| mibuokami said: I'm wondering if we should take a bet on how much Star Citizen can make before it actually launch. The scariest thing right now for me is that the developer will be stuck in feature creep hell. This game is almost guaranteed to miss its deadline now. Given that I am expecting at least another 2 years before the 'soft launch' and maybe 3-6 months after that for the official launch, this game could conceivably reach a stage where the developer HAS to stop stretch goals simply to have a launch window target. The mind boggles at how successful this game has become. What sort of game can boast to have 34 million (at this stage I am expecting 50 million tbh) dollars in the bag from customers before exiting Alpha lol. |
Well keep in mind that they have no plans to stop development once the game launches. They are planning it as a persistant world title which will have a stream of content and feature updates for 5-10 years. Also most of their streatch goals (post FPS missions) are content rather than features which can be scaled by adding more artists and coders without adding too much strain on the high level designers. And some things like having an inhouse performance capture studio could reduce dev time because they can be more flexable with how and when they can do things. Also keep in mind they were originally budgeted for $20-30m as they were intending to get private funding on top of their crowd funding, in fact the crowd funding was intended as more as a proof of interest to take to investors rather than an actual means of covering development costs like it is now. For a AAA game of the scope and scale of Star Citizen $20m isn't really all that much these days anyway. And your average AAA budget is usually $20-50m and most of those don't have half the ambition of the origanal pitch for SS.
Then again it could all go horribly wrong and we could end up with a horrible mess. But I like to stay positive.
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