Star Citizen serves as a cautionary tale for both game developers and game backers about what happens when a studio has essentially unlimited funds. Game developers are used to using all available money to make a game, only finishing once the development funds run out - before the money runs out, the game doesn’t come out. (Although also, paradoxically, when the money does finally run out, it’s not uncommon for studios to be somehow caught by surprise and the game still doesn’t get finished. It happens over and over again.) The more money the studio has to work with, the longer the development process is going to be, so when Star Citizen raised unprecedented amounts of money, people really should have expected it wouldn’t come out under anything like normal development times.
Given what an unusual situation it is, it’s hard to know how much of what’s been going on is unavoidable issues related to scale, how much are management issues, and how much is dysfunction by those in charge. (Although some of the management issues are unavoidable too - very few studio heads have experience working on this scale, and the bigger the team, the more the management structure multiplies out of control, so having a smaller team taking more time is logical, especially since you can’t really develop a lot of new game features in parallel.) A $48k “microtransaction” bundle suggests dysfunction. They shouldn’t be needing money at this point, so making it easy for people to spend this kind of money doesn’t make sense.
I approach such claims a little… gingerly. I first saw this claim over a decade ago, when it was completely untrue. (The basis for the claim was less an apples-to-oranges comparison and more an apples-to-everything-else-in-the-grocery comparison. They took all the money spent on things like game sales, game subscriptions, console hardware and even the money spent by the game industry on software, and compared it to… movie ticket sales, which weren’t remotely the majority of movie revenue at the time, when home video was still going strong.)
I assume it’s true at this point, but it’s also a bit misleading. Game retail prices haven’t really changed since the '80s, and competition has exploded (435 games were released on Steam in 2013, whereas in 2023, there were 14,534.) Development costs constantly go up, especially for AAA (having increased orders of magnitude), to the point where even the best selling games struggle to break even. It’s even worse on mobile, where the pricing expectation of “basically nothing” was created in the early days. (So how do you make money off a game that’s already struggling to break even at a $40 price point on PC/console, when people aren’t willing to even spend 4 bucks?) So the strategies for revenue generation are really, above all, incredibly desperate. There have been some dire times in the game industry, but right now everything is incredibly precarious and largely unsustainable.
There’s a pretty simple reason for that: the studios that didn’t prioritize money extraction schemes are largely no longer still around to pay for coding and development. Insane pricing expectations by game buyers have herded things in that direction, I’m afraid.
In those days, a hit game could fund a studio to make a few games that failed, on top of one that would keep the studio open. Since then, retail game prices haven’t really changed, development costs have skyrocketed, and there’s about a thousand times more games competing for gamers’ money. If game prices had kept up with inflation, i.e. a new game cost upwards of $120 bucks, it would help. Selling DLC is a way of trying to bridge that gap, but it doesn’t make as much money as you’d think - you’re selling only to a subset of people who bought the game, and DLC requires a full development process (that’s more expensive than you might think) so it’s not all that profitable.
Ad revenue is pretty pitiful - a game would have to be incredibly cheap to develop and have enormous audiences (and have no ongoing service fees) to make that economically viable.
They’re interesting examples but not models for anyone else to emulate - they got insanely great sales (because everyone got excited about features that weren’t necessarily in the games…) that allowed the developers to keep working on them. If sales had slacked, the games would have been forced to be left in states that upset everyone. If Star Citizen tried releasing in similarly incomplete states, they also would have been attacked, even if they were only doing so in order to let people play the game while it was still being developed. There was no winning for them.
