I can’t imagine where the ad budget is going, because I never see any ads for this. I’d assume it’s largely marketing to the existing client base to get more money out of them.
Promotional videos and free play events?
The ad budget is probably the thing I’d question the least. They got hundreds of millions in crowdsourced funding. It’s quite possible none of that is due to advertising but whatever they’re doing to bring money in, it’s clearly working.
Sure… “advertising” and “developers”, all of whom are real people doing real work, and not at all phony subcontractors funneling the money off to wherever. Sure.
We are well past the break-even point of doubt as to whether the developers are wholly invested in developing a game, versus at least some of them developing cinematics to show off that LOOK like a game.
If you read the updates, the feature creep has entered a level of… well, it’s either self-delusion or fraud.
Well, that’s where budget money ultimately goes, right? Salary/compensation to somebody. In this case, it looks like the ad team is really, really good at what they do.
Are they? I don’t see ads for Star Citizen, even when this thread bumps and my cookie trail gets a few articles and mentions of the game. It appears to rely entirely on word of mouth and game journalism.
Hell, this very thread was started by a True Believer who was running around the internet spamming referral links.
It’s entirely possible the advertising team is incompetent. But based solely on the results, something is going right. They likely have their own ways of measuring performance, but I’m not going to knock the ad people or the front line developers for this travesty. Rather, it’s the executives and creators and other folks at the top that have a lot to answer for.
Some random person working what seems more or less like a normal job at a games corporation and just trying to make a living? Why blame them at all? Just by association? There are several companies that ended up being shams or otherwise crummy in a lot of ways (Enron, Bernie Madoff’s fund, etc) that had hundreds or thousands of regular employees who did not deserve opprobrium simply for working for what we found out eventually were crummy people.
The ones up top that have to know it’s a scam and keep perpetuating it? Yeah, I blame them a lot.
I think it depends on the job they have. If they’re just accepting a paycheck for going in and working on components of the game? I dunno. The game has been in development for over ten years, so there’s no such thing as being unaware of its true nature, and working on the product means you’re contributing to the scheme. On the other hand, keeping your head down and getting a paycheck for working on bedsheet physics or whatever probably isn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme. On the other other hand, I’m sure they’re getting well paid, and they know they’re being paid with dirty (or at least smudged) money taken from gullible whales.
But ad/PR guys? Community managers? Anybody who has a public-facing role (and that includes programmers who showcase their work in vlogs or whatever else) is absolutely and explicitly complicit in perpetuating the fraud. No question.
I think “ad budget” means “bribes paid to gaming industry journalists to write articles”, and possibly “bribes paid to ‘users’ to hype the game on social media”. Maybe even “starting up ‘gaming journalism’ shell companies to write articles”.
They’re called “Influencers” these days.
I do find it astonishing that people keep investing money after all this time.
Can I ask a software question?
Assuming that a load of game code was written ten years ago - would it still be useful today?
A lot of it, yeah. Most of the improvements that are made with time to video games are just in the graphics rendering. Everything else could be kept as-is.
Of course, they’re also trying to reinvent the wheel with their graphics rendering, so…
This thread is just shy of being 7 years old. Star Citizen is just as close to release now as it was back then.
Oh, sure. World of Warcraft came out in 2004, and is still going. Bethesda Software released its first game using their Creation engine in 2011, and their current online game, Fallout '76 is still using it. The Creation engine itself was based on the Gamebryo engine, which was first used in a published game in 2001.
Obviously, these engines have undergone a ton of tweaks and upgrades, and there may be a bit of “Ship of Theseus” about it, but ten year old (or more) engines are not uncommon in the game industry.
As others said, decade-old code is not a problem in and of itself. But I suspect what you’re getting at here is: are the developers going to find themselves on a treadmill, where because they’ve tackled too much to finish quickly, they’re going to find that when they “finish”, they actually have to start all over again because the stuff they did 10 years ago is obsolete?
And that absolutely can happen. The classic case is Duke Nukem Forever, which was in development hell for >10 years, partly because they kept having to re-do parts that became out of date.
Some of that was graphics; textures and models that looked good a decade ago don’t look so great today. But some of it was actually code–because they didn’t have their own engine, and they kept switching to more modern engines (to keep up with graphics improvements, etc.) things like AI routines, game logic, etc. had to be rewritten. The code didn’t stop working exactly, but it just wasn’t applicable to the new engine.
Star Citizen has also gone through a couple of engine changes. So, probably they’ve had the same issue to some extent, where the early code had to be tossed because it was for a different engine. I don’t think we know enough about their internal development practices to be sure, though.
Post #207, nearly six years ago:
I almost forgot about this. We’re now very close to the 10-year anniversary of the Kickstarter!
When I tried it last year on a free weekend, performance was terrible on a 3080. Unplayable in parts.
More importantly, though, there didn’t seem to be a game there.
Plus, there’s a lot more to a game than the engine. Most games just license an already-developed engine from some other company, and most of what makes the difference between a good game and a bad game (or in this case, “no game there”) isn’t in the engine.
I’m surprised they haven’t announced that they’re migrating to their own custom engine yet; that would let them make even more lofty promises while buying at least another half a decade of “development” time.