Citizen-Con 2015 (Star Citizen)

[Thunderous Cacophony]

So while Canadians were enjoying a lovely bit of turkey, Star Citizen held their convention to announce what is going on with the game. Here's early coverage from Massively Overpowered, a website that seems to be focused on MMO news (I don't know anything about them, but I'll update OP as more mainstream groups put out their coverage).

So what's the big news? Two things, as far as I can tell:

1) Fancy Actors: CIG has announced about 20 AAA Hollywood actors who are involved with the game, from Gary Oldman to Andy Serkis, who will also be providing mo-cap. I'm guessing it's been in the works for a while, as they had some scenes already viewable, but it'll be interesting to see how that plays out given the current negotiations between SAG and voice actors unions. If nothing else, we know that SC has spent a ton of money getting that caliber of actors onto the set for as many mo-cap sessions as it takes to complete a game, and that they've likely gotten good contracts that tie those actors to the franchise for future work (as MMOs require). EDIT: Calling all the actors AAA may have been overstepping on my part: Whenever I see names like Mark Hamill and John Rhys-Davies, I still think top-shelf acting, even if they're no longer commanding the salaries they once were.

2) Demos: They had live play demos for their 'Alpha 2.0', though I use the term loosely; from the videos they seem to basically just be the player flying around, landing, walking around the landing area, then flying again; no real gameplay in terms of a challenging situation or something showcasing, for example, combat. I'm not even sure that there's any AI that interacts with the player during the sequence. That said, it's very pretty, this alone seems to make a lot of people happy, so I might just be misunderstanding what's going on.

So, having seen what CIG puts forward on their big stage, what do you think of Star Citizen's progress? Does it put to rest complaints, or is it not satisfactory?

 

[Fox12]

Well, it doesn't reinforce the accusations made by The Escapist, but it certainly doesn't falsify them either. Which is a problem, because this was their opportunity to do so, and I'm pretty sure Star Citizen made a big deal out of that.

I don't know, the 20 actors strikes me as overly ambitious and suspicious. This may turn out alright in the end, but I think I smell trouble brewing. At the very least, I have the suspicion that they'll be raising more money soon...

 

[DefunctTheory]

Honestly, I abandoned hope for Star Citizen ages ago, and nothing short of an actual release will restore it.

Its a shame. I liked my Aurora LN.

I don't know, the 20 actors strikes me as overly ambitious and suspicious.

It's beyond ambitious, and deep into the 'Why the fuck would you do this' territory.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

20 AAA actors? I could understand paying for one or two... But TWENTY?

Theres no real proof that Star Citizen has problems but theres just so many red flags....

 

[Dalisclock]

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks the AAA actor thing seems....suspicious. Almost like they're trying to prove "Everything's fine. See, if everything weren't fine, we wouldn't be able to hire 20 AAA actors, would we?"

Maybe there are no significant problems at CIG. OTOH, it wouldn't be the first time someone has tried spending more money they didn't have in an attempt to convince people there were no financial problems. Frankly, Roberts comes across as the kind of guy who would prefer to maintain the illusion of stability and wealth rather then admit (his) failure.

 

[Fox12]

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks the AAA actor thing seems....suspicious. Almost like they're trying to prove "Everything's fine. See, if everything weren't fine, we wouldn't be able to hire 20 AAA actors, would we?"

Maybe there are no significant problems at CIG. OTOH, it wouldn't be the first time someone has tried spending more money they didn't have in an attempt to convince people there were no financial problems. Frankly, Roberts comes across as the kind of guy who would prefer to maintain the illusion of stability and wealth rather then admit (his) failure.

The weird thing is that this information was already revealed by the Escapist. Supposedly this was part of SC's budgeting problem, as they were spending money on things like this instead of things that mattered. Supposedly those claims were overblown, but this suggests otherwise. It doesn't help that SC revealed this, but hardly any gameplay. Which begs the question: what else was The Escapist right about?

It's entirely possible that Star Citizen will be fine, and I hope for the sake of the backers that it is. But this situation is just so suspicious...

 

[EternallyBored]

20 AAA actors? I could understand paying for one or two... But TWENTY?

Theres no real proof that Star Citizen has problems but theres just so many red flags....

Looking over that list, that is not 20 AAA actors, Gary Oldman maybe, and a couple others, but a lot of those actors haven't been on their A game for a decade or more. Not to say their bad, but this list would only be ridiculous if all these actors were at the height of their careers, Mark Hamill is a damn good voice actor, but he doesn't command AAA Hollywood pay. It's more like 1 or two AAA actors and a bunch of celebrity voices of varying grades. Still not cheap by any means, and likely blowing a few million or more on voice acting and mocap alone, especially since I've heard they built their own mocap studio for the game.

Also, it was apparently a stretch goal in the expanded kickstarter, so it was expected, they didn't just announce they were blowing a ton of money on a celebrity cast.

As for the game itself, yeah I haven't seen anything impressive gameplay wise from this con, and certainly nothing that makes me think they will manage to merge space combat and FPS combat simultaneously in a way that will actually be fun for both shooters and ship crews. The ships are pretty, the gameplay is definitely still in alpha, and the FPS stuff looks awful at this point.

Still, with the massive retooling they did after completely blowing all their kickstarter goals out of the water, and when they realized they were basically being paid to develop a game with a AAA budget, I'm willing to grant them some leeway timewise to come up with something substantial.

If they blow through all the deadlines in 2016 with nothing substantial to show for it after announcing SQ42 and alpha 2.0 for next year they will likely be in serious trouble, for me, the success for failure of SQ42 will be what decides whether I put my money into the game or write it off completely. I'm hoping for the best, but after playing Arena commander on a friend's computer, the game just isn't impressing me in anything other than visuals at the moment.

Basically, I'm Willing to give CIG the time to wow me with a finished project before I write them off as a lost cause, but there is some Molyneux level feature creep going on here, I'm old enough to remember Freelancer and Wing Commander, and while I loved those games, they suffered from scope issues as well, the way they talked about freelancer before launch and what we got in the final product are noticeably different things.

 

[Dalisclock]

The weird thing is that this information was already revealed by the Escapist. Supposedly this was part of SC's budgeting problem, as they were spending money on things like this instead of things that mattered. Supposedly those claims were overblown, but this suggests otherwise. It doesn't help that SC revealed this, but hardly any gameplay. Which begs the question: what else was The Escapist right about?

It's entirely possible that Star Citizen will be fine, and I hope for the sake of the backers that it is. But this situation is just so suspicious...

I think this just highlights the need to learn more about what's going on at CIG, not just the line from the PR department(or Roberts, which apparently is the same thing now). I'm inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to whistle-blowers regardless, since whistle-blowers normally get shit on by everyone, making it very hard to come out and just say something is wrong.

I'm trying not to pay attention to the legion of fanboys who get really upset by the idea that something might be wrong at CIG, except their response is to yell at the critics rather then level suspicions at CIG and Roberts. Also, something something Derek Smart not sure why I should care.

 

[EternallyBored]

Well, it doesn't reinforce the accusations made by The Escapist, but it certainly doesn't falsify them either. Which is a problem, because this was their opportunity to do so, and I'm pretty sure Star Citizen made a big deal out of that.

I don't know, the 20 actors strikes me as overly ambitious and suspicious. This may turn out alright in the end, but I think I smell trouble brewing. At the very least, I have the suspicion that they'll be raising more money soon...

They are still making money hand over fist from what they say, they are always raising money, the kickstarter never really stopped as they still open up new ships, bundles and packages for purchase on the website.

From what they say, they've made 2 million dollars since the Escapist article, and are quickly on their way to breaking 100 million dollars raised total.

The issue I have with that is that they seem to be budgeting the game to be dependent on future donations that haven't come in yet, if they stopped receiving donations tomorrow they might have enough to finish the single player game, but I doubt they've budgeted out the MMO and shooter modules based on current funds as a lot of it went into basically starting their own AAA studio from scratch, hundreds of staff in multiple cities in multiple countries, and stuff like building their own motion capture studio, some of it was stretch goals so I'm assuming they at least got some estimates before announcing stuff like the celebrity voice cast and motion capture stuff.

If worse comes to worse, Mr. Roberts may fall back on his original plan of selling to a publisher, which was abandoned when the original kickstarter started breaking the bank. I imagine the property would sell quickly as its a game and studio that basically had all its startup costs paid for it.

They also just announced a referral program giving ingame rewards (when it launches) for getting friends/family/strangers to signup and donate, they need a referral code, so they are at least up front about it, but I've already received sales pitch PMs from some of my online friends on my Reddit account, so make of that what you will.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

I wonder also, will they still go with the same engine if we reach a point where development took so long that the graphics look outdated? Then do they throw the whole thing away and start over?

I think thats what happened with Duke Nukem Forever IIRC. They had like 3 different engines they showed off in trailers because development time was so long their product was obsolete(in their eyes because they valued graphics) before they released...

 

[StreamerDarkly]

From what they say, they've made 2 million dollars since the Escapist article, and are quickly on their way to breaking 100 million dollars raised total.

Which doesn't actually go that far when you have, what was it, like 260 employees on the payroll? If you assume an average salary of $80K per year, they're burning through $1.73 million per month on salary alone. Maybe not all those employees are full time, but this number is probably a lowball because it doesn't even include their expenses for facilities, development tools, Hollywood actors, etc.

So yea, if you're boasting about a short term 'funding boost' that only keeps the ride going for another month, that's nothing but hubris.

 

[Zontar]

the suspicious part isnt the fact they have a number of AAA actors, but the fact they referred to said actors as AAA.

isnt the acting terminology list? A list, B list, etc?

maybe semantics sure, but it strikes me as them trying to name drop AAA as much as possible. which is a shame, AAA would seem lost on their target audience, and the broader game playing world probably doesnt give much a fuck about the genre.

Probably just trying to mix Hollywood and gaming terminology, but in any event I find it odd like everyone else. I mean just look at MGSV, that game was made on an 80 million budget, had 1 A list actor voicing a character, was less ambitious then Star Citizen, and still couldn't ship in a completed state due to going over-budget.

 

[EternallyBored]

From what they say, they've made 2 million dollars since the Escapist article, and are quickly on their way to breaking 100 million dollars raised total.

Which doesn't actually go that far when you have, what was it, like 260 employees on the payroll? If you assume an average salary of $80K per year, they're burning through $1.73 million per month on salary alone. Maybe not all those employees are full time, but this number is probably a lowball because it doesn't even include their expenses for facilities, development tools, Hollywood actors, etc.

So yea, if you're boasting about a short term 'funding boost' that only keeps the ride going for another month, that's nothing but hubris.

I'd imagine the average salary is probably quite a bit less than 80K a year, maybe at the California studio where cost of living is much higher, but I doubt 80K is the average.

Still, yes, with that much staff they are still guaranteed to be burning through a lot of money every month just on paying employees.

While the star citizen subreddit did boast about it, they are right that it's likely still a plus. At 2 million in less than a month, and selling tickets to citizencon for 40 bucks a pop, they are still probably staying comfortably in the black at that rate. Whether they can keep that up, and how much reserve money they still have left is anyone's guess. If I had to estimate, like I said earlier, as long as they aren't lying about progress or release dates, they've likely got enough to coast to the release of the single player component, if it is only a year away.

Beyond that, I'm unsure how much they've got saved up, they seem to be budgeting based on expecting a certain level of donations trickling in from month to month.

The engine looks really pretty at least, even if I don't get the obsession CIG has with letting you get out of the beautiful looking spaceships to wander around generic looking space stations or marvel at useless collectibles in an instanced docking bay, also the really excessive animations for getting in to and out of ships is going to get old fast.

 

[Thunderous Cacophony]

Looking over that list, that is not 20 AAA actors, Gary Oldman maybe, and a couple others, but a lot of those actors haven't been on their A game for a decade or more. Not to say their bad, but this list would only be ridiculous if all these actors were at the height of their careers, Mark Hamill is a damn good voice actor, but he doesn't command AAA Hollywood pay. It's more like 1 or two AAA actors and a bunch of celebrity voices of varying grades. Still not cheap by any means, and likely blowing a few million or more on voice acting and mocap alone, especially since I've heard they built their own mocap studio for the game.

Good point, I edited OP to reflect that. I'm too old to know who the current Hollywood darlings are; if at some point in the past 30 years someone was referred to as an A-list actor, they've stayed at that status in my mind.

Also, while poking around the Star Citizen IMDB I made a very surprising discovery: They have not one but two regular shows! Around the Verse is a faux news show providing in-universe info every week, while The Next Great Starship is a reality competition show where teams compete to design ships for Star Citizen. "Each episode involves teams' progress evaluated by a panel of science fiction's leading concept artists, designers and celebrities, along with the creator himself, Chris Roberts, from concept art to playable starship, to ultimately decide which team will achieve their dream of having their starship immortalized in the game."

So yeah, the idea that Star Citizen is more about making a production out of the production of the game, rather than producing the game itself, just gained a bit more legitimacy in my mind. I can understand the marketing potential, but this seems ridiculous.

 

[shintakie10]

I'd imagine the average salary is probably quite a bit less than 80K a year, maybe at the California studio where cost of living is much higher, but I doubt 80K is the average.

Still, yes, with that much staff they are still guaranteed to be burning through a lot of money every month just on paying employees.

While the star citizen subreddit did boast about it, they are right that it's likely still a plus. At 2 million in less than a month, and selling tickets to citizencon for 40 bucks a pop, they are still probably staying comfortably in the black at that rate. Whether they can keep that up, and how much reserve money they still have left is anyone's guess. If I had to estimate, like I said earlier, as long as they aren't lying about progress or release dates, they've likely got enough to coast to the release of the single player component, if it is only a year away.

Beyond that, I'm unsure how much they've got saved up, they seem to be budgeting based on expecting a certain level of donations trickling in from month to month.

There's literally no way I can imagine that Citizencon made them money.

Blizzard does their annual Blizzcon every year and sell tickets to them for 200 dollars a pop and sell out every single year. They've gone on record as saying that they still lose money on the con.

Now Blizzcon is friggin ridiculously over the top (in the best ways) and they could probably factor in the cost of the Hearthstone invitationals/WoW Arena/WCS finals/and I think there's now a Heroes tournament with a prize pool to come to the conclusion that they're losing money on it, but even without the tournaments they still don't make a lot on the con.

Cons are expensive. Very very expensive. At 40 dollars a pop unless they were in some cheap ballroom and had barely any equipment to set up it still probably lost them money.

edit -

On topic!

I'm still upset about the Gary Oldman thing. His inclusion had to have cost, bare minimum, 2 million dollars. Hell, HTC paid him 12 million dollars to say blah a bunch of times. How much do you think the SC team had to pay him to do mocap?

 

[EternallyBored]

I'd imagine the average salary is probably quite a bit less than 80K a year, maybe at the California studio where cost of living is much higher, but I doubt 80K is the average.

Still, yes, with that much staff they are still guaranteed to be burning through a lot of money every month just on paying employees.

While the star citizen subreddit did boast about it, they are right that it's likely still a plus. At 2 million in less than a month, and selling tickets to citizencon for 40 bucks a pop, they are still probably staying comfortably in the black at that rate. Whether they can keep that up, and how much reserve money they still have left is anyone's guess. If I had to estimate, like I said earlier, as long as they aren't lying about progress or release dates, they've likely got enough to coast to the release of the single player component, if it is only a year away.

Beyond that, I'm unsure how much they've got saved up, they seem to be budgeting based on expecting a certain level of donations trickling in from month to month.

There's literally no way I can imagine that Citizencon made them money.

Blizzard does their annual Blizzcon every year and sell tickets to them for 200 dollars a pop and sell out every single year. They've gone on record as saying that they still lose money on the con.

Now Blizzcon is friggin ridiculously over the top (in the best ways) and they could probably factor in the cost of the Hearthstone invitationals/WoW Arena/WCS finals/and I think there's now a Heroes tournament with a prize pool to come to the conclusion that they're losing money on it, but even without the tournaments they still don't make a lot on the con.

Cons are expensive. Very very expensive. At 40 dollars a pop unless they were in some cheap ballroom and had barely any equipment to set up it still probably lost them money.

edit -

On topic!

I'm still upset about the Gary Oldman thing. His inclusion had to have cost, bare minimum, 2 million dollars. Hell, HTC paid him 12 million dollars to say blah a bunch of times. How much do you think the SC team had to pay him to do mocap?

Upon further research, you are right, they say that Citizencon doesn't cost the company any money since ticket sales pay for the con. Given that the con is much smaller and more low key than Blizzcon, which is almost like a mini E3, I can see why $40 a head would break even rather than lose money. The purpose being that they've promised not to spend any donated funds for the game on it.

So yes, it looks like the con is basically neutral cost wise, it is its own self contained thing that doesn't make or lose money from what CIG says.

 

[CrystalShadow]

I wonder also, will they still go with the same engine if we reach a point where development took so long that the graphics look outdated? Then do they throw the whole thing away and start over?

I think thats what happened with Duke Nukem Forever IIRC. They had like 3 different engines they showed off in trailers because development time was so long their product was obsolete(in their eyes because they valued graphics) before they released...

It's a heavily modified cryengine 3 game.
The original crysis still looks pretty good by modern standards, and that was released in 2007.
I don't think there's any immediate concern of the game looking graphically dated.

I'd imagine the average salary is probably quite a bit less than 80K a year, maybe at the California studio where cost of living is much higher, but I doubt 80K is the average.

Still, yes, with that much staff they are still guaranteed to be burning through a lot of money every month just on paying employees.

While the star citizen subreddit did boast about it, they are right that it's likely still a plus. At 2 million in less than a month, and selling tickets to citizencon for 40 bucks a pop, they are still probably staying comfortably in the black at that rate. Whether they can keep that up, and how much reserve money they still have left is anyone's guess. If I had to estimate, like I said earlier, as long as they aren't lying about progress or release dates, they've likely got enough to coast to the release of the single player component, if it is only a year away.

Beyond that, I'm unsure how much they've got saved up, they seem to be budgeting based on expecting a certain level of donations trickling in from month to month.

There's literally no way I can imagine that Citizencon made them money.

Blizzard does their annual Blizzcon every year and sell tickets to them for 200 dollars a pop and sell out every single year. They've gone on record as saying that they still lose money on the con.

Now Blizzcon is friggin ridiculously over the top (in the best ways) and they could probably factor in the cost of the Hearthstone invitationals/WoW Arena/WCS finals/and I think there's now a Heroes tournament with a prize pool to come to the conclusion that they're losing money on it, but even without the tournaments they still don't make a lot on the con.

Cons are expensive. Very very expensive. At 40 dollars a pop unless they were in some cheap ballroom and had barely any equipment to set up it still probably lost them money.

edit -

On topic!

I'm still upset about the Gary Oldman thing. His inclusion had to have cost, bare minimum, 2 million dollars. Hell, HTC paid him 12 million dollars to say blah a bunch of times. How much do you think the SC team had to pay him to do mocap?

I watched the entire presentation. While they may have had other stuff going on, what I saw was a rather small setup on a single stage. They had about 15 staff, and an audience of a few hundred at most.

The venue initially looked extreme, like they had built a life-size mockup of one of the starships, but on closer inspection (and a bit of research confirmed this), the presentation was held underneath a concorde in Birmingham (update: As was pointed out further down in the thread, it was in Manchester. This is what happens when you research something, but have a terrible memory and don't reference your own research when writing something.).

Since that looks to be a permanent indoor museum display, it's difficult to judge what it cost them to hire the space.
But that aside, what they set up for the presentation was pretty minimal.
Assuming they shipped the equipment involved from the UK studios, I can imagine the cost could've been quite reasonable, given what they had on stage. 2-3 large monitors/projectors, about 15 pc's, and a bit of audio equipment...
Much of which they could well have borrowed from the UK studio, and returned to it afterwards...
Not a huge expensive event from what I saw of it.

Personally I'm surprised nobody played up Mark Hammill and John Rhyss Davies being involved. Even the 'documentary' they showed for the mocap sessions barely showed either.
Anyone with a bit of a memory would remember that these two played a big part in wing commander 3 and 4...
It's interesting how directors have a habit of using the same actors for lots of projects.
(wonder what Mark Hammill will be doing, given he can't be Christopher Blair in an unrelated setting... That'd make no sense.)

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Color me not impressed. Sorry but as has been said, the sheer weight of VA by some A-List actors and the Serkis mocap is a huge chunk of change. I'm fairly sure besides Hamill (previous work with Wing Commander may mean a cheaper buy for Roberts/CIG.. maybe) the rest of the VA's are not cheap.
Its the same mistakes AAA dev's make by trying to wow gamers with big names and promises but whats the meat? How can they focus on making a great, immersive game when they're making every mistake that other devs have done in the past?
I'm not trying to be negative, I really liked the idea of Star Citizen and want it to succeed but there's so much that raises red flags for me. Its not even the Escapists article that makes me feel this way. Just so much promised and such a high bar being set, we've seen this before and its name was Peter Molyneux. Promise the moon, we get a chunk of rock that vaguely resembles the moon.
I am staying unhyped until the development gets near the end, and a working full version product is released.

 

[Zontar]

It's interesting how directors have a habit of using the same actors for lots of projects.
(wonder what Mark Hammill will be doing, given he can't be Christopher Blair in an unrelated setting... That'd make no sense.)

This is due to the fact a lot of directors tend to form bonds with actors which make doing work with them easier. It's the reason why the head writer for the first season of The Walking Dead used a lot of actors from his movies.

Hamill will probably be playing a character of is effectively Christopher Blair in all but name given his history. They can't use the same character, but they CAN use the archetype.