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Billion Dollar Video Game: Is This The Most Expensive Entertainment Ever Created?

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Billion Dollar Video Game: Is This The Most Expensive Entertainment Ever Created?

hHow much does it cost to make a video game? The development costs of blockbuster games are closely guarded trade secrets, but they have risen higher and higher over the years to become big, Hollywood-style expenses.

Industry leaks have exposed how the budgets of major video games are spiraling: $100 million, or $200 million, even more. One of the best-selling franchises, Call of Duty, saw its costs soar to $700 million (£573 million), a figure only recently revealed when a journalist looked into court documents.

However, there is one game whose budget is anything but secret. The extensive multiplayer space simulator Star Citizen publishes its funds on your website and are updated in real time. Currently, they amount to $777,145,107 (a figure that will be obsolete as soon as this article is published). It will soon surpass $800 million and, possibly in about a year, will surpass the ceiling to become the world’s first billion-dollar video game.

Unless another great game defeats it (and there is some of those in productionalthough its costs are likely not revealed, which would make it the most expensive piece of entertainment ever produced. Star Wars: The Force Awakens the most expensive movie ever madecosts about half as much.

Star Citizen figures are publicly available because it is not the investors who finance this PC game, but the players themselves.

“Fandom is at the heart of Star Citizen,” says Rhys Elliott, a games industry analyst at London-based market research firm MIDiA Research. “It’s more of a movement than a game. “There is a mutual commitment between developers and players to make something cool and revolutionary, something that hasn’t been done before.”

Olli43 playing the latest version of Star Citizen.

British-American video game developer Chris Roberts, famous for his 90s Wing Commander spacecraft fighting series: launched Star Citizen as a crowdfunded project in 2012, promising to create a digital universe so enormous and at the same time so detailed that players would “forget it’s a game.”

It raised its first $2 million on Kickstarter and has been growing ever since, fueled by fans willing to invest their money in a outreach plan so ambitious that no publisher focused on profits and deadlines would consider the risk of doing so.

After a few years, an early version of the game became available for fans to try, but it was almost always unplayable, freezing, and crashing constantly. Only recently did Star Citizen start to look and feel like a real video game.

YouTube is full of videos of players roaming the Star Citizen universe together. Their spaceships fly seamlessly from space stations and descend through planetary atmospheres to land in sci-fi-style cities, before proceeding on foot into caverns deep underground. Warp holes have just been added to the game, allowing players to jump between two solar systems.

“It’s very easy to get excited about space games,” says Oliver Hull, who runs a company focused on games. youtube channel with 1.56 million subscribers. “It is a very nice game. I think visually, people see it and say, ‘Oh, what is this about?'”

Hull, 32, used to play many other games, such as Grand Theft Auto, but now he mainly posts videos that show him playing Star Citizen, flying around and looking for things to do, whether it’s mining asteroids or attacking space pirates. Hull’s videos often show him frustrated when things don’t work as they should. But that’s part of the interest, he says.

“To be honest, the game is still in development,” he says. “When something doesn’t work out as expected… it doesn’t really bother me because it’s kind of a work in progress. In any case, I find it quite interesting from a game development point of view.”

It’s the rough edges of the game, the promise of what could be, and seeing the game slowly move in that direction, that motivates Star Citizen fans. “I can’t think of many games that do what Star Citizen does,” Hull says. “It’s not finished, but I think it’s very attractive – the fact that there’s nothing like it.”

It may not be finished, but people have been paying money for Star Citizen all this time. A starter ship costs $45 and the game now has over 80 flyable ships. The most expensive ones currently available cost over £500.

The preview allows the development team, Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), to test how the game works with live players as they develop it. But it also gives funders something tangible to play with, a look at the game’s long and complicated development processes, rather than waiting years for a full release.

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As time goes on, satisfying the community becomes more and more important. Many fans have donated large sums of their money, including through a controversial money-making scheme in which CIG pre-sells spaceships online that they intend to manufacture in the future. Some of the so-called “superbackers” have spent more than $10,000.

Fans, says industry analyst Elliot, have been “investing so much money in it… that they’re really emotionally invested.”

The Star Citizen website, which shows ships for sale. Photography: Roberts Space Industries

The development teams have also felt pressure from the community, with accusations in the industry media filed against the CIG management for imposing long working hours. TO 2016 research by gaming website Kotaku cited former employees who described “critical” practices in which development teams are asked to work overtime before a big milestone, such as a gaming convention. Roberts told Kotaku at the time that he didn’t want “the crisis as a culture.”

CIG describes Star Citizen as “the largest scale open development game out there,” but that ambition has also meant that the game has now been in development for over a decade, with repeated frustrating delays. In a 2012 interview with Roberts, The Guardian reported that the plan was to release the game two years later, in 2014. Fan forums regularly ask if the game will ever be properly released.

But late last year, there were tentative signs of hope. For the first time, CIG revealed what the eventual release version will be likeoffering a clear view of what will and won’t be included, even if no date was given.

What they did provide, however, was a 2026 release date for a standalone single-player game, Squadron 42, a story-driven narrative set in the broader Star Citizen universe, featuring a cast of Hollywood voice actors. which includes Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson and Andy Serkis.

More delays are certainly expected, but the end may finally be in sight.

No game created the traditional way, through an established publisher with investors expecting a return, could have survived 13 years of development without a finished product. Star Citizen has been able to buck the trend of the rest of the industry, which is in crisis, with rising costs and regular layoffs. Their main sponsors are players, not investors, and they have different motivations.

“I think Star Citizen’s funders saw it as a direct line to fight corporatization and support a passion project of the highest level,” Elliott says. “Success is not just about spreadsheets, maximizing value and return on investment, but putting fans at the center of everything.”

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