Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

Tuco · Oct 3, 2015

The 12 dollar retail margin seems extreme and the lack of a publisher assumes cig isnt taking a healthy cut to continue development of the game. I also dont know what sales promotion is and how it is different than the sales promotion they have done for their ships.

But the big problem i have with that chart is that it presents the illusion that star citizen is 4x cheaper to develop because it is crowd funded and the investors dont get a cut when the game is released.

Really, the chart is only true if they pour their profit after release back into continued development of the core game and release it all for free. This will never happen. They are already set up for episodic content to be released and the profit they make from star citizen will be the down payment for that instead of additional iickstarters.

Nija · Oct 3, 2015

Palum_sl said:
Well no one knows because we don't have the actual books, right?

So look at it this way:
Best case - S42 is awesome, drums up a bit more support, few more buyers into the snake oil spaceship scheme, SC comes out at some point hurray.
Mid case - S42 is OK, pretty much all the people who care have free copies, RSI has to make some serious cuts or changes to make SC come out
Worst case - S42 sucks, I mean, even the hardcore people just don't like it. Everyone starts a panic sell-off of ships and no more money starts coming in. Meanwhile the company is budgeted on bankrolling millions a year in fake ships and they have a panic sell-off on their market. Is SC going to come out after that?

Your worst case doesn't even cover the worst case! What about if S42 doesn't get released?!

Draegan_sl · Oct 3, 2015

Erronius_sl said:
It isn't that anyone disputes the various miscellany you've brought up, only that it isn't really pertinent for what was being talked about. Now, if you disagree with the opinion that they want/need S42 for additional funding and you believe that S42 tanking won't cause a cascade failure, that's fantastic and all, but the earlier points you brought up still seem to have no bearing.

Is the simple statement: Did either company require their single player game to be a success to make their multiplayer game? The answer is always going to be yes, because any failure really dooms the brand regardless. It's a useless question if you never want to get into any details.

Erronius · Oct 3, 2015

Draegan_sl said:
Is the simple statement: Did either company require their single player game to be a success to make their multiplayer game? The answer is always going to be yes, because any failure really dooms the brand regardless.

If you go back to the original statements, Valderen made the statement that "...success could infuse them with a large amount of cash to easily continue development..." and my commenting that I was dubious because we've seen people try that before. You then started out arguing that a comparison couldn't be made because platforms/engines (lolwut?) and now you're saying something that actually supports what I said in the first place.

I don't even know where you're trying to go with this, at this point.

Draegan_sl said:
It's a useless question if you never want to get into any details.

I'm all for details, as long as the details make sense. You may as well have argued that I couldn't make a comparison between S42 and Reckoning because Utnayan hasn't attacked CIG the way he attacked 38S, and we all know that Utnayan makes or breaks MMOs.

Ukerric · Oct 3, 2015

Tuco_sl said:
The 12 dollar retail margin seems extreme

Nope.

Back when I was in the industry at the turn of the century, it was the 3 3rd rule: dev get 1/3, publisher 1/3 and retail/wholesalers 1/3. Then publisher would eat marketing costs and have most of the rest as profit, and retail would eat discount sales and kickbacks and whatnot, and have the rest as its margin. The figure seems to have the dev getting a bit less than they did, and the publisher getting more, while retail is still mostly unchanged.

Tuco · Oct 3, 2015

Ukerric_sl said:
Nope.

Back when I was in the industry at the turn of the century, it was the 3 3rd rule: dev get 1/3, publisher 1/3 and retail/wholesalers 1/3. Then publisher would eat marketing costs and have most of the rest as profit, and retail would eat discount sales and kickbacks and whatnot, and have the rest as its margin. The figure seems to have the dev getting a bit less than they did, and the publisher getting more, while retail is still mostly unchanged.

Thanks for the correction.

Draegan_sl · Oct 3, 2015

Erronius_sl said:
If you go back to the original statements, Valderen made the statement that "...success could infuse them with a large amount of cash to easily continue development..." and my commenting that I was dubious because we've seen people try that before. You then started out arguing that a comparison couldn't be made because platforms/engines (lolwut?) and now you're saying something that actually supports what I said in the first place.

I don't even know where you're trying to go with this, at this point.

I'm all for details, as long as the details make sense. You may as well have argued that I couldn't make a comparison between S42 and Reckoning because Utnayan hasn't attacked CIG the way he attacked 38S, and we all know that Utnayan makes or breaks MMOs.

You basically said you're dubious because of Reckoning. I said you can't comapre either because they're almost completely different scenarios.

What's not to understand? Outside the general idea of "single player game before MMO" they are nothing alike from management, to funding, to development, to publishing etc.

Not only that I think 38S needed it to sell just to keep the lights on. I don't thing Star Citizen is in as dire straits at all.

Tuco · Oct 3, 2015

Chris Robert's TLDR response, big waste of time, IMO:
Chairman's Response to The Escapist - Roberts Space Industries

(When I read that link earlier he hadn't responded, so I figured I'd repost it)

Erronius · Oct 3, 2015

Draegan_sl said:
You basically said you're dubious because of Reckoning. I said you can't comapre either because they're almost completely different scenarios.

Christ almighty, Tanoomba. We're going to start going around in circles here.

Draegan_sl · Oct 3, 2015

Now you're just being a dick.

Tuco · Oct 3, 2015

What other cases in gaming history have there been where a new IP has a massive MMO development underway made by a high profile person making 'the game he always wanted to make', but that MMO was preceded by a more constrained singleplayer game in the same IP?

I really can't think of one besides KoA: Reckoning.

hodj · Oct 3, 2015

Tuco_sl said:
What other cases in gaming history have there been where a new IP has a massive MMO development underway made by a high profile person making 'the game he always wanted to make', but that MMO was preceded by a more constrained singleplayer game in the same IP?

I really can't think of one besides KoA: Reckoning.

I can't think of one either, tbh.

Draegan_sl · Oct 3, 2015

Tuco_sl said:
What other cases in gaming history have there been where a new IP has a massive MMO development underway made by a high profile person making 'the game he always wanted to make', but that MMO was preceded by a more constrained singleplayer game in the same IP?

I really can't think of one besides KoA: Reckoning.

Certainly fair to say. But that statement is ignoring the giant fact one was a highly successful game developer and one was a highly successful baseball player.

Tuco · Oct 3, 2015

Draegan_sl said:
Certainly fair to say. But that statement is ignoring the giant fact one was a highly successful game developer and one was a highly successful baseball player.

I think you're reading into an argument that me or Erronius aren't making. Neither of us are saying that SC will follow the same path as Amalur because of the similarities. Just that the similarities exist. There are massive differences between the two games and franchises that are almost all in SC's favor.

Palum · Oct 3, 2015

Draegan_sl said:
Certainly fair to say. But that statement is ignoring the giant fact one was a highly successful game developer and one was a highly successful baseball player.

I don't know if I'd call CR 'highly successful' in the modern sense. The last games he designed were 20+ years ago, he only produced Starlancer and he left/was kicked to the curb off Freelancer so they could actually release it.

Kriptini · Oct 3, 2015

Draegan_sl said:
Now you're just being a dick.

Erronius · Oct 3, 2015

Draegan_sl said:
You basically said you're dubious because of Reckoning.

Did I? And here I thought I was just using Reckoning as a humorous, tongue in cheek example.

Erronius_sl said:
We'll see, but I'm immediately dubious when I hear things like this. CoughReckoningCough

I'm dubious about a lot of things, but I was mostly dubious of what Valderen said in regards to S42 infusing them with enough cash to fund SC. But not in a sense specific to CIG and SC, but rather, in a very loose and general sense. For the most part I feel that if you end up at a place where you need to rely on the funding from one project to fund another, when you have no products on the market or revenue stream, then you probably bit off more than you can chew and should probably have started with less ambitious projects to develop your engine/platform with and then have created the MMO 2nd. Now, maybe you don't think that is what CIG is trying to do, or maybe you don't think it's the same thing because of the somewhat hybrid nature of the games here, but no one twisted their proverbial arm to come out of the gate with an MMO. Regardless, if they ARE in a financial bind (I don't know either way) having to rely on a 2nd product in this way is, IMHO, a mistake of their own making.

It's just happenstance that Reckoning is such a good example of this, your butthurt aside.

Abefroman · Oct 3, 2015

It's a lazy comparison. SC doesn't have the bad publishing deal in place or the burden of having to pay something back. SC doesn't have certain goals of hiring a certain amount of people to handcuff them. There was nothing original in what Curt was doing, he also had to buy a game to get his IP out there instead of developing something from scratch where assests could be used in both games.

Yes there are some similarities but can't we say that a lot of gaming studios would fold if a massive project failed and it in turn destroyed future projects? I get why people want to compar it to something but I think due to the way the money was raised, it is in a very unique position that we have not seen before.

Cris has the ultimate deal and if he fucks this up he has nobody to blame but himself, Curt had a terrible deal from the start, combine that with his greed and you see why it failed.

Erronius · Oct 3, 2015

Abefroman_sl said:
It's a lazy comparison.

You realize that I wasn't trying to make comparison in the first place, right?

Abefroman · Oct 3, 2015

Erronius_sl said:
You realize that I wasn't trying to make comparison in the first place, right?

Yes. Wasn't responding to you but just the general flow of the discussion. But you did bring the shit up and now everyone is tanoombing the fuck out of this thread. I hope you're happy!

Star Citizen Online - The search for more money

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