Greetings Citizens,
Gamasutra has published a major article on Star Citizen’s crowd funding campaign! In the article, Chris Roberts talks about how backers have changed the campaign and what’s next for Star Citizen:
The next step is the Dogfighting Module, which is due at the end of the year. “You’ll be able to take your ships, you go out of your hanger and you go into space, and you fight against other players, or AI, in this sort of deathmatch setup. So it doesn’t have the story that we’re going to have, it doesn’t have a big sandbox universe. But we’re going to use it to balance the combat, we’re going to use it to do technical stress testing — like, how many people we can have in one area of space,” Roberts says. “And then next year we’re going to have the planetside module, which is where you walk around the planet, go to the bar, get missions, talk/interact with other players, you buy equipment and stuff like that. And then we’ll have the shipboarding module, which is the first person combat when you board another ship. And then we’ll have the alpha single player story. Then we’ll have the alpha of the full game.” In addition, GDC Next has announced that Chris Roberts will be giving a talk about Star Citizen during their conference. GDC Next takes place from November 5th through 7th at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California. The event is the successor to GDC Online, where Chris first announced Star Citizen last year. You can learn more about the talk here.
Cloud Imperium Games CCO and Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts — who spoke to Gamasutra about his crowdfunding success — will present a talk called ‘Star Citizen: Going Beyond Crowdfunding’. In this talk, Roberts will explain his approach to cultivating and continuously engaging Star Citizen’s supporter community — and how that approach enabled them to raise more money than any other crowdfunded game and build a head start on the large player base needed to support its massive virtual universe. Dealspwn has also published an interview with Chris Roberts, focusing on how Star Citizen stretch goals have evolved.
“So we got to a point where we went ‘Okay, well it doesn’t look like we need investors now. We are fully community funded,” he continued, “and that’s the best because everyone who’s backed the game just wants a cool game, [and] I want to make a cool game – we’re not worried about ‘Okay, you’ll get your 10 X return on your investment.’ So as long as the game, even after it goes live, makes enough money to pay for the servers and add new content, then it’s great, you know, and anything over that would be gravy.” Roberts went on to explain that even a successful game can still bring a lot of pressure with investors and publishers on board. “When things go well, they’re like ‘Oh, you did really well. Well, next year we need you to do 20% more.’” But, of course, that isn’t the case with Star Citizen which is now 100% independent from these issues and restrictions.