Star Citizen Tops $700M, Still No Release Date

12 years and $700M later, they&#x27;re on Alpha 3.23.<p>When this game started accepting donations, it was 2012. Mass Effect 3 was released in March of that year. Mass Effect 2 was released just two years previous, in 2010, and the first game in the series was released in late 2007. Less than four and a half years from start to finish.<p>I know that development cycles have been growing quite a lot longer, but this is ridiculous...<p>Aside, does $700M make this the most expensive (or, rather, well-funded) video game of all time?

Star Citizen is a financial success as is, everyone making it is getting paid. Would they really make more money by releasing it?<p>There is a phenomenon in the start-up world where wildly pre-revenue fast growing startups are overvalued until they decide they want to make money and then they are judged on their profitability, which often kills their valuation.

Putting all the cash drama aside, it&#x27;s kinda wild seeing tech finally catch up to it. Even though it hasn&#x27;t dropped release yet, it&#x27;s already starting to look like old news.

Star Citizen is why I won&#x27;t ever give money again for a game unless it&#x27;s released and I am receiving it right then.<p>I&#x27;ve felt scammed for almost a decade now.<p>But to be fair, I think it was only $20 or something. Can&#x27;t really remember.

Even if Star Citizen released tomorrow, exactly as Chris Roberts envisioned, everything was flawless, how many players could they realistically attract? It feels like most people who will ever want to play Star Citizen has played it. I&#x27;m worried what&#x27;s left for Star Citizen is to keep monetizing their existing playerbase, not that their current playerbase is going to run dry of funds anytime soon.

Say what you will of Star Citizen, there is actual gameplay... more than other crowd-funded games like Chronicles of Elyria or Earth2 can claim.<p>Not that I&#x27;m going to bat for Star Citizen.

At the beginning of every year, CIG releases their annual financial report from 2 years prior. This is the most recent one for 2022 released earlier this year in January. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudimperiumgames.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;cloud-imperium-financials-for-2022" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloudimperiumgames.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;corporate&#x2F;cloud-imperium...</a>

Somehow I have literally never heard of this game. Does anybody here happen to have a video saved that offers one of those excellent “here’s why newcomers might fall in love with this game” videos that YouTubers sometimes put together?

I&#x27;d love to know their finances in greater depth. They can&#x27;t have burned through $700 million, can they? If they haven&#x27;t, how are they storing this money? Is it just in a savings account? Bonds? Stocks?

If there there was too much of a good thing, this project seems to be a poster child for why you shouldn&#x27;t get over-funded. Maybe one day it&#x27;ll be a thing, until then o7

All the money shenanigans aside, it&#x27;s interesting watching technology catching up with it. It&#x27;s starting to look pretty dated for a game that hasn&#x27;t released yet.

3.23 is smooth, performance is great, a lot of gameplay loops are in. 4.0 is around the corner. It&#x27;s disappointing that they split the development between Squadron 42 (single player) and Star Citizen, but now that SQ42 is feature complete, the pace at which Star Citizen is being developed has been very nice. A lot of the features from SQ42 is being released&#x2F;polished for the MMO and has already seen many features ported&#x2F;implemented.<p>4.0 is going to be by end of year which will have server meshing, at which point, all of the difficult tech behind the scenes will be finished.<p>I think CIG is going to license the engine once this is completed.

I almost want to contribute just to be part of history.

GTA6 is rumored to cost $2B. How can they possibly make a good game for $700M?

Ironically with inflation these past few years and enormous AAA flops (halo infinite reportedly cost 500mil), this doesn&#x27;t even seem like all that much, especially since there&#x27;s loads of content currently released as we type.

Critics of this game have moved the goal posts so many times they are out of the stadium. Face it - Star Citizen exists. People play it, enjoy it, and pay for it. The devs are trying to make something crazy and huge. It is entirely on brand with Chris Roberts’s history. He made Wing Commander which only ran on computers that nobody could afford at the time.<p>Yes, they pulled a lot of fake it till you make it, but what they’ve done is undeniably grand and impressive, no matter how buggy it still is.

It&#x27;s a heated race with HL3. Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years, so I wouldn&#x27;t call this dead quite yet.

Sunken Cost Citizen

When elite dangerous was new I asked a friend if they wanted to join me in playing it. They said no, they were waiting for star citizen (why either-or?)<p>Anyway, that was 2 US presidents ago. Still waiting huh?

People are having fun, so what? I&#x27;ll never understand the hateboner against it. For Tesla it&#x27;s at least explainable: They hate Elon. But Star Citizen people just hate for the sake of it. Strange

lol. Until the money well runs dry there never will be any. The gig is just too good to miss out on.

would be very interesting if they followed the Unreal -&gt; Unreal Engine playbook and eventually productized some amazing game engine (not making a comment on whether their stuff is likely to be good or not)