I agree with this post, but I do think a lot of the rooting for it to fail is unfortunate. I don't love how they are going about it all, but overall it's cool to see basically a AAA game get crowdfunded. Yes there have been bad parts to crowdfunding, but it's also put out a lot of really great games. I love that it exists as a way for games to happen, because we have gotten games I do not think we'd get otherwise.

I also think some of the doubt seems based on the idea that this game is more than it is. There are other games on the market that probably won't be too dissimilar ultimately to what this game is (Elite Dangerous comes to mind). Maybe people are expecting too much? I feel like Destiny suffered under that expectation.

@paulmako: It's not that anyone really wants Star Citizen to fail but I know for me is that realistically I can't see this game succeeding on even half of what is promised or even being released.

When I see they are offering ship packs totaling $15,000 and starting a referral system I can't help but feel that this is gross and exploitative. Yeah no one is forcing anyone to buy these ship packs or to refer their friends and family to sign up for bonus fake money but it is playing off peoples weird obsession for a game that isn't even close to being released. You got guild/corporation threads and recruitment videos on Youtube for this game and again there is no game yet. I just can't help but feel bad for all the people who have spent more than retail price for Star Citizen. I get there is a risk with any crowd funding project but there is the weird cult of personality surrounding Star Citizen where the faithful refuse to have grounded expectations.

There are "cults" of fans surrounding pretty much any big IP. Have you met Star Wars fans, Star Trek fans, Lord of the Rings fans etc? Have you met fans of popular actors, popular singers? Wing Commander is nostalgia for us old dudes. There are always extremes when you look at a big group of people, I bet most people supporting Star Citizen is below 60 bucks, but yeah, what do I know.

I think it is possible to support this for as low as 35 bucks or is it 45? Some support it with 10000 dollars, and some even more! Scam and Pay 2 Win gets thrown around, but some of these people are honestly excited that this is happening. Are there any interviews with big individual backers? Do they feel scammed, are they aware the game could fail to deliver?

As I said I'm all for the singleplayer experience, but I have to say, without the MMO Star Citizen would have never become this big, have raised this much money, and be talked about as much as it is right now.

As an old space sim fan, I love that stuff is happening in this rather niche and forgotten genre. I might not agree with everything and how it plays out, but finally something is happening, you know.

This game.... It's never coming out is it?

Who knows. Supporters will say YES. Doubters MAYBE. Haters NO. Developers Soon(tm). :)

I'm positive at least something will eventually come out. After all, some of the basics are already playable, so they are well on their way to piecing together something. I think the better questions are: when will it eventually be released, what will the scope of the game be like when it does come out, and what will the game actually initially feature compared what has been promised. I can see Star Citizen going the Elite: Dangerous route and releasing more or less the base framework of the game initially, and then slowly rolling out the rest of it over a period of years in the form of expansions. Whether those will be paid expansions or not, who knows. It's just a guess, though.

My main concern is that given the massive scope of what Roberts wants to accomplish, it seems like that is so far away from what they currently have that is playable, which isn't much.

Ultimately, I'm just glad I only dropped around $50 to back Star Citizen. I still cannot wrap my mind around why in the world all these people would spend thousands and thousands of dollars on ships that are not only currently unusable, but these are ships that players can eventually attain for free during the course of gameplay when the game finally comes out. I just don't get it. I mean yeah, one could argue that they are just supporting the project and donating money to fund development, but I think there's something more than that going on with some of the Star Citizen whales.

I'm still trying to get past people assumption that the game should almost be finished by now. Expecting an MMO to be done after only 3 years of production is crazy. Hell the staff here on the site have themselves on multiple occasions made mention of the fact that according to most developers they've spoken to over the years a game doesn't really start to look like the finished product until the last 20%.

Epic started work on UT4 close to 18 months ago and all they have is a 4 or 5 of completed maps, a bunch of grey boxed maps, the weapons and half a dozen skins. Not to mention half of those maps are recreations of old maps which removes a large part of the design work. That game isn't even half as complex and I don't here anyone talking about the state of development there.

Ah, you think the whales may literally be buying influence into the game design process? It wouldn't surprise me, I remember Austin telling a story about some mobile game devs doing special things for an individual whale.

@mbdoeden: I don't think so? I really don't know, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that sort of thing is happening, though.

@mike: I doubt it myself (there is no evidence) but it's an interesting thought. I mean, if you have an investor willing to give enough money to make a project happen the creators usually bend and sway to appeal to them. Not saying the devs really need to fund raise like that at the moment, they presumably have the funds to give them leverage in that sort of conversation. However, I could see minor appeasements turning around to bite them in the ass through natural escalation of perks in the interest of fairness.

Whatever, this is all hypothetical BS. :)

I'm excited to eventually read the insane series of novels about the behinds the scenes of this thing in 20 years.

I should point out that calling the PU an MMO is a slight misnomer. You're going to get multiple people in an area at the same time, but the game is heavily instanced and the world is heavily weighted at 10% humans to 90% npc. They aren't looking at 100 people in the same area at the same time, rather as soon as an area hits its limit a new instance is created on the fly, with maximum numbers in the same order as a typical session based multiplayer game.

If you want a comparison to a working architecture today look at Elite:Dangerous (though that is p2p) and Destiny, which has those shared areas, like the Tower. Unlike an MMO where people join a world server accomodating large numbers of people, new instances of the Tower are generated when it hits a player limit.

The ships only serve the purpose of a collection to them or the ability to boost their Organisation's capabilities. Outside of that, it's something else that drives their spending. From what I've observed of the high rollers, there is always an element of charity or goodwill to what they are doing. They certainly feel passionately about the project. It could be nostalgia of Chris' earlier games, a sense of giving their hard earned money to something they genuinely believe in, or maybe even just wanting to ensure the community they are participating in stays afloat for long enough to matter. Some also buy ships as a way to promote their Twitch streams with regular prizes, or simply to pay it forward to people who can't even buy a single package.

I have access to the Concierge forum (it unlocks for people who have accrued $1000 or more), and, aside from a few perks such as faster response for CS tickets or VIP access to after-party popup events, almost none of the high rollers ever seem to expect any major privileges out of what they pay. They mostly say they are doing it because they want to see the project get bigger and more successful. Given their wealth, it's not like they have just won the lottery and want to spend it somewhere. These are highly successful people (gas company engineers, IT consultants, property developers) and they know how to earn money and they know that spending real money on pixels makes no sense (although i've heard there are some who milk the 'grey market' pretty well) but they seem to do it anyway for the reasons I said above.

As for the scope of the game, there are a lot of technical boundaries that are being pushed hard. Take this dev's post for example. It seems to me that they have been spending a lot of time "under the hood" so to speak to get the engine to where they need it to be. So long as there are no major tech problems or game-breaking bugs (or more crap from a certain unhinged and vindictive individual :P ), these coming months we will see more content pushed out than the last few years combined.