Star Citizen is a controversial project, to say the least. Despite having been collecting crowdfunding money since 2012 and existing in some form of development ever since, a decade has passed and Cloud Imperium Games still has very little to show for it, despite having originally planned to launch in 2014.
Technically, you can play Star Citizen in Early Access right now, but it’s clearly nowhere near finished yet. It’s more of a vertical slice than it is a real game. Nearly a billion dollars of potential players’ money has gone into this project, and it’s still unclear where that cash has gone. There have been layoffs and crunch, and still no release date.
Chief developer Chris Roberts has said about Star Citizen’s single-player spin-off Squadron 42, “We’re hoping it’ll be almost as big an event [as Grand Theft Auto 6]. Other than GTA 6, it’s probably the biggest-budget triple-A game.”
The internet laughed.
GTA 6 Isn’t Huge Because It’s Expensive
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what’s going to make Grand Theft Auto 6 the biggest entertainment launch of the decade – because it will be, nobody has any doubt about that. GTA 6 is leaning on an IP almost three decades old, that will have been in the public consciousness as a ‘must play series’ for 25 years by the time the sixth mainline game launches.
GTA is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. It’s following Grand Theft Auto 5, which has been lauded by many critics at many publications as one of the best video games ever made, at least when it came out over a decade ago. It made 10 billion goddamn dollars. It’s helmed by Rockstar, which is considered one of the best game developers in the business when it comes to incredibly immersive, impossibly detailed, narrative-driven, well-written games.
When GTA 6 comes out, players will have waited 13 years for it. It is one of the most highly anticipated titles of all time. It’s the gaming event of the decade because of all these reasons, not because a ton of money went into it.
Star Citizen Simply Cannot Compare
Star Citizen, in comparison, is none of these things. Chris Roberts is best known for creating the Wing Commander series in 1990. Star Citizen and Squadron 42, while ambitious and expensive, do not have the liberty of belonging to a long pedigree of industry-shaping games or a household name studio.
Its reputation is also far worse. While you could argue Rockstar has been mired in some controversy, especially over the misogyny arguably present in the GTA series, and it’s also historically engaged in quite a lot of crunch, everybody knows that Rockstar is an entirely legitimate developer. This is not the case with Cloud Imperium.
Its spacefaring MMO has a lot of fans, but Star Citizen has a pretty bad reputation already, largely because of the incredibly expensive paid upgrades and the fact that it has released a bundle of in-game spaceships for a mindboggling $48,000 real-life American dollars. What business does a developer have selling imaginary vehicles to players for the price of a brand-new car?
Again, it’s raking in money from committed players (again, for a game that isn’t complete) while still not having delivered a game. It’s also unclear how much of that money has gone into Squadron 42. Getting stars like Gillian Anderson, Henry Cavill, and Gary Oldman surely wasn’t cheap.
Star Citizen does have a lot of players – as the original article mentions, the game has over a million players returning monthly, and at least 25 million players who have tried it at least once. But if I asked a random gamer on the street if they’ve heard of Star Citizen, they’re not likely to say yes. Grand Theft Auto 6, though? They’re probably waiting for it. There is no chance that Star Citizen will have a launch as big as GTA 6’s. To suggest otherwise is laughable.
Star Citizen
Systems
- Developer(s)
- Cloud Imperium Games Corporation
- Publisher(s)
- Cloud Imperium Games Corporation
- Engine
- star engine
- Multiplayer
- Local Multiplayer
- Early Access Release
- December 23, 2017
