A lot of people seem to have heard that Star Citizen is a huge disaster project that is infinitely delayed, but not many people really seem to know why. Come with me for another mini Twitter Down the Rabbit Hole.
In 2012, space game giant Chris Roberts announced that he was starting a crowdfunding campaign for a space MMO called Star Citizen. He was asking for a few million to finish up production, and already had a lot of the tech done.
But then the campaign got big. Really big. The website servers crashed. MILLIONS of $ were flooding in. And Chris Roberts is not a man to make modest projects; he was infamous for dreaming big, and it got him very far despite his struggles. And predictably, his appetite expanded.
New stretch goals with ludicrous dollar amounts continued to be built to reflect the monetary support: fully-realized planets; more career paths; more ships; more customization. And the more Chris Roberts promised, the more excited the nerds became, and the more they pledged.
Eventually, the stretch goals stopped coming, but they decided that they wouldn't stop collecting money; it would be an evergreen crowdfunding campaign. However, now they had a problem: they had all of this money and all of these promises, but they didn't have a team.
Chris had built the original systems with a small team of people, I think maybe a dozen, but for what he was promising, he would need hundreds. And not just laborers; he was going to need skilled programmers and engineers to make revolutionary new software.
But these people aren't always easy to find. Some of the more specialized roles, like netcoders, are like unicorns. I remember one time, Chris Roberts spoke to the community directly asking if anyone knew a netcoder that might be interested in a job.
But this was also a crowdfunded game, and with those comes a certain expectation for transparency; essentially, they now had to show what progress they were making, and when their progress was placed next to their promises, it felt sluggish.
There's a reason that game studios tend not to announce their games until very late into production: usually, there's not a lot to show for a vast majority of the time. But if Chris was going to keep the goodwill of the backers, he had to keep their interest.
While he didn't have the engineers he needed to make the insane new systems he'd promised, he DID have people that could design new ships. And so, he would continue to announce ships and offer them in exchange for more pledges to the ongoing crowdfunding campaign
In a sense, he was building a game backwards: he was having ships designed for a game that still had no real framework. Still, this was likely the most efficient option; even if the engineers weren't there, he could still put what people he had to work.
Today, Chris Roberts has over 400 people working on the game, but this number took YEARS to achieve. Theoretically, given the money, the game should be much farther along, but practically, he had to build an entirely new game studio before he could even use the money.
During this time, a strange, cultish community has built around Star Citizen, at once immensely enthusiastic yet phenomenally nitpicky, fostered by a community management team that has struggled to keep things together, but that's an ENTIRELY different story.
Over the years, as the engineering team has constructed more of the core code and game mechanics, ships have inevitably had to be redesigned in order to fit it—a sacrifice to appease the community.
So effectively, Star Citizen has only been in FULL production for the last few years, but most people don't see this; all they see is a game studio with almost $240 million USD that has taken an inordinate amount of time to make a dizzyingly ambitious game.
As for whether or not it will be released, it's hard to tell. Star Citizen is actually two games: a single-player and an MMO, both of which run off of the same game engine. The single-player game is slated for release long before the MMO.
Chris Roberts has stated that the MMO will release without all of the features added, but as for what will be included with release and what will (or won't) get added later—if it releases at all—we'll have to see. [End]
