He made games in his teens, including a soccer simulation for the BBC Micro, before landing in Austin in 1987. Growing up in Manchester, England, Roberts was a skilled coder with grand ambitions. (Today, Roberts says that initial year of development doesn’t count because “it was more proof-of-concept work.”) After all, Star Citizen was already “ 12 months into production.” It seemed like a redemption song from a man who had been out of gaming for a decade after his partnership with Microsoft had gone sour. It doesn’t seem like a lot in a world where budgets for quality games can easily reach into the tens of millions, but Roberts left the impression that it would be enough. In the fall of 2012, Chris Roberts stepped onto the stage of a different Austin auditorium and proclaimed, “I’m coming back.” With a sleek video showing flying spaceships and a short demo he played from the podium, Roberts announced his first crowdfunding campaign, which quickly raised $6.2 million. It is very rare to be doing game development for seven years-that’s not how it works. “This thing is unusual in about five dimensions. Star Citizen is nuts,” says Jesse Schell, a prominent game developer and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. His wife and his brother both work in senior positions at the company. But he won’t say how much he or other top Cloud Imperium execs have made from the project. He released years’ worth of financial statements last December. Up to a point, Roberts has been transparent about where the money has been going. This is not fraud-Roberts really is working on a game-but it is incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale. To keep funding it and the 537 employees Cloud Imperium has working in five offices around the world, Roberts constantly needs to raise more money because he is constantly burning through cash. Star Citizen seems destined to be the most expensive video game ever made-and it might never be finished. Don’t worry-it’s not complete madness,” Roberts insists.īut what Roberts has stirred up does seem crazy. The promises being made-call it feature creep, call it whatever it is-now we can do this, now we can do that. “As the money rolled in, what I consider to be some of old bad habits popped up-not being super-focused,” says Mark Day, a producer on Wing Commander IV who runs a company that was contracted to do work on Star Citizen in 20.
#Star citizen movie#
Release The Kraken: With a wink to the 1981 movie "The Clash of The Titans," The Kraken is a Star Citizen “concept” ship that Cloud Imperium sold for $1,650 each last year. They describe the work environment as chaotic. Roberts also dabbled in Hollywood, spending tens of millions on a movie version of Wing Commander that he directed himself and that was a critical and commercial flop.įorbes spoke to 20 people who used to work for Cloud Imperium, many of whom depict Roberts as a micromanager and poor steward of resources. There, he spent years working on Freelancer, a spiritual successor to Wing Commander, which was eventually released years behind schedule and was far from a blockbuster. He followed that success by starting his own studio, Digital Anvil, with Microsoft as an investor.
#Star citizen series#
Roberts first gained fame with his early 1990s hit Wing Commander, a space combat series that grossed over $400 million and featured Hollywood stars like Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell. But in the world of consoles and controllers, he is Keith Richards: an aging rock star who can still get fans to reach into their pockets. If you don’t play video games, you probably have never heard of Roberts. Many high-profile crowdfunded projects, like the Pebble smartwatch ($43.4 million raised) and the Ouya video game console ($8.6 million), have failed miserably.
Federal bureaucrats and state lawyers have intervened only in a few egregious situations where there was little effort to make good and a lot of the money was pocketed by the promoters. Creatives are in charge here, not profit-driven bean counters or deadline-enforcing suits.
#Star citizen free#
The heedless waste is fueled by easy money raised through crowdfunding, a Wild West territory nearly free of regulators and rules.
0 kommentar(er)
