Tumbler wrote on Apr 1, 2014, 17:42:

Comet wrote on Apr 1, 2014, 15:54:
I read some of the posts and I don't understand the negativism towards Star Citizen or Chris Roberts.

I think it has a lot to do with the complexity of what he wants to do.

The timeline that was originally laid out was nothing short of insane. The game they want to make is going to take between 3-4 years at a fully staffed dev studio that already works well together. (IE had a large catalog of games under their belt.)

Since it's an Online world that they want to create and let players have experiences in day in and day out the work load to bring that into reality is immense and we've seen dozens of company's do it. most fail, some fail and survive, and a few flourish.

The project is supposed to be a full fledge SP campaign ala wing commander games with the same scale and scope of a AAA action game. Like Crysis for example. That is normally a 2 year dev cycle at least. They also want to build a MMO hybrid online world. Doing both of those things inside 2 years was crazy. When 2012 ended and the real work began they had maybe 12 million? Not a lot, that is a year's budget for many large devs.

This put a lot of people on the defensive that this project was not able to reach it's goal. The thing people are still adjusting to is the increased funding the project got in 2013. All from fans. They ended 2013 with approx 38 million in total funds gathered. But they missed their target release for the dogfighting module. (we're hoping that is in 2 weeks or at least this month)

The way they got most of that 38 million was selling spaceships. Most of these ships don't exist in any real way. They are concept art. Some of them are ships you can walk around in with the Hangar module. (demo of your hangar with ships in it) These ships ranged in price from $30 - $1000+ and people were lining up to get the highest price ships.

That is bizarre to even me. The most I spent on a single ship was $250 but that came with a shit load of extra stuff, like a collectors edition of a game normally does. I spend $100 on a cutlass and eventually another $60 on an avenger. I also bought an Aurora just because. ($40) I've bought plenty of phyiscal stuff as well, shirts, mouse pads, a hoodie, and I have a subcription which kicks in $10 a month. I think the slow bleed over time has enabled them to get a lot more money out of fans than anyone expected. All along the way they've been improving their communication, they have a youtube show that airs each week, they have a star ship design compeition which airs each week and we have a special 10 min clip of CR himself answering questions.

It's easy to see why all this looks crazy from the outside but being on the inside it's one of the most exciting experiences I've ever been a part of.

I just spend more than $1000 on upgrading my pc finally, dragged my feet on that long as I dared. Still need a good joystick...won't I be pissed if the DFM sucks? Well...no. I'll have is this awesome gaming pc plus all the amazing memories so far! Truth be told if the game ends up sucking I can't say I regret any of this. It's more fun to dream and hope for this than stick with the AAA titles coming from the major players.

You can get involved for very little money, I think it's $35 to buy the starter ship and that also gets you into alpha / beta stuff so you'll have stuff to play very soon.