Star Citizen, Roberts Space Industries - Chris Roberts' life support and retirement fund [2012-]

Even publishers as large as EA or Activision-Blizzard would be staking the future of their companies on the performance of this singular title. If it released and did well they'd continue doing business. If it didn't they'd be declaring bankruptcy and be put on the auction block.
Activision-Blizzard? Ha ha, no it wouldn't. Not unless the title cost like one and a half billion dollars to develop... :) Blizz alone pulls in enormous cash every month. They're financially extremely stable. Vivendi were idiots to ever have sold them off.

Remember that Blizz was developing its "Titan" MMO for close to ten years before largely scrapping the whole thing (re-purposing some assets into Overwatch), and that was with a huge team of developers working for years and years. And it's not the first time they've done that either. Starcraft Ghost went into the wastebasket after much development and agonizing. Diablo III was re-cobbled multiple times, and so on. There's other stuff they haven't publically even announced that they've scrapped. :p
 
Really, PC/console gamers have no idea how spoiled they are.

Well, no. They can't command prices that people can't afford. And people can't afford because their income is stagnant. And their income is stagnant cause that's the way neolib capitalism works. Blaming people is just ridiculous scapegoat.

Maybe companies could start experimenting with lower prices at launch to determine right elasticity, like what that Valve experiment showed.

The most stunning example: last weekend, the company ran an experiment with the game Left 4 Dead. It heavily discounted the price, and sales shot up 3,000%. And this wasn't just a case of building off a small base. The sales over the weekend were more than when the game launched.

In fact, it looks like a big part of the problem facing the industry is that they charge way too much for their products. Here are the numbers Newell shared from Valve's experiments with "sale" pricing:
  • 10% off = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
  • 25% off = 245% increase in sales
  • 50% off = 320% increase in sales
  • 75% off = 1470% increase in sales

Why do I mention all of this? Because it all relates to the post I responded to. Big publishers don't treat it as a commodity and they certainly aren't short sighted. What they are doing is trying to stay in business and make a profit.

Everything what you've said is a symptom not the cause. The drive to make a profit in the first place is because of the system they are in which is forced on everyone.

And if they can't make a profit even with the very maintream/mass market-friendly game design then there is something more fundamentally wrong with the way game industy works that charging higher prices won't even come closing to fixing it. Publishers merging is the nature of monopoly phase of capital.
The first economist to connect the theory of crisis to the theory of monopoly was the Polish economist Michal Kalecki, who drew his inspiration from Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. Kalecki’s work in the early 1930s in Polish had developed, according to Joan Robinson and others in the circle of younger economists around Keynes, the main elements of the “Keynesian” revolution, in anticipation of Keynes himself. Kalecki moved to England in the mid-1930s where he helped further the transformation in economic analysis associated with Keynes. There he developed his concept of the “degree of monopoly,” which stood for the extent to which a firm was able to impose a price mark-up on prime production costs (workers’ wages and raw materials). In this way, Kalecki was able to link monopoly power to the distribution of national income, and to the sources of economic crisis and stagnation. Kalecki also explored the more general historical conditions affecting investment. In the closing paragraphs of his Theory of Economic Dynamics (1965) he concluded: “Long-run development is not inherent in the capitalist economy. Thus specific ‘developmental factors’ are required to sustain a long-run upward movement.”

This analysis was carried forward by Josef Steindl, a young Austrian economist who had worked closely with Kalecki in England. According to Steindl’s Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (1952), giant corporations tended to promote widening profit margins, but were constantly threatened by a shortage of effective demand, due to the uneven distribution of income and resulting weakness of wage-based consumption.* New investment could conceivably pick up the slack. Yet such investment resulted in new productive capacity, that is, an enlargement of the potential supply of goods. “The tragedy of investment,” Kalecki wrote, “is that it is useful.”* Giant firms, able to control to a considerable extent their levels of price, output, and investment, would not invest if large portions of their existing productive capacity were already standing idle. Confronted with a downward shift in final demand, monopolistic or oligopolistic firms would not lower prices (as in the perfectly competitive system assumed in most economic analysis) but would instead rely almost exclusively on cutbacks in output, capacity utilization and new investment. In this way they would maintain, to whatever extent possible, existing prices and prevailing profit margins. The giant firm under monopoly capitalism was thus prone to wider profit margins (or higher rates of exploitation) and larger amounts of excess capacity than was the case for a freely competitive system, thereby generating a strong tendency toward economic stagnation.*

And when it comes to expectations, part of the problem certainly lies with the players and audience changes. Like with the case of Shattered Horizon. Make it simple, low skill with instant gratification or they'll go away lol.
 
Last edited:
Well, no. They can't command prices that people can't afford. And people can't afford because their income is stagnant. And their income is stagnant cause that's the way neolib capitalism works. Blaming people is just ridiculous scapegoat.

And yet those same people pay more for their food, their clothing, their TVs, their kitchen appliances, their electricity, their cars, pretty much everything compared to 25 years ago. And yet they pay almost half of what they used to pay 25 years ago for games. That is people being greedy and expecting unreasonable things from the AAA games industry.

Maybe companies could start experimenting with lower prices at launch to determine right elasticity, like what that Valve experiment showed.

As long as Physical Media exists, that isn't possible without companies going out of business. And Steam can only do targeted limited duration sales on AAA titles due to console makers not liking it if they don't match Physical Media pricing which cannot match the profitability of digital and hence can't go lower without bankrupting the gaming industry.

Everything what you've said is a symptom not the cause. The drive to make a profit in the first place is because of the system they are in which is forced on everyone.

The drive to make a profit is because virtually everyone on the planet wants to make enough money to live on and enough money to afford leisure activities. For the small minority of people that want life to consist of nothing but subsistence living (food, clothing, shelter, and nothing more), I supposed it's forced.

Publishers merging is the nature of monopoly phase of capital.

Publishers merging for the game industry is all about survival for the vast majority of publishers. Publishers that have chosen not to merge have gone out of business. The games industry is littered with publishers (GT Interactive, 3DRealms, Interplay, THQ, Infogrammes, and many many others) that have gone out of business because the cost of making games is huge and the potential to make back your money on a per title basis is low. Squaresoft and Enix didn't want to merge, but they were on the road to going backrupt prior to merging. Eidos didn't want to join them, but they were in the process of going backrupt before they got purchased. All 3 of those publisher's would not exist today if they hadn't been merged into one publishing house. And even with those mergers Square-Enix Eidos came very close to going bankrupt a few years ago.

Yes, you do have a situation like Activision-Blizzard where that wasn't the case. But that merger doesn't even make sense. Blizzard operates completely independent of Activision. Neither side offers the other side anything. No shared development efforts, no shared online store, no shared production, no shared marketing, no shared management for the most part, nothing. Blizzard publishes it's own titles. Activision publishers everything else that isn't a Blizzard developed title.

The price of modern AAA games is so low and the cost to make them is so high that for AAA game development to provide the graphics that gamers demand they must rely on 1-2 games making a huge profit to subsidize the other 7-10 games that will lose money. They don't do this knowing that those games will lose money, but that is just the reality of the situation.

Regards,
SB
 
Last edited:
And yet those same people pay more for their food, their clothing, their TVs, their kitchen appliances, their electricity, their cars, pretty much everything compared to 25 years ago. And yet they pay almost half of what they used to pay 25 years ago for games. That is people being greedy and expecting unreasonable things from the AAA games industry.

No kidding, I had an Atari 2600 between 1979 and 1982. Official Atari cartridges in the UK were generally £30 and I remember paying that for Asteroids, Phoenix, Berzerk and Star Raiders - which came with an additional controller pad so felt like a bargain. That £137 in today's money accounting for inflation.

I had so many side jobs to fund my gaming habit. It was different for kids back then, you couldn't just start a drug lab or become a millionaire by writing some app and hoping somebody would buy you out for a ridiculous pile of money. :no: Summers were brighter and fields were greener too! :yes:

However when you consider C64 games were generally around £10 in 1985, that's a shade under £30 quid now with today's PS4 games typically launching at £40-50.
 
No kidding, I had an Atari 2600 between 1979 and 1982. Official Atari cartridges in the UK were generally £30 and I remember paying that for Asteroids, Phoenix, Berzerk and Star Raiders - which came with an additional controller pad so felt like a bargain. That £137 in today's money accounting for inflation.

I had so many side jobs to fund my gaming habit. It was different for kids back then, you couldn't just start a drug lab or become a millionaire by writing some app and hoping somebody would buy you out for a ridiculous pile of money. :no: Summers were brighter and fields were greener too! :yes:

However when you consider C64 games were generally around £10 in 1985, that's a shade under £30 quid now with today's PS4 games typically launching at £40-50.

Heh, I grew up poor. We couldn't even afford glass panes in most of the windows of our house. :p Most of my clothing came from the local dump. As a child I went around collecting aluminum cans to sell to recycling centers to afford books to read. Things eventually improved though. But because of that I take absolutely nothing for granted in life.

I didn't do the C64, I had an Apple ][ in the 80's. The price in the US was comparable for games though. And games like Wizardry, Ultima, The Bard's Tale, King's Quest, Might and Magic, etc. (80's equivalents of AAA titles) were already in the 50 USD range. Ultima peaked at 80 USD in the US in the early 90's. Then Origin Systems (developer and publisher for those that don't know) started to lose profitability despite growing revenue, got bought out by EA and disappeared. Damn, looking at that. Sir-Tech Software (developer and publisher also) is also gone. Same goes for Sierra-Online (another developer and publisher). Although Sierra-Online's name has been resurrected in name only. Bleh, so sad that most of the publishers that made my favorite games over the years no longer exist.

I wouldn't say grass is greener. But it was easier for AAA developers to create new IP and a lot easier for AAA publishers to fund those developers.

Regards,
SB
 
Alpha 2.5 is now live. I wrote about it some sites before.


In the current ATV CIG Frankfurt stated that they want to implement Picture in Picture into the game engine.
For the Gamescom demo Miles Eckhart and they guy that gives you landing permission on Levski were both pre-rendered as Flash videos which were triggered inside the engine. They said this is "old school" and they want to change that in the future to a process where they can render picture-in-picture live in the engine. This would be scaling much better with an online universe that has hundreds of these characters.wants to do PiP where the

Employee in UK wrote this about PiP
"I'm not sure whose schedule it's on, but likely it would be Frankfurt, Wilmslow, or a combination of the two. The team here is well suited to do things like plumbing render targets, shuffling of the pipeline etc, but making sure that things like visibility, streaming etc properly understand the idea of multiple viewpoints is something that the guys over there are better at.
Hannes has also done some cool test renders for a kind of "lightweight PiP", so characters can pop up with messages without the engine going "Oh no! Stream and render that character's entire ship!" and ruining your framerate for the sake of a two-second line
."

Source: https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/6933864/#Comment_6933864


I wonder how this would be possible to render in real-time in a modern game? PiP is mostly known from racing games (rear view mirror). But here the engine would calculate an environment that could be millions of km away. While the environment around the player is still there.
The only "modern" shooters I know using PiP are Escape from Tarkov and Red Orchestra 2 (scopes).

Normaly it looks like this in games (whole screen is zoomed)
latest


Escape from Tarkov and Red Orchestra 2 are like this (just the scope zoomes [PiP]) -

20110919204125.jpg




EDIT:

Chris Roberts talks procedural planet generation and crafting realistic worlds for an FPS.

“We still have some work to do on the V2 procedural tech, but it is going to be awesome because it will allow us to really craft things with character,” explains Roberts. “It can be to the level that you might see in Star Wars Battlefront, say like the moon with the little Ewoks on [the Forest Moon of Endor], we can craft areas with that level of detail with the new tech. It's going to look super cool and realistic when it's done.”

http://www.redbull.com/en/games/stories/1331814041509/making-star-citizens-planets-believable
 
Last edited:
And yet those same people pay more for their food, their clothing, their TVs, their kitchen appliances, their electricity, their cars, pretty much everything compared to 25 years ago. And yet they pay almost half of what they used to pay 25 years ago for games. That is people being greedy and expecting unreasonable things from the AAA games industry.

Why don't they try setting higher prices, say 100-200$ and see how it goes? At least for one game as an experiment. It can't be that those damn greedy people is the only thing preventing them?

The drive to make a profit is because virtually everyone on the planet wants to make enough money to live on and enough money to afford leisure activities. For the small minority of people that want life to consist of nothing but subsistence living (food, clothing, shelter, and nothing more), I supposed it's forced.

lol Nice wielding of ideological axes, even if wasn't intentional.
 
Last edited:
The reason why I mentioned shareholder value maximization:
https://hbr.org/2014/09/profits-without-prosperity
http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1584
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/lazonick.pdf


Top American and British companies are using the vast majority of their earnings for stock buybacks and dividends and very little for reinvestment. This is the reason for GM's bakruptcy and IBM's fade into irrelevance. MSV strategy makes both managers and stockholders happy even while it ruins the company and the society long-term. Maybe it's the same with major gaming pubs. Would be useful to see their numbers.
 
I never noticed that. Not that release dates are anything RSI actually cares about :)
 
This weeks ATV was good and it worths to watch. They showed cargo, offroading with a rover, the Drake Dragonfly hovering over a surface, some cool sound design and wrecks in orbit and on planets.

New link (old video was dremoved)

TLDR (Too Long;Didn't Read)
Intro and other information

  • Star Citizen Alpha 2.5 is live which features an improved landing system, two flyable ships: Reliant Kore, and the Argo utility craft, Grim Hex a place for outlaws to gather.
  • Subscriber Town Hall featured the U.K. Audio Team.
Studio Update

  • Will Maiden is chatting about Cargo in 3.0.
  • In 3.0 we’ll be able to pick up boxes and take them to market.
  • Cargo comes from salvage, piracy, missions or from markets.
  • When buying from markets, it’ll be automatically loaded onto the ship.
  • You can still manually drop and pickup cargo however.
  • Salvage and pirate players will have to manually carry cargo - they have lengthier gameplay.
  • They’ll be able to pick up what they want to take.
  • As ships are already built out they can start placing cargo and seeing where it’ll fit.
  • Once cargo is down inside the ship it’s locked to that ship.
  • Markets are set up at Port Olisar, GrimHex and Levski currently.
  • You’ll be able to pay for things with cargo you currently have.
  • Ursa Rover’s wheels and turret fold in when inside the Constellation and deploy for use
  • One driver chair, one navigator chair. The consoles fold into the chassis for access
  • You can use the Ursa to drive across entire planets and enable closer inspection and investigation than flying over
  • You can open the back door on the Rover and set up 2 characters to fire out
Ship Shape: Dragonfly

  • The Dragonfly is a new category of vehicle for Star Citizen: a space motorcycle
  • Drake was a perfect candidate because of it's styling and recent work on the Caterpillar
  • Design brief was something small, that can hover over land and fly in space
  • The concept and art guys essentially had carte blanche which is what they want
  • It was challenging to model because it has so many exposed components: it's an expensive asset
  • Tech design do a rough "whitebox" flyable state and then start breaking the model up
  • Items and parts are made detachable and given damage effects
  • Gamescom demo show basic ground mode and spaceflight mode but they are adding more:
    • further work on the ground mode flight system so it feels "spot on"
    • setting up the rear seat for a rear facing passenger and capable of holding a weapon
    • implementing compact mode for storing the Dragonfly
  • The kickstart sound is heavily processed Harley Davidson so you know it's a motorbike
  • They wanted to provide a contrast between space travel and planetside travel
  • They wanted to emphasize things like ground effects to give you a better sense of where you are and enhance that experience planetside

Behind the Scenes with Nathan Dearsley

  • They are dedicated to derelict spaceship salvage and it's reuse of established assets by the end of the year.
  • The challenge is how to blend these with established terrain along with erosion and decay effects.
  • They'll be collaborating with design and environment guys once planetary tech is on board.

Source: http://imperialnews.network/2016/09/around-the-verse-episode-3-05/

They showed in a video how wrecks could look like in Alpha 3.0:
https://gfycat.com/GregariousLegalFlea
qDXzV9K.png


AfXuwPg.png


Sandstorms: https://gfycat.com/RewardingConventionalLabradorretriever

CIG is aware about the current HUD issues and adressed them: https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/343796/addressing-hud-mfd-feedback
 
Last edited:
The kickstart sound is heavily processed Harley Davidson so you know it's a motorbike

Oh thank god it's a heavily processed harley sound! How else would I ever know it's a motorbike???

So how is Squadron 42 going?
(crickets)
 
So I'm going to say something positive ... The graphics look great and have improved greatly. Here is another positive ... they've added a lot more into the game.

Now negatives. The flight models still suck with joysticks and mouse is still the best way to play the game. The content needed for SQ42 seems to be no where near ready with most of it not in the game. It is now Sept I highly doubt they will deliver in 2016 at this point and if they do it will be the tail end of Dec and perhaps less than 5 hours of actual game play.
 
Oh thank god it's a heavily processed harley sound! How else would I ever know it's a motorbike???
God Damnit...why can't they make things try to sound like how they would actually sound like (to the extent that it's possible) instead of only going for what's "cool". And who the hell thinks the Harley sound is cool? Could the Chairman possibly be...a fag?

fag-gif.1568
 

Attachments

  • fag.gif
    fag.gif
    325.3 KB · Views: 149
Last edited:
God Damnit...why can't they make things try to sound like how they would actually sound like (to the extent that it's possible) instead of only going for what's "cool". And who the hell thinks the Harley sound is cool? Could the Chairman possibly be...a fag?

fag-gif.1568


why are we talking about cigarettes in this thread ?
 
Star Citizen Alpha 2.5: Welcome to GrimHEX!


____

Michael Graf (GameStar chief editor) info about Squadron42 release/progress

Michael Graf does a lot about Star Citizen at GameStar (biggest german PC magazine), you can see him here meeting CR and checking out the 3.0 demo at Gamescom.

They published a new video about Star Citizen (concerning the hopes/fears for the game) and gave out some additional info in the comment section, specifically this one: http://imgur.com/VnOEXnb
"Chris stated in an interview that all content for Squadron42 (graphics, missions) will be complete by the end of the year. There is still more work to do concerning some basic systems like the AI or the coversystem for infiltration missions. Those will take more time."
Source:https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/50z7op/michael_graf_gamestar_chief_editor_info_about/


CIG will say and show more about Squadron 42 at CitizenCon on October 9.
 
Last edited:
So basicly no SQ42 for 2016 since basic systems are still not done.

So we are now going to hope for spring 2017 which will most likely fall into a Holiday 2017 release for SQ42 as opposed to the original Holiday 2014 release
 
Back
Top