Star Citizen: A New Crowdfunding Record
I missed remarking on this yesterday, but Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen has just captured the record as the most successful crowdfunded project to date:
Your support isn’t just making Star Citizen a reality, it’s changing the face of game development. In fact, you pushed the project over an important milestone: over the weekend Star Citizen backers officially passed the $10,266,844 pledged to Pebble Watch, making Star Citizen the number one crowd funded project of all time. That’s a record you should be proud of. But we’re just getting started!
Star Citizen’s approach to crowdfunding has been novel, and is fascinating to watch in action. Case in point: their recent reveal of another ship model, the Origin 300 series (which includes, at least, the base model 300i and the upgraded 350r). Not only did they show off the ship in a shiny new advertisment/trailer (which apparently, despite being rendered as a cinematic, made use of the in-game ship model); they opened up a bunch of new “add-on” pledge tiers for those who want to increase their pledge to Star Citizen and boost the number of ships in their hangar. You can add a 300i to your existing collection of ships for just $55.
And this isn’t the first time they’ve done this sort of thing; the same was true when they revealed the Aurora series a while back; you could add an Aurora to your existing pledge for…$35, if memory serves.
It’s a stroke of sheer genius, how Star Citizen parlays development milestones into cash cows…and it works fantastically. Their initial campaign raised over $6 million, and since then they’ve added another (roughly) $4 million to the coffers. And since it’s likely that the campaign will continue for a while, expect Star Citizen, by the time it launches, to have set a very difficult-to-beat record for crowdfunding success indeed.
I’m close to 100% sure that Star Citizen will be awesome in many ways. Regardless, we can imagine what the negative reviews might generalize (the few that dare to appear):
Too much flying around in spaceships (crazy)
Too hard to control (lazy)
Social confuses me (fool)
Regardless of how the game is released, it will be just as interesting to see what bold statements it attempts to make with gameplay. I imagine pretty seamless transitions between dogfighting and running around on foot. Plenty of “private time” where you’re not risking death in small arms combat but your carrier could still be destroyed. Volunteer game masters minimizing chaos at trade intersections. And finally some decent space sim graphics. 2001: A Space Odyssey ship effects with a slight touch of the new Star Trek lens flare overuse. I wonder if “Kilrathi” is trademarked?
Don’t forget the multiplayer starships. The game will let a team of players work the various stations (helm, guns, etc.) of a multi-seat ship, co-op style.
Living la vida Star Trek, minus all that silly Federation utopianism.
I can’t properly respond to that without being obscene, so I’ll just say that’s really super cool. As in it…nevermind. Yeah, that’s awesome.