The most ambitious space game in history has raised $94 million. So where is it?

Concept art for the 'Sabre' spacecraft. (Credit: Cloud Imperium)

Would you pay $15,000 for a bunch of virtual spaceships?

That’s not a misprint. Go to the website for the upcoming, as-yet-incomplete space simulation Star Citizen and you’ll find, among the many items available for purchase, an embarrassingly expensive suite of 66 digital spacecraft, from the massive Idris-P Frigate to the sleek F7C-S Hornet Ghost.

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Or, you can buy your spacecraft one at a time. The cheapest cost about $20; others run several hundred. One — the Javelin — will set you back $2,500, but you can’t get one, because they were released last December in a limited run of 200 and sold out within minutes.

If this all sounds nuts — and it should — then you don’t know Star Citizen. Frankly, no one really does yet, because despite raking in a record-setting $94 million in crowdfunded cash (officially making it the biggest crowdfunded project ever), it’s a year behind schedule.

Because of this delay and those conspicuously large price tags, Star Citizen and its developer, Cloud Imperium Games, have drawn intense scrutiny and become a lightning rod for a host of issues: the ethics of crowdfunding, the limits of in-game purchases, and the trustworthiness of the video game hype machine.

Warp factor 10

It all began three years ago, when veteran game designer Chris Roberts launched a crowdfunding campaign for Star Citizen on both Kickstarter and a proprietary site. During this initial run, he raised an impressive $6 million.

Roberts rose to fame as the developer of the Wing Commander series of space simulations that were hugely popular in the 1990s. Following the release of 2003’s Freelancer, he switched gears and focused on a second career as a film producer. That didn’t quite pan out, leading him to dream up a bigtime return to games with Star Citizen, a “complete universe where any number of adventures can take place.” Players would cruise a vast universe, able not only to fly spaceships but also to walk around inside them and participate, first-person-shooter style, in boarding actions and hand-to-hand combat.

In other words, it’s the ultimate space game by one of the genre’s pioneers.

The pricey Completionist package. (Credit: Cloud Imperium)

Fans eagerly answered Roberts’s call. Their enthusiastic participation propelled the crowdfunding effort to its now-stratospheric numbers; a rabid microculture has developed around the game. The game’s forums are packed with users (the “General Chat” subforum alone has over 68,000 separate threads).flyable ships.

But the game itself, originally estimated to release in November 2014, remains a long way from completion. This is not, in itself, so unusual. Games run behind schedule all the time. Some delayed games were so good that all was immediately forgiven (see: Half-Life 2). Some weren’t (see: Duke Nukem Forever). Still, good or bad, such games were financed in the traditional way, by investors and publishers. Consumer money wasn’t on the line until after release.

In the case of Star Citizen, consumer money has created what some consider a disaster in the making.

Thrusters not firing

Star Citizen’s most persistent critic has been Derek Smart, an independent developer who’s no stranger to controversial space-simulation projects, having fought many an online flame war over his troubled Battlecruiser series in the 1990s.

In recent months, Smart has played the role of gadfly, composing lengthy screeds in which he alleges severe mismanagement and even fraudulent behavior at Cloud Imperium. “The four year, $90m+ Star Citizen video game project, is no longer a going concern,” Smart wrote in an October 6 blog post. “The project is FUBAR and there is no going back.”

Meanwhile, an October 5 Escapist article, relying heavily on quotes from anonymous ex-employees, bolstered the perception of Cloud Imperium as a dysfunctional company unable to build the game it had promised, and of Roberts as a starry-eyed dreamer more interested in shooting expensive cutscenes with Gary Oldman than in buckling down to release Star Citizen. The article sparked threats of legal action against the Escapist, while a parallel legal dispute blossomed between Smart and Roberts over the latter’s claim that Smart’s activities constituted stalking and defamation.

In short, trying to sort out fact from fiction and truth from vendetta is untangling a Gordian knot of Internet rage. But where there’s smoke, there’s often at least a little fire, and there’s a lot of smoke here.

Stay on target

Yet in the midst of all this, Cloud Imperium has carried on, projecting confidence that Star Citizen will eventually release and be every bit as good as Roberts claims. A few weeks ago, the developers showcased new gameplay footage and cutscenes before cheering fans at CitizenCon 2015 (yes, the unreleased game already has its own convention) in Manchester, England.

Far from being embarrassed about Star Citizen’s overreaching ambition, Roberts insists it’s the project’s strength. “I don’t want to build a game. I want to build a universe,” he says, perhaps deliberately echoing the famous tag line of Origin Systems, where he began his career: “We create worlds.”

For now, the only part of the game that’s playable is Arena Commander, a dogfighting simulation that allows backers to pilot some of the game’s many spacecraft in small-scale multiplayer battles and races. Other segments — including a story-based campaign called Squadron 42 and the vaunted “Persistent Universe,” which is supposed to tie everything together — have not been given release dates. Meanwhile, other space sims like David Braben’s Elite Dangerous and Hello Games’ equally ambitious No Man’s Sky have either launched already or are cleared for takeoff.

Other people’s money

None of this would matter at all had Roberts not opted to largely fund his vision through crowdfunding, which has in large part been a boon to gaming.

Just ask the makers of smaller, niche games like Pillars of Eternity or Wasteland, which have traded on the nostalgia older gamers have for the hits of their youth. It’s a way for once-defunct genres to get a second chance without jumping through corporate hoops. Crowdfunding is a form of communication, a way for potential customers to tell developers, ahead of time, that they would not only pine on message boards for their product, but would put up hard-earned cash to make it a reality.

The Javelin, Star Citizen's $2500 spaceship. (Credit: Cloud Imperium)

But when the crowdfunded tally gets as high as $94 million, the game is no longer the plucky underdog — it’s the 800-pound gorilla. And a company with a 200-strong development team, as Cloud Imperium now is, burns through a lot of cash each month. Though the Star Citizen website’s Terms of Service page claims refunds will be forthcoming to any who request them if the game hasn’t launched within 18 months of its estimated release date, it’s reasonable to wonder whether there would be enough money to reimburse everyone should the majority ask for their money back.

And it’s hard not to be put off by those outrageous price tags for virtual goods. The price for a traditional video game usually falls somewhere between $20 and $60, depending on the genre, the platform, the publisher, and how long ago it was released. To charge hundreds, even thousands, for a tiny slice of a game, savors of exploitation.

Yet this is an increasingly common practice. Many contemporary games offer $100-plus packages of virtual coins and depend on “whales,” who, like serious gamblers, are willing to pay money far out of proportion to any conventional estimation of the value they’re getting.

To play devil’s advocate, is Star Citizen’s Javelin spacecraft any more useless than a $2,000 decorative rug? Is this just a matter of antivirtual chauvinism? At least in Star Citizen’s case, the whales are getting complex, handcrafted digital objects for their money — or will be when (if?) the game actually launches.

Structural integrity critical

Questions of mismanagement aside, Roberts and his team sincerely want to make this game. Star Citizen was clearly not designed as a long con, and the project was not launched with malice aforethought. Nobody started out trying to bilk anyone out of their money.

But it’s nonetheless troubling that Cloud Imperium seems, for the moment, more efficient at generating revenue than it is at producing the game it was founded to produce. With questionable free-to-play models and in-app purchases generating considerable controversy in recent years, Star Citizen putting the money cart before the horse obviously strikes a nerve. Is a game company about making money or making games? Ostensibly both, but the order in which those occur is pretty important.

So is the plight of Star Citizen. If the game turns out to be the fiasco its detractors already claim it is, it will send serious ripples across the game industry and crowdfunding in general. The pressure’s on, for sure, and only time will tell if Cloud Imperium can keep it together and deliver on its heady promises — and hefty bank account.

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