (they sold 10% of shares for 50mln)
Darek Smart on suicide watch.
Star Citizen milestones
Those are not complete from 0 to 100% but current state and next milestones before release.
3.4 seems like will be released rather soon as everything is in polishing phase.
Finances from 2012 till 2017
They are sitting on about 100mln in cash right as of 2017 just from pledges
500 people
pledges didn't fall but stayed at the same level past 3 years
about 50mln extra money from third party sponsorships, investements etc.
another 50mln from recent stake buyout (they sold 10% of shares for 50mln)
Darek Smart on suicide watch.
a cut of domestic sheep prime
Guest
W-well I guess this is it for Star Citizen.
It's been fun sifting through the comment sections acting as if this is the end. Even if the continual crowdfunding slowed down (it hasn't), they were valuated at 500 million and Chris Roberts retains 75% ownership of the company. Even in an apocalyptic scenario for the company where they desperately needed cash, Chris would easily be able to get another 300 million+ dollars today. It's even better to see people who unironically believe the Persistent Universe that is live right now is just a ship in a hangar or some shit.
Keep in mind these financials end right as they started pumping out content every quarter including major features like mining, FPS AI, their first planet containing their first city Lorville, tech that doubled or even tripled performance within the persistent universe and by the time the fiscal year ends for 2018, DNA character creation, ArcCorp the equivalent of Coruscant in Star Wars, salvage, the inclusion of 5 more ships, 5 major reworks and the law system will be in too.
/r/StarCitizen_refunds and Something Awful on suicide watch.
It's been fun sifting through the comment sections acting as if this is the end. Even if the continual crowdfunding slowed down (it hasn't), they were valuated at 500 million and Chris Roberts retains 75% ownership of the company. Even in an apocalyptic scenario for the company where they desperately needed cash, Chris would easily be able to get another 300 million+ dollars today. It's even better to see people who unironically believe the Persistent Universe that is live right now is just a ship in a hangar or some shit.
Keep in mind these financials end right as they started pumping out content every quarter including major features like mining, FPS AI, their first planet containing their first city Lorville, tech that doubled or even tripled performance within the persistent universe and by the time the fiscal year ends for 2018, DNA character creation, ArcCorp the equivalent of Coruscant in Star Wars, salvage, the inclusion of 5 more ships, 5 major reworks and the law system will be in too.
/r/StarCitizen_refunds and Something Awful on suicide watch.
Last edited:
Skdursh
Savant
I can answer than question without even watching the video. It's because he's a fanboy idiot.
a cut of domestic sheep prime
Guest
Eh, you mean like a buyout? Someone has to actually be willing to give you the money. And they don't have a great reputation.
Will it ever come out? It's possible, but with all the money they've supposedly taken in, you'd think they'd be a lot closer to a functioning game than the persistent universe, which I am guessing from your brags about performance is under 100 people per server.
Meanwhile, I just bought Elite and Horizons for $12.
They had a good enough reputation to get $50 million dollars in exchange for a 10% stake.
That's because server meshing isn't in yet. Network meshing has always been the final piece of the puzzle to turn Star Citizen into an MMO. It's no secret they've had difficulties with the tech but that's no surprise. There's never been a project of this scale at this level of fidelity.
We're seeing the fruits of their labor now. Take a look at the roadmap, extremely content-heavy for the next 9 months because OCS made its way in and they can finally implement the content and systems they've been developing. Keep in mind the majority of SQ42's tech and systems as seen on the roadmap will be integrated into Star Citizen too.
Great. Go play those until Star Citizen is complete. I've always told people who were frustrated that Star Citizen isn't the same project as it was 198 million dollars ago to play Elite. Elite plans to be comparable to Star Citizen in the long term but it's really a gamble whether they'll survive long enough to see it through. Star Citizen took another approach, which I think is the superior one given how often we see the sentiment of "too little too late" from Early Access games and major overhauls that deliver two-three times the game people were expecting at launch. No Man's Sky is 2-3x the game people dreamed up yet a very large portion of people who bought the game will never revisit it. Even if Elite becomes half the game Star Citizen plans to be, will anyone outside a fringe of their userbase even bother to try it out? You only get one chance at a launch and what Elite Dangerous launched as was a space trucking simulator.
I'm fine waiting for a galactic-scale immersive sim MMO.
lophiaspis
Arbiter
- Joined
- Oct 24, 2012
- Messages
- 379
Are you a paid shill or just a mouth-breathing fucktard?
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2012
- Messages
- 9,020
a cut of domestic sheep prime
Guest
Galactic scale? Aren't they only going to have a few hundred systems? Or was this hyperbole on your part?
Anyway, enjoy that waiting. After 6 years, you must be pretty good at it.
Skdursh
Savant
I'm pretty sure most Star Citizen "true believers" are borderline austismos with way too much of their parents money to throw around. They've become ~ F i X a T e D ~.
hello friend
Arcane
Oh wow these people still exist
If I'm fixated, what the hell are the Goons and Redditors that have been inhaling Derek Smart's farts for the last six years? At least I'm spending my time (and $30) on something I actually enjoy.
I used to think he was a boogeyman for the true zealots that had a real problem but holy fuck. I'd rather have more money than sense than be some of these guys who treat their free time as disposable enough to spend hundreds or even thousands of hours shitting on a crowdfunded video game at every available opportunity.
theSavant
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2012
- Messages
- 2,009
Doesn't that mean they are out of money already? The sum of these is $193 million, and they've raised a total of $211 million. But 2018 is not even included...
Edit: just read - they raised $46 million yesterday in venture capital for the big launch in 2020. Sounds adventurous...
It also looks like a deadline of some sort. They're running out of money. Someone gave them a last money injection, and that was it. It's probably enough to get to summer 2020, but then it's over. Hopefully it will be enough for Squadron 42, because it will surely never be enough for Star Citizen.
That said, even if they do run out of money by summer 2020 I'm sure the progress on Squadron 42 would be good enough, that other companies (like Microsoft... again?) would eventually buy them. Star Citizen however... well thaaat is a whole other story...
Last edited:
Conspiracy
Novice
- Joined
- May 2, 2016
- Messages
- 3
Yup, they had ~15 million in the bank at the end of 2017, but for the past 3 years they've been in the red with income stagnant and trending down.
Without the cash infusion from CRoberts' buddies (a south african born billionaire father & movie producing son apparently) I doubt they would of lasted to the end of 2019, especially with them needing to do further hiring to meet the deadlines laid out in the SQ42 roadmap. It being earmarked for marketing is bullshit.
Angthoron
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2007
- Messages
- 13,056
I don't think anyone cares what Derek has to say at this point. He did a couple of relatively interesting write-ups in 2015 but since then it's been more entertaining to read the SA thread on the topic, and even that is duller than reading the local Shoutbox since the noise to signal ratio is about 20 to 1 at best, and the noise is largely dull.
However, you seem to be a legendary name on that subforum, I think you and Lethality are brought up as having the reverse Midas touch of the MMO genre, every game you two like ends up shit or something like that. Is that true, or are there any MMOs that you were interested in that came out and weren't shit (or died) since the beginning of the crowdfunding age?
Also, have you played Haven & Hearth? It seems to touch on the themes that you find enjoyable in MMOs, and there was a bit of a craze about it on this sub a few years ago.
a cut of domestic sheep prime
Guest
From the sound of it, that looks like where that $50 million he was talking about came from.
https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/20/...raised-46-million-to-launch-big-game-in-2020/
Star Citizen‘s coffers just got bigger, as its parent company has raised an additional $46 million in venture capital, in addition to the $211 million in crowdfunding it has brought in over the past five years from 2.2 million fans. On top of that, it’s also releasing its financial history and announcing that its science fiction game, Squadron 42, will launch in the summer 2020.
It is perhaps the most extraordinary release of information about a major game in progress that I have ever seen, driven in part by regulations in the United Kingdom as well as the company’s own desire to be transparent with and crowdfunding participants who want more information. All for a game that creator Chris Roberts says he always wanted to create. This data is exactly what I wished I had when I was assessing the costs and revenues for Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2.
The CEO of Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries, Roberts said in an interview with GamesBeat that the funding for Cloud Imperium Group comes from Clive Calder (his “family office”) and Keith Calder’s Snoot Entertainment, who are well-known figures in the United Kingdom music business. Under the deal, the investors will own 10 percent of Cloud Imperium, and Roberts will still retain control of the company and hold 75 percent ownership. The post-money valuation of the company is $496 million. Not many game companies ever get to this kind of valuation, especially those that haven’t yet released a game.
The result is a remarkable amount of transparency behind one of the biggest projects under way in the game industry, and it is fitting as fans, crowdfunders, and skeptics have been asking more information from Cloud Imperium Games for a while. Roberts said he believed the best strategy is to be as transparent as possible with fans.
We’re open. We’re public. We’re committed to spending all the money we bring in on development,” Roberts said. “We’ve told everyone on our backer side that the money we raise dictates the level of development spending and scope of what we’re trying to do with Star Citizen. So we’ve long debated — we’re already showing part of the picture, so why don’t we just show it all? We’re already open with how we’re developing it. In some ways we’ve had this internal debate for quite a few years. Why don’t we just publish the consolidated global numbers like you would as a public company so our backers can see where the money goes?”
While Roberts can use the new funds as he wishes, the whole point of raising more money is to develop full marketing campaigns for the launch of the first game in the Star Citizen universe, the single-player Squadron 42 that finally has a launch window. Star Citizen is the larger persistent multiplayer universe, where players can explore worlds and plunder other players as pirates in the science fiction world.
Both are extremely ambitious games.
“The goal of Squadron has always been to have you as the player feel like you’re living this huge science fiction event movie,” Roberts said. “You’re emotionally connected to it. There’s a level of performance from the various characters around you that gives a human connection and an emotion that potentially you haven’t seen or had before in most games. We’re trying our best to push the tech in terms of bringing the actors in — their likeness, their performance, how they fluidly behave. People have seen some of this stuff in prerendered cinematics, but I don’t think anyone’s played it in a game where it’s all fluidly happening around you — where it’s gameplay, but it’s of a cinematic quality.”
Cloud Imperium Games confirmed that it has 520 people working on the overall Star Citizen universe, compared to 464 in 2017 and just 13 people in 2012, when the project was in its infancy. Details were not released for 2018, which hasn’t ended yet, but Roberts said that the year has been the company’s best ever, with more revenue coming in for the early access version of Star Citizen than ever before.
These details are crucial in part because the fans have sometimes wavered. Rumors were rampant at various points in the game’s history that Cloud Imperium was about to run out of money, largely because it reportedly spent a lot more than it brought in through crowdfunding. But a report signed by Cloud Imperium chief financial officer Simon Elms says that the company’s auditors have approved the information released, which has been described in as easy a way possible, Elms said.
As for the complaints, Roberts said it is a work in progress.
“A fair amount of our backers totally get that,” he said. “They’re cool with that. I think there is some subset of people in the gaming world that don’t quite understand that yet about Star Citizen. They look at it through this lens of, ‘Is it released yet?’ Which is a bit different to us. We’re in this weird early access phase where people are playing and doing stuff, but we’re still wiping the database now and then, doing new releases, changing functionality, and rebalancing stuff.”
As far as worker numbers go, the chart below shows that headcount in the U.S. — primarily in Austin, Texas, where the company is based — was the largest percentage within the company from 2012 to 2014. But starting in 2015, the headcount in the rest of the world — primarily in the United Kingdom — became the largest block of employees. The company continues to add people as it nears the launch of Squadron 42. Revenues have come in over the years in the form of presales of games, which means players are paying now for games they will play in the future. Every day, new money comes in through presales. The trick is to not spend ahead of that money.
“Our approach was that we wanted to — the money we’re bringing from crowdfunding, we’re committed to spending on the game and development,” Roberts said. “If we saw a change in that velocity or trajectory of the revenue coming in, we would make an adjustment on our internal development spending. We have a few levers to pull, but we’ve been pretty steady as we’ve gone along. We felt comfortable in our planning on that.”
The new investment was made equally into each side of the Cloud Imperium Group (including both the U.S. and U.K.). Roberts said this all funding round allows the company to dedicated most of its pledge money to development, publishing, and community engagement. Meanwhile, the new round will be used to prepare marketing campaigns for the launch of Squadron 42.
Roberts said that two new board members, Dan Offner, on behalf of the investors; and Eli Klein, as an adviser to the company, have joined the boards of Cloud Imperium UK and Cloud Imperium US. Yet Roberts said he retains full control of the board and group (the umbrella company).
During 2018, Cloud Imperium released into early access its first planet, Hurston, in the overall Star Citizen universe. It also released areas in the multiplayer game known as the landing zone, Lorville, four new moons, 32 new flyable ships, and other updates. The latest quarterly update also added Object Container Streaming (OCS), which is a piece of technology that had been in the works for four years. OCS improves the frames per second, allowing for a faster graphical experience for players. It takes advantage of the available central processing unit (CPU) power, resulting in frame rates in the triple digits. One of the keys to the experience is that players will reportedly never have to see a loading screen, even as them move from space to the surface of a planet.
“People don’t always appreciate how much work and effort it takes to make the modern game, where everyone expects this total detail and fidelity,” Roberts said. “People will complain that we’re taking it too long, but the flip side is, ‘Well, what about this beautiful snow simulation? Why don’t you have what this game is doing? You should do it exactly like that!’ We all want to do that too, but it takes time and effort.”
Roberts also released a public roadmap for the remaining development targets for Squadron 42. That will allow fans to track the game’s progress toward completion.
“When we started the campaign for Star Citizen and Squadron 42, I said that the crowdfunding would go towards development of the game,” Roberts said.
He noted that the marketing expense will be big because Cloud Imperium’s games will be going up against other Triple-A games that have tens of millions of dollars in advertising campaigns behind them. Other developers tackle this problem by partnering with a publisher for the marketing and sales of the game, but that results in putting the game’s destiny in the hands of a third party, Roberts said. And he doesn’t favor that.
Roberts said the company turned away from traditional private equity and venture capital — two of the most common sources of big capital — because of concerns about whether they truly understood what the company’s long-term goals were, and how those were more important than short-term profits.
In the process, Roberts said he met Clive Calder (a billionaire) and his son Keith, who have both been interested in the confluence of entertainment with the ability to directly connect with an audience online. Clive Calder founded the most successful independent music company, Zomba, which was home to some of the biggest music acts in the world. Keith Calder is an independent film producer: his Snoot Entertainment’s most recent films are the critically acclaimed Blindspotting and the Academy Award nominated Anomalisa.
During their first meeting, Roberts said that Clive Calder talked about how he wished that Zomba had ways to bypass the media gatekeepers in the same way that Roberts had done through crowdfunding. That wasn’t possible 15 years ago, but Roberts said that Clive Calder’s views indicated he would be sympathetic to the need to focus on long-term development and patience. Roberts said the investment helps secure his company’s independence.
Among the details in the report: U.S. contractor costs for game developers fell from a high of $8.8 million in 2014, down to only $300,000 in 2017. That reflected the shift of work to overseas locations as well as the conversion of contractors to full-time employees. Costs in areas of operations — such as online service, customer support, marketing, and servers (which number in the hundreds on Amazon Web Services), rose to $7.1 million in 2017. That cost will continue to rise.
Elms said in his report that the accounting shows that the group is “diligently spending the money we are collecting from our backers and customers on game development and publishing.” Over time, the company has gotten better at scoping the scale of development needed, allowing it to adjust both the timing for the launch and the number of developers on the two games. Elms said the current month is the best the company has ever had in terms of finances.
Roberts joked in our interview, “One problem we have is everyone just looks at the headline. ‘Star Citizen raises $200 million,’ and so they immediately think we’re off on a deserted island sipping piña coladas on the back of our super-yacht. … I can’t go and buy myself a $50 million yacht with it.”
Roberts said the team is working hard as the work ramps up.
“No one wants to make an OK game. They want to make a great game,” he said. “When they see other games doing cool stuff, developers want to do that too, and that escalates a little bit.”
And of course in our case, because we’re an ongoing open process, as we’re adding stuff people are coming up with suggestions and ideas. A lot of this stuff is really good, and we of course say, “Yes, we’d like to be able to do that.” On the Star Citizen front, we’re applying a different approach, which is more like — we treat ourselves like a live game. We’re constantly trying to improve it, even though we still have loads of features that we’ve committed to and we still need to do. We’ve made the approach of — it’s a kind of live, iterative process that’s ongoing.
While millions of players have already paid for their games, Cloud Imperium is betting that millions more will buy the game once it is completed.
“We obviously anticipate that when Squadron comes out, that’s going to be a big revenue-positive event for us,” Roberts said. “We have a bunch of people who’ve backed for Star Citizen and pledged for Squadron, but that game has potential to reach millions more people than our current base.”
As for the valuation of the company, Roberts said, “We actually did a valuation, an investment bank valuation process. I’m pretty proud that we’ve built a company to this point that’s worth almost half a billion dollars. But I think that if it all works, if Squadron comes out and is big, and then Star Citizen turns into this online universe that people just go to — I’m not going to say it’s World of Warcraft-sized, but it has the potential to be that kind of destination. If it does that, you’re talking about a much bigger number than we’re talking about here.”
It is perhaps the most extraordinary release of information about a major game in progress that I have ever seen, driven in part by regulations in the United Kingdom as well as the company’s own desire to be transparent with and crowdfunding participants who want more information. All for a game that creator Chris Roberts says he always wanted to create. This data is exactly what I wished I had when I was assessing the costs and revenues for Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2.
The CEO of Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries, Roberts said in an interview with GamesBeat that the funding for Cloud Imperium Group comes from Clive Calder (his “family office”) and Keith Calder’s Snoot Entertainment, who are well-known figures in the United Kingdom music business. Under the deal, the investors will own 10 percent of Cloud Imperium, and Roberts will still retain control of the company and hold 75 percent ownership. The post-money valuation of the company is $496 million. Not many game companies ever get to this kind of valuation, especially those that haven’t yet released a game.
The result is a remarkable amount of transparency behind one of the biggest projects under way in the game industry, and it is fitting as fans, crowdfunders, and skeptics have been asking more information from Cloud Imperium Games for a while. Roberts said he believed the best strategy is to be as transparent as possible with fans.
We’re open. We’re public. We’re committed to spending all the money we bring in on development,” Roberts said. “We’ve told everyone on our backer side that the money we raise dictates the level of development spending and scope of what we’re trying to do with Star Citizen. So we’ve long debated — we’re already showing part of the picture, so why don’t we just show it all? We’re already open with how we’re developing it. In some ways we’ve had this internal debate for quite a few years. Why don’t we just publish the consolidated global numbers like you would as a public company so our backers can see where the money goes?”
While Roberts can use the new funds as he wishes, the whole point of raising more money is to develop full marketing campaigns for the launch of the first game in the Star Citizen universe, the single-player Squadron 42 that finally has a launch window. Star Citizen is the larger persistent multiplayer universe, where players can explore worlds and plunder other players as pirates in the science fiction world.
Both are extremely ambitious games.
“The goal of Squadron has always been to have you as the player feel like you’re living this huge science fiction event movie,” Roberts said. “You’re emotionally connected to it. There’s a level of performance from the various characters around you that gives a human connection and an emotion that potentially you haven’t seen or had before in most games. We’re trying our best to push the tech in terms of bringing the actors in — their likeness, their performance, how they fluidly behave. People have seen some of this stuff in prerendered cinematics, but I don’t think anyone’s played it in a game where it’s all fluidly happening around you — where it’s gameplay, but it’s of a cinematic quality.”
Cloud Imperium Games confirmed that it has 520 people working on the overall Star Citizen universe, compared to 464 in 2017 and just 13 people in 2012, when the project was in its infancy. Details were not released for 2018, which hasn’t ended yet, but Roberts said that the year has been the company’s best ever, with more revenue coming in for the early access version of Star Citizen than ever before.
These details are crucial in part because the fans have sometimes wavered. Rumors were rampant at various points in the game’s history that Cloud Imperium was about to run out of money, largely because it reportedly spent a lot more than it brought in through crowdfunding. But a report signed by Cloud Imperium chief financial officer Simon Elms says that the company’s auditors have approved the information released, which has been described in as easy a way possible, Elms said.
As for the complaints, Roberts said it is a work in progress.
“A fair amount of our backers totally get that,” he said. “They’re cool with that. I think there is some subset of people in the gaming world that don’t quite understand that yet about Star Citizen. They look at it through this lens of, ‘Is it released yet?’ Which is a bit different to us. We’re in this weird early access phase where people are playing and doing stuff, but we’re still wiping the database now and then, doing new releases, changing functionality, and rebalancing stuff.”
As far as worker numbers go, the chart below shows that headcount in the U.S. — primarily in Austin, Texas, where the company is based — was the largest percentage within the company from 2012 to 2014. But starting in 2015, the headcount in the rest of the world — primarily in the United Kingdom — became the largest block of employees. The company continues to add people as it nears the launch of Squadron 42. Revenues have come in over the years in the form of presales of games, which means players are paying now for games they will play in the future. Every day, new money comes in through presales. The trick is to not spend ahead of that money.
“Our approach was that we wanted to — the money we’re bringing from crowdfunding, we’re committed to spending on the game and development,” Roberts said. “If we saw a change in that velocity or trajectory of the revenue coming in, we would make an adjustment on our internal development spending. We have a few levers to pull, but we’ve been pretty steady as we’ve gone along. We felt comfortable in our planning on that.”
The new investment was made equally into each side of the Cloud Imperium Group (including both the U.S. and U.K.). Roberts said this all funding round allows the company to dedicated most of its pledge money to development, publishing, and community engagement. Meanwhile, the new round will be used to prepare marketing campaigns for the launch of Squadron 42.
Roberts said that two new board members, Dan Offner, on behalf of the investors; and Eli Klein, as an adviser to the company, have joined the boards of Cloud Imperium UK and Cloud Imperium US. Yet Roberts said he retains full control of the board and group (the umbrella company).
During 2018, Cloud Imperium released into early access its first planet, Hurston, in the overall Star Citizen universe. It also released areas in the multiplayer game known as the landing zone, Lorville, four new moons, 32 new flyable ships, and other updates. The latest quarterly update also added Object Container Streaming (OCS), which is a piece of technology that had been in the works for four years. OCS improves the frames per second, allowing for a faster graphical experience for players. It takes advantage of the available central processing unit (CPU) power, resulting in frame rates in the triple digits. One of the keys to the experience is that players will reportedly never have to see a loading screen, even as them move from space to the surface of a planet.
“People don’t always appreciate how much work and effort it takes to make the modern game, where everyone expects this total detail and fidelity,” Roberts said. “People will complain that we’re taking it too long, but the flip side is, ‘Well, what about this beautiful snow simulation? Why don’t you have what this game is doing? You should do it exactly like that!’ We all want to do that too, but it takes time and effort.”
Roberts also released a public roadmap for the remaining development targets for Squadron 42. That will allow fans to track the game’s progress toward completion.
“When we started the campaign for Star Citizen and Squadron 42, I said that the crowdfunding would go towards development of the game,” Roberts said.
He noted that the marketing expense will be big because Cloud Imperium’s games will be going up against other Triple-A games that have tens of millions of dollars in advertising campaigns behind them. Other developers tackle this problem by partnering with a publisher for the marketing and sales of the game, but that results in putting the game’s destiny in the hands of a third party, Roberts said. And he doesn’t favor that.
Roberts said the company turned away from traditional private equity and venture capital — two of the most common sources of big capital — because of concerns about whether they truly understood what the company’s long-term goals were, and how those were more important than short-term profits.
In the process, Roberts said he met Clive Calder (a billionaire) and his son Keith, who have both been interested in the confluence of entertainment with the ability to directly connect with an audience online. Clive Calder founded the most successful independent music company, Zomba, which was home to some of the biggest music acts in the world. Keith Calder is an independent film producer: his Snoot Entertainment’s most recent films are the critically acclaimed Blindspotting and the Academy Award nominated Anomalisa.
During their first meeting, Roberts said that Clive Calder talked about how he wished that Zomba had ways to bypass the media gatekeepers in the same way that Roberts had done through crowdfunding. That wasn’t possible 15 years ago, but Roberts said that Clive Calder’s views indicated he would be sympathetic to the need to focus on long-term development and patience. Roberts said the investment helps secure his company’s independence.
Among the details in the report: U.S. contractor costs for game developers fell from a high of $8.8 million in 2014, down to only $300,000 in 2017. That reflected the shift of work to overseas locations as well as the conversion of contractors to full-time employees. Costs in areas of operations — such as online service, customer support, marketing, and servers (which number in the hundreds on Amazon Web Services), rose to $7.1 million in 2017. That cost will continue to rise.
Elms said in his report that the accounting shows that the group is “diligently spending the money we are collecting from our backers and customers on game development and publishing.” Over time, the company has gotten better at scoping the scale of development needed, allowing it to adjust both the timing for the launch and the number of developers on the two games. Elms said the current month is the best the company has ever had in terms of finances.
Roberts joked in our interview, “One problem we have is everyone just looks at the headline. ‘Star Citizen raises $200 million,’ and so they immediately think we’re off on a deserted island sipping piña coladas on the back of our super-yacht. … I can’t go and buy myself a $50 million yacht with it.”
Roberts said the team is working hard as the work ramps up.
“No one wants to make an OK game. They want to make a great game,” he said. “When they see other games doing cool stuff, developers want to do that too, and that escalates a little bit.”
And of course in our case, because we’re an ongoing open process, as we’re adding stuff people are coming up with suggestions and ideas. A lot of this stuff is really good, and we of course say, “Yes, we’d like to be able to do that.” On the Star Citizen front, we’re applying a different approach, which is more like — we treat ourselves like a live game. We’re constantly trying to improve it, even though we still have loads of features that we’ve committed to and we still need to do. We’ve made the approach of — it’s a kind of live, iterative process that’s ongoing.
While millions of players have already paid for their games, Cloud Imperium is betting that millions more will buy the game once it is completed.
“We obviously anticipate that when Squadron comes out, that’s going to be a big revenue-positive event for us,” Roberts said. “We have a bunch of people who’ve backed for Star Citizen and pledged for Squadron, but that game has potential to reach millions more people than our current base.”
As for the valuation of the company, Roberts said, “We actually did a valuation, an investment bank valuation process. I’m pretty proud that we’ve built a company to this point that’s worth almost half a billion dollars. But I think that if it all works, if Squadron comes out and is big, and then Star Citizen turns into this online universe that people just go to — I’m not going to say it’s World of Warcraft-sized, but it has the potential to be that kind of destination. If it does that, you’re talking about a much bigger number than we’re talking about here.”
Even the megarich can be scammed.
I wonder if our true believer here ever asked himself why they needed 50 million more if they took in 200 million from donors? What did they spend it on etc?
a cut of domestic sheep prime
Guest
Yeah, if 200 million is just enough to get them into pre-alpha stages of development after 6 years, 50 million will be a drop in the bucket. I have a feeling that a certain billionaire and son are going to be disappointed, though maybe they will just sue the pants off Roberts, take it for themselves and sell it to Microsoft etc.
One can hope.
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