The production cost of Star Citizen has now surpassed that of multiple triple-A titles combined, including the likes of GTA 5, RDR2, and Cyberpunk 2077.
I think people kind of just like laughing at how ridiculous Star Citizen is, and kind of rightly so. Over half a billion dollars and a decade in development just for what they’ve got is pretty wild.
To be clear, what they’ve got right now with sharded persistance and asset streaming is extremely novel on a technical level, but there’s no real substance to it yet as a game, just an impressive engine with an absurdly large scale and a tech demo running on it.
If they ever actually stop fiddling and make the damn game it’ll be impressive, I’m sure, but so will the earthshattering cost and scale of waste getting there. Then 2 years later someone else will put out something 90% as impressive for 1/100th the cost.
Maybe I’m missing something, but what’s so remarkable about persistence? EVE Online has had persistence since before Star Citizen was even announced. It’s nothing new to the MMO world. Especially since it’s sharded, so it’s not even synced between shards/servers. It’s literally just numbers in a database somewhere. Where’s the novel technology? They don’t even have server meshing yet.
It might have been hard to code, but that has as much to do with their choice of engine as anything.
I think people kind of just like laughing at how ridiculous Star Citizen is, and kind of rightly so. Over half a billion dollars and a decade in development just for what they’ve got is pretty wild.
To be clear, what they’ve got right now with sharded persistance and asset streaming is extremely novel on a technical level, but there’s no real substance to it yet as a game, just an impressive engine with an absurdly large scale and a tech demo running on it.
If they ever actually stop fiddling and make the damn game it’ll be impressive, I’m sure, but so will the earthshattering cost and scale of waste getting there. Then 2 years later someone else will put out something 90% as impressive for 1/100th the cost.
Maybe I’m missing something, but what’s so remarkable about persistence? EVE Online has had persistence since before Star Citizen was even announced. It’s nothing new to the MMO world. Especially since it’s sharded, so it’s not even synced between shards/servers. It’s literally just numbers in a database somewhere. Where’s the novel technology? They don’t even have server meshing yet.
It might have been hard to code, but that has as much to do with their choice of engine as anything.
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Scaling up as a game developer (or any software company) is hard, but not “it takes a decade and half a billion dollars” hard.