You can always add SOMETHING to a game of this type.
No one controls him. No one is imposing budget or time limits on him. This is what happens.
Why wasn’t World of Warcraft in endless development before it officially launched? After all, it’s an RPG in an open world. You could in theory add stuff forever. (Same with EVE Online, or Final Fantasy online or whatever?) That didn’t happen because it was a formally managed project, and the people in charge of it had corporate supervision telling them they had X dollars to spend in Y time before the product had to ship.
Also, if and when the greatest game in the world is ever made, it will almost certainly have a numeral after its name. You make a great game not by making a great game, but by making a good game, learning from it, and making a better sequel. If Roberts knew what he was doing, we would all be eagerly awaiting Star Citizen 3 by now - and THAT could have been an amazing game.
There’s a disincentive to “release” the game for similar reasons that GRRM is never going to finish the Game of Thrones books. He has a fanbase of people who are convinced there’s this brilliant product just around the corner and it will justify all their emotional investment in it. In GRRM’s case, it’s harder to land the finish of a book than the beginning and middle and whatever he does, it’s going to disappoint all the fans that are convinced he’s going to put out the best books ever to finish the series. He’s probably better off letting them continue to believe and talking about how amazing they’re going to be than to actually write them and disappoint people. There’s an element of that in Star Citizen too - people are so emotionally invested and so convinced it’ll be the best thing ever that anything that’s ever actually released is going to be a disappointment. Endless development allows them to avoid that moment of reckoning where people have to confront that this isn’t going to be the be all end all of gaming.
The situations not exacty the same but they share elements - “release” is going to bring a ton of criticism and backlash that gets spread out with indefinite postponement.
I think GRRM is never going to write the final GoT books but eventually star citizen will “release” once the interest has died down and the money flow has stopped. Probably in like 5-7 years.
I think you are right. Eventually the money spigot will turn off* , they will not be able to employ 600-whatever employees and they will release the game as “finished” in whatever state it is in.
*Probably…it seems many are still willing to throw money at it.
I mean, doesn’t it have to be that way? Logically, it doesn’t make any sense to launch Star Citizen if the current revenue model is working. If they can pull in millions by selling a dream, it doesn’t make sense to stop selling a dream.
This was predictable, really. Giving money to a large studio for a nonexistent game based on a promise is an economic incentive for the studio to continue selling a nonexistent game. I can’t believe I have to say this, but the economists are right: you get what you pay for. If you pay someone to not make a game, they will not make the game.
The idea of giving someone money for a game that doesn’t exist or only partially exists makes my stomach turn, to be honest. I can understand it if
You are supporting a little indie developer where it’s Tim and his sister and his buddy working out of a garage and you feel like you’re helping the little guy have success against the EAs of the world, or
The developer already has a track record of producing quality products that were Kickstarted or whatever,
But to give thousands to a rich guy employing hundreds in a big office is just fucking crazy. The result will inevitably be vaporware. It’s precisely the same as fans paying hundreds of millions of dollars for tickets for a Marvel movie that hasn’t been filmed yet; if they keep doing that, why would Marvel ever bother to finish the movie?
I’d feel better giving money to a KickStart if there were legal protections in place. The Kickstarter has to show a legitimate effort at producing their product on a specified timeframe. Even allow for that timeframe to be missed (gonna happen) but, at some point, it becomes apparent if the team is really working to achieve their stated goals or not.
Tell Chris Roberts the courts will clawback all the money he has made and see how fast he gets a product out.
Where does Divinity: Original Sin fit into your taxonomy? They were an established developer, though they hadn’t done anything at that scale before. And it was by all accounts a very successful Kickstarter.
Star Citizen is at a whole other scale, but nevertheless Larian Studios was not either an indie dev nor had a history of successful Kickstarters.
Larian WAS indie, at least when publishing D:OS. It’s the first scenario @RickJay described. They are a studio (not quite as little as others, certainly not Tim and his sister, but still relatively small) that had proven itself capable of making games together with a publisher in the past but was now going indie.
D:OS2 was where Larian went big. But going into it, despite the success of D:OS, they still didn’t have the resources to independently develop and publish the second game, so they had to go to Kickstarter. I’d still call them indie at that point; and they were able to use D:OS2’s massively successful kickstarter to launch themselves into becoming something that couldn’t really be described as “indie” anymore.
They’re still independent, but their massive level of success gives them resources that make them incomparable to smaller indie devs. So I wouldn’t feel comfortable calling post-DOS2 Larian ‘Indie’, and apparently they didn’t think a kickstarter was the right path for Baldur’s Gate 3, so perhaps they agree.
Larian seems to still have an indie attitude though. No micro transactions, no DLCs, a really long early access period where anyone who wants to play is a tester. You don’t see that stuff from the AAA companies very often.
I haven’t personally played it (I almost did during one of the free weekends but was discouraged by dopers in this very thread IIRC), but it looks like there is an actual game to play and enjoy. Unlike years ago when a backer had nothing to show for his money.
There are let’s play videos on YouTube but, like, you can also install the client and play the game. Maybe it’s not complete or polished enough for you, but evidently it’s enough for so many people to justify funding continued development.
I liked Privateer. Personally I’m content with No Man’s Sky whenever I get the urge for this kind of gameplay.
It reminds me of these door-to-door salesmen we used to have. They sold cutlery and related accessories. The business model was that you get a commission on each sale or a bonus when recruiting another salesman. They didn’t pay a wage, and this wasn’t obvious when they came to recruit at our high school. What actually happened was that the poor sops who signed up only made a profit on their immediate friends and family. But at the bottom of the pyramid were actual products being sold, namely the knives which I heard were okay quality, and actual clients buying actual products, and a legitimate profit being made.
I guess what I’m saying is that there is an actual product here. Uh, you may get a bonus if you’re a “guide” that helps get new players into the game. But at the bottom there is an actual product.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into RickJay’s example, but while I might allow that Larian was an indie studio (certainly if your definition is anyone but AAA studios), they were definitely far beyond the kind of garage startup that I assume he had in mind. They were an actual business with multiple titles under their belt, and enough capital to fund small projects. It just doesn’t seem like the same thing of identifying a promising individual that has no capital at all, and taking a risk on them.
They were a small business that leveraged kickstarter to gain independence from publishers. That’s not exactly RickJay’s example but I think it fits in spirit.
The irony is that Squadron 42 wasn’t even part of the original project, it was an additional product that got added and is an example of feature creep. Celebrating that it is complete is probably a bit of a slap in the face for people who invested in the actual game that was initially proposed and marketed (which is a big multiplayer game in a massive galaxy).
That being said, it’s a good thing that something is actually finished. I wonder how good it is.
