Star Citizen is a project by Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts. It was a space sim, a genre of game that we really don’t see much nowadays. It said it was going to be the mother of all space sims, made for PCs, and filled with an incredibly large universe for players to explore. The project first started on Kickstarter in 2012 and asked for $500,000. It closed at $2,134,374, but the team didn’t stop there. They decided to just keep taking donations via their own website.
Well… it turns out that people really want a new space sim. As of now, the project has made almost $63 million dollars. Yes, you heard us. It is now a multimillion dollar project. Not only that, but its developers think that they will likely get over $100 million dollars over the life of the project. Even without reaching that goal, Star Citizen is currently the most funded crowdfunded project of all time, and that’s not just in video games! It’s literally the most funded project of ANY crowdfunded project of ANY sort.
Star Citizen is important more than just because it has big numbers and breaks records. Specifically, it has shown that we can fund projects in ways we never thought we could before.
“But wait!” you might be saying. “Crowfunding isn’t new. How is this funding a project in ways we never thought we could before?”
The answer is the sheer volume of money that Star Citizen is making.
You see, the best we have done before was raising a couple million dollars for Kickstarted projects. That’s good, don’t get us wrong, but it’s nothing compared to the budgets that AAA titles get. This has sort of caused a division in the “funding wars’ so to speak. If you want to make a game with interesting ideas that might rock the boat, you go to crowdfunding and accept that you’ll have to be a low budget, low cost indie game. If you are more willing to fall in line with the expectations of the industry, you can get officially funded by a publisher and their investors, but have less creative say, and possibly even less direct money making potential, while still managing to be mainstream.
As a result, the types of games we see out of crowdfunding are different, more minimalistic than games we see come out of publishers. They are both good, of course. Shadowrun Returns and Dragon Age: Inquisition are both fantastic games. But Shadowrun Returns is, quite obviously, build on less robust technology and a much simpler graphics engine than Dragon Age: Inquisition .
But Star Citizen is changing that. Star Citizens budget is starting to climb to AAA levels, or at least levels that can compete. It’s showing that with enough time and enough fans, we have as much power as a wealthy investor. That truly is something that will change our game creation environment.
Of course, it’s not quite there yet. AAA games have broken the $100 million mark before, and have gone even higher than that. But the very fact that we can raise budgets like this shows what the masses can do. In the end, it’s the gamers that have the power here, and through gamers we will make new and better games. Crowdfunding projects like Star Citizen just allow us to be a little bit more direct with that power.