Star Citizen has officially reached half a billion in funding

Bigger discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32916496" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32916496</a>

What a colossal waste of money. Thor: Love and Thunder had a budget of half that, and that film is a classic contender for &#x27;Big Blockbuster Budget Franchise Film&#x27; fame.<p>I could build an entire theme park for that amount of money, from scratch. 10+ Roller coasters, footpaths, restrooms, in-park IT offices, the works!<p>Why spend so much but not complete the game? Because the gravy train keeps rolling. Game studios are motivated to ship the game because until they ship, they don&#x27;t get paid as a company, yet the employees keep drawing paychecks, etc.<p>But this studio has no motivation to do that, they are getting the pay out now.

It&#x27;s a different development model now. They&#x27;ve long passed the single payment kickstarter-style model and are monetizing existing players. For comparison, Clash of Clans gets over a billion&#x2F;year revenue [1] but nobody calls it &quot;funding&quot; despite that money being used for further development of the game.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessofapps.com&#x2F;data&#x2F;clash-of-clans-statistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessofapps.com&#x2F;data&#x2F;clash-of-clans-statistic...</a>

I aways wanted to play this AMAZING GAME. But it seems that they CANNOT deliver something. This is really weird. Is this game playable?

I honestly thought that HN of all places could appreciate the two big factors of this project:<p>A) It&#x27;s a moonshot by an unproven company.<p>B) Software development is hard, it&#x27;s two massive software projects, to say nothing of all the creative disciplines involved<p>I&#x27;m also surprised people here, in Venture Capital land, are worried over 500m being &quot;wasted&quot; to wages to produce the game, something that people can already play and have gotten returns for their money from. Maybe if we could be half as grass-roots down to earth individuals when evaluating startup ideas we wouldn&#x27;t have a bright future in NFT powered Metaverse Real Estate salesmen knocking down our virtual doors.

You could actually go to space several times for this cash

My usual conversion - 267 full modular budget NIH R01 equivalent grants, including 50% overhead.

I see this project as an experiment. Despite what some people are feeling, this is not a scam, they really are building something.<p>It is difficult to predict if it will reach 1.0 status one day, or if it will be any good, but the whole process is extremely interesting.<p>This is much more ambitious than a simple game, the goal is not to build a few hours of entertainment, but a much more permanent space-sim &quot;metaverse&quot;.<p>I could see them being bought by Microsoft of Nvidia at some point.

&gt; Star Citizen gathers its funding from players by selling in-game space ships.<p>How is this called &quot;funding&quot; and not just &quot;sales&quot; or &quot;dlc?&quot;

At a certain point we&#x27;ll realize if Star Citizen is the Notre Dame or La Sagrada of video games.

I backed this game when the original Kickstarter happened. That was ten years ago. A whole decade! The game is a victim of its own successful funding campaign. I wonder who it&#x27;s even for anymore. Is anyone actually playing the early demos they put out?

Huge amount of money for a game. I&#x27;m waiting for Vulkan renderer and Linux version. I wonder if they&#x27;ll reach it before a billion.

*yells to sky*<p>Fix the god damn elevators already!

It’s going to be the Hagia Sophia of video games