Star Citizen Articles
Star Citizen’s Patch 2.4 promises to be the biggest update yet. We push Gareth Harmer through the airlock to report on what’s being added.
In theory, Star Citizen should have launched by now. After a successful Kickstarter in November 2012, raising over $2 million in crowdfunding, Cloud Imperium Games planned to have the spacefaring epic in our hands in just two years.
The drama surrounding Star Citizen continues and spins even more wildly as cease and desist letters fly. Red Thomas breaks a long hiatus from writing about the game to chime in.
It’s no secret that studios tend to use writers as a sort of advertising. It’s nothing malicious, just a subtle focus on the new stuff they would like to get promoted. The relationship is certainly symbiotic because where they get to manage the publicity of their games to some degree, we get to see things a little earlier than most, which allows us to produce articles while the information is relevant.
My feelings on the subject of Star Citizen are shrouded in more shades of grey than the murkiest Seattle skyline. I’m a Golden Ticket holder, Imperator, High Admiral, and very nearly the first writer to report on the game as being a major movement in the gaming community. If I wasn’t the first to point out how it’d shape the future of the industry, I was dang close.
Earlier this month, it was announced that Chris Roberts' Star Citizen had broken a Guinness World Record for the top crowdfunding project of all time with $55 million being raised to help develop the game. While $55 million is far from the biggest game budget of all time, it's still an impressive amount of money to be raised by little more than word-of-mouth and a Kickstarter campaign.
Star Citizen has had its share of detractors from the start, though you wouldn’t know it from the way their continuing crowdfunding campaign has been progressing. While there have been questions about their open development model and potential feature-creep, fans have continued to be staunchly in Chris Roberts’ corner from the start. There is one issue debated even among the fans, however. That would be their use of Crytek’s CryENGINE 3 for the backbone of the developing game.
Well, he moderately dislikes us, I guess. I had to exaggerate a bit, because that’s what we media people do. According to Chris, we whip out sensationalist headlines to generate a little drama around our articles. To be fair to him, we do to some extent, but folks like him are there loading our ammo for us.
In a new look at the crowd-sourced juggernaut, Star Citizen, we examine the phenomenon of this new funding model as well as take a look at what backers get for their hard-earned dollars. Read more after the jump before heading to the comments to leave your thoughts.