Exclusive: The Saga Of 'Star Citizen,' A Video Game That Raised $300 Million—But May Never Be Ready To Play
It’s October 2018 and 2,000 video game fanatics are jammed into Austin’s Long Center for the Performing Arts to get a glimpse of
Star Citizen, the sprawling online multiplayer game being made by legendary designer Chris Roberts.
Most of the people here helped to pay for the game’s development—on average, $200 each, although some backers have given thousands. An epic sci-fi fantasy, Star Citizen was supposed to be finished in 2014. But after seven years of work, no one—least of all Roberts—has a clue as to when it will be done. But despite the disappointments and delays, this crowd is cheering for Roberts. They roar as the 50-year-old Englishman jumps onto the stage and a big screen lights up with the latest test version of
Star Citizen.
The demo starts small: Seeing through the eyes of the in-game character, the player wakes up in his living quarters, gets up and brews a cup of coffee.
Applause quickly turns to laughter when the game promptly crashes. While his underlings scramble to get the demo running again, a practiced Roberts smoothly fills minutes of dead air by screening a commercial for the Kraken, a massive war machine spaceship. Eventually the Kraken, like all the starships that Roberts sells, will be playable in Star Citizen. At least that’s the hope. But for $1,650 it could be yours, right away.
“Some days, I wish I could be like . . . ‘You’re not going to see anything until it’s beautiful,’ ” Roberts later says at his Los Angeles studio. “A lot of times we’ll show stuff and literally say, ‘Now, this is rough.’ ”
What’s really rough is the current state of
Star Citizen. The company Roberts cofounded, Cloud Imperium Games, has raised $288 million to bring the PC game to life along with its companion, an offline single-player action game called
Squadron 42. Of this haul, $242 million has been contributed by about 1.1 million fans, who have either bought digital toys like the Kraken or given cash online. Excluding cryptocurrencies, that makes
Star Citizen far and away the biggest crowdfunded project ever.
Rough playable modes—alphas, not betas—are used to raise hopes and illustrate work being done. And Roberts has enticed gamers with a steady stream of hype, including promising a vast, playable universe with “100 star systems.” But most of the money is gone, and the game is still far from finished. At the end of 2017, for example, Roberts was down to just $14 million in the bank. He has since raised more money. Those 100 star systems? He has not completed a single one. So far he has two mostly finished planets, nine moons and an asteroid.
This is not fraud—Roberts really is working on a game—
but it is incompetence and mismanagement on a galactic scale. The heedless waste is fueled by easy money raised through crowdfunding, a Wild West territory nearly free of regulators and rules. Creatives are in charge here, not profit-driven bean counters or deadline-enforcing suits. 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. 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.
If you don’t play video games, you probably have never heard of Roberts. 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. 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. He followed that success by starting his own studio, Digital Anvil, with Microsoft as an investor. 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. 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.
Forbes spoke to 20 people who used to work for Cloud Imperium, many of whom depict Roberts as a micromanager and poor steward of resources. They describe the work environment as chaotic.
“As the money rolled in, what I consider to be some of [Roberts’] 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 2013 and 2014. “It had got out of hand, in my opinion. The promises being made—call it feature creep, call it whatever it is—now we can do this, now we can do that. I was shocked.”
“There is a plan. Don’t worry—it’s not complete madness,” Roberts insists.
But what Roberts has stirred up does seem crazy. Star Citizen seems destined to be the most expensive video game ever made—and it might never be finished. 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.
Up to a point, Roberts has been transparent about where the money has been going. He released years’ worth of financial statements last December.
But he won’t say how much he or other top Cloud Imperium execs have made from the project. His wife and his brother both work in senior positions at the company.
“There’s no two ways about it, man.
Star Citizen is nuts,” says Jesse Schell, a prominent game developer and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “This thing is unusual in about five dimensions. . . . It is very rare to be doing game development for seven years—that’s not how it works. That’s not normal at all.”
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 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. 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. (Today, Roberts says that initial year of development doesn’t count because “it was more proof-of-concept work.”)
Growing up in Manchester, England, Roberts was a skilled coder with grand ambitions. He made games in his teens, including a soccer simulation for the BBC Micro, before landing in Austin in 1987. There, he met influential video game director Richard Garriott—famous to fans of the blockbuster
Ultima series as Lord British—and at age 19 started working for Garriott’s Origin Systems, where Roberts created
Wing Commander. The PC game launched in 1990 and was wildly successful.
In 1996, Roberts left Origin and cofounded Digital Anvil to create games in partnership with Microsoft, which was beginning to take gaming seriously and had a minority stake. Following the success of
Wing Commander, Roberts authored another game at Origin,
Strike Commander, known for its production headaches, and developed a reputation as an exacting boss. But he was still seen as gaming’s golden boy.
Roberts expanded on the idea of a living, breathing universe when he announced Freelancer in 1999, two years after the start of development. At the same time, Roberts convinced 20th Century Fox to back a $30 million movie version of Wing Commander, which lost nearly $20 million. Stuart Moulder, the Microsoft general manager who oversaw the software giant’s relationship with Digital Anvil, came to believe that Microsoft money intended for game development was instead used for the movie. “[Roberts’] energy and attention and some of the funds were siphoned off for that movie,” Moulder says. “The Digital Anvil investment has to be looked at as largely a failure.”
Roberts concedes that Microsoft was frustrated with the time he spent on the movie but says funds used for it were appropriate because they came from Microsoft’s purchase of the minority stake, with the proceeds earmarked for general business purposes that included moviemaking. Either way, Microsoft acquired full control of Digital Anvil in 2001, and Roberts left the company. It would be another two years before
Freelancer hit stores as a much smaller game than envisioned.
Free of Microsoft, Roberts went full Hollywood. He got in on the business side of things by cofounding production company Ascendant Pictures, which made several mostly forgettable movies like
Outlander (2008) and
The Big White (2005). Roberts got a producer credit on Ascendant’s most successful film,
Lord of War, starring Nicolas Cage.
But things were shaky. To make the movies, Roberts teamed up with a German lawyer, Ortwin Freyermuth, who is now vice chairman of Cloud Imperium. They arranged financing from an investment fund that was using a tax scheme to raise money in Germany for Hollywood movies. By 2006 the German government had stopped the practice, and the fund’s founder was sentenced to jail for tax fraud, according to Variety. Roberts and Freyermuth were not implicated.
With the German money dried up, things were bleak in Tinseltown. Kevin Costner sued Ascendant Pictures at the end of 2005, claiming it reneged on a deal to pay him $8 million to act in a comedy. (Ascendant denied wrongdoing and the suit was settled.) Roberts sold Ascendant Pictures in 2010 to a small production company called Bigfoot Entertainment, which had offices in Los Angeles and the Philippines.
Roberts’ Hollywood days were over. It was time to get back to gaming.[/spoiler]
Exclusive: The Saga Of 'Star Citizen,' A Video Game That Raised $300 Million—But May Never Be Ready To Play
. Instead of complaining about the state of the game, the fanboys are on reddit asking for animals to be implemented
. Chris Roberts, Finesse gawd
Got this scam shyt down to a science
" 
them nikkas gotta be sick af 
and why we spending 700 dollars on a friggin spaceship when the entire game runs like butt?
