Re: Star Citizen: Half a Billion Dollars and Still Not Done

On Mon, 18 Mar 2024 17:15:27 -0700, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

On 3/18/2024 10:24 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

And yet, somehow, the company has burned through $669 million dollars
to get to this point. Where is the money going?

DAFUQ!!!

I know, right?

On a similar note:

Developers have revealed that, for "Monopoly Go" (a mobile version of
the popular board game) they spent ~$500 million USD just on marketing
alone.*

In fairness to the "Monopoly Go" spend, that marketing budget was
spent on making individualized campaigns for each and every region
where the game was launched. To quote the dev, "Our marketing team was
a fierce advocate for taking a hyperlocal approach...that reflected
the language and culture of every country where the game is
available."). So it's not as if it were wasted money. And it looks
like it paid off; as "Monopoly Go" has proven to be incredibly
profitable, earning more than $2 billion USD in its first year. Still,
looking at the game itself, you can tell that the marketing budget
dwarfed the development budget.

But that's not what happened with "Star Citizen". Most of the money
Cloud Imperium Games collected has (nominally) gone towards the game's
development. And yet, despite having a budget that is more than "The
Last of Us Pt 2" and "Horizon Forbidden West's" /combined/, the
company still has nothing to show for it.

(Also, "Star Citizen" has been in development for 14 years, tying it
with "Duke Nukem Forever". Cloud Imperium started working on it around
the same time that the /first/ "The Last of Us" game began
development. In that time, Naughty Dog Games released two remasters
/and/ a sequel to the "The Last of Us", as well three other games.)








* read about it here:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/monopoly-go-devs-spent-more-on-marketing-than-it-cost-to-develop-the-last-of-us-2/1100-6521930/