Yeah, for the players’ sake I hope that the game does deliver on the promises at some point. And if they are enjoying it now, that’s cool, provided their engagement isn’t coerced because of sunk costs. Stockholm Citizen?
I don’t know that that’s true.
ahem freelancer ahem which i think only got finished by microsoft after he and they parted ways
Chris Roberts announced Freelancer in 1997 once he was done with his saga Wing Commander… First scheduled for 2000, then reported to 2001, it was finally sold to Microsoft Game Studios who took control of its development because Chris Roberts was unable to finish what he started…and released it in 2003 after having been waited for 6 years
( via not an authoritative source but it fits my memory of the news at the time )
i think the success of the clone factories played a huge role, and yes once the clones existed, the willingness of people to buy them. you also had early apple putting pressure to keep mobile titles low.
i don’t know if any of that is “entitlement.” if game studios had been unionized and could have lobbied for regulation ( either at the government level or the corporate ) one could imagine the floor might not have fallen ( so fast )
so many mobile games are dark pattern central. they really take advantage of their players and of the way people get addicted to gambling. it benefits those corporate entities willing to behave the worst
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Star Citizen very much seems like an extension of what he was thinking about for that. Except it was far beyond the budget/time limitations he had. It’s been a pretty common problem for game developers to have some fantasy game in their heads that they can never actually make, but they try to push the limits of their resources to get as close as possible, regardless of whether they have 20 million dollars or more than half a billion…
Yeah, you had the pricing expectations set right off the bat, so low that simply selling games became impossible at those kinds of prices. So alternative revenue streams became necessary, which meant everyone in that market was inventing new ways to extract money from players, so more and more exploitative strategies emerged (that otherwise wouldn’t have).
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in this case, i’m going to guess it’s not the resource of money: it’s the resource of planning
probably the final couple wing commanders either had a good producer or two behind the scenes - and who could tell him no when he wanted to change things - or, a team that had grown in place over the early releases so they knew what to do without much planning
the complexity of games in the 90s grew by leaps and bounds, and i think a lot of people were just (ahem) winging. seat of your pants works fine when things are small, not so much after games got big
to me, that still seems to be what star citizen is doing: big goals, great ideas, pretty presentations… and no real development plan. just constant churn
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The two very much go hand-in-hand. (Which is why the number of managers required for a game increases in a non-linear manner with project/team size.) Roberts is very much unconstrained here - by budget concerns, by having anyone to answer to, his (total lack of) experience dealing with projects this size…
Yeah, the time and budget limits kept things from getting too crazy - when you only have 20 or 30 people at most (and you personally know them and the work they’re doing and capable of doing) and a few years to produce a game, it creates a lot of natural constraints that are lost when the team size even doubles, much less is ten (or more) times bigger and you have no firm deadline at all. The lack of a firm deadline alone has been incredibly destructive to so many games…
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Maybe? I suspect most folks just buy the game for $45, so not really a huge investment. I know some streamers and such spend more, but it’s a business expense for them. Either way, anyone spending money on Star Citizen in 2023 knows what they’re getting into.
If you(or anyone) wants even more perspective on how much people spend on games, here’s a recent reddit thread with gacha players talking about what they spend monthly on their favorite games.
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