![]() ![]() But what about the game itself, the space those ships will fly though and the experiences they'll take part in? So Roberts is very clear that the ships being sold on the site aren't made available until the company is sure they can be completed. But ships are one of the things helping us make the game." "Definitely ships cost us money to make and a lot of our cost is a massive amount of people working on ships. "The ships are basically one of the core things that subsidize the building of the game," he says. That will probably be, not hundreds of thousands of sales, but we tend to sell 7,000 to 8,000 of those ships. ![]() "They might be holding out for the mining ship. "A bunch of people, they're not interested at all in combat, so they don't want that," he says. By the time we end up like saying this week we're going to have the mining ship sale, it's like, we've already done a lot of the work on it and the remaining work is basically covered by what we bring in."Īnd those ships remain fertile ground for future funding. "It's not like we're selling stuff we still have to pay for down the road. You can go onto the site and there is a whole bunch of ships that players know the name of and the stats of, but we haven't started the conceptual design phase, let alone the 3D modeling phase. ![]() "For a start, people can only back for a ship when we have it in production," he says. "If the money stopped today would you be able to get all of the things out that you promised?"Ībsolutely, says Roberts, creator of Wing Commander and Freelancer. So shortly into our meeting early this month, I ask Roberts what seems to me to be the obvious question: "Do you worry that Star Citizen could become a Ponzi scheme, that you're taking money for things now that you promise to produce down the line but never do? Roberts says the company pulls in $3 million to $4 million a month and that 200 to 300 people a day buy the game. Meanwhile, Roberts Space Industries continues to prime interest in the game and feed the funding with a steady release of new ships sold like cars on a car lot for the in-progress game. While bits of the massively multiplayer game featuring space combat, mining, piracy, trading, first-person shooting and a persistent universe have been released, a bulk of the game remains to gamers little more than promise. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |