I didn’t quote that bit, but that’s actually what he was upset about too.
For Lord, it’s no longer the game he thought he was getting. The first person mode is an especially hard sell. “I have [multiple sclerosis],” he told me. “My hands shake badly. I have tremors…They just recently confirmed that you have to do the first-person shooter thing to get through Squadron 42. I can’t do that, I just can’t do that. So my money’s stuck in a game I can’t possibly play.”
The good news is that work on the game is still under way. The bad news is that its actual release date is just as unclear as ever.
For those keeping track, that means it’s been almost fifteen years since Ubisoft released its first trailer for the game, which is longer than it took to get gaming’s other development-hell classic Duke Nukem Forever out the door.
The company made a big splash when it released a new trailer for the game at E3 2017, but at the time director Michel Ancel cautioned that the team was still at “day zero” of development. Following his departure from the company in 2020, reports emerged that Ancel was under investigation for his allegedly toxic management style.
It sounds a lot less like a joke and more like enormous project management problems.
Ken Lord was one of those fans, and an early backer of Star Citizen. He’s got a Golden Ticket, a mark on his account that singles him out as an early member of the community. Between April 2013 and April 2018, Ken pledged $4,495 to the project. The game still isn’t out, and Lord wants his money back. RSI wouldn’t refund it, so Lord took the developer to small-claims court in California.
According to the game’s original pitch on Kickstarter, it would be a space sim with a co-op multiplayer game, an offline single-player experience, and a persistent universe. It’s since become a massively multiplayer online game and a separate single-player game with first-person shooter elements called Squadron 42, which RSI originally pitched as “A Wing Commander style single player mode, playable OFFLINE if you want.”
Along with the game—which originally had a targeted release date of 2014—Lord was supposed to have received numerous bits of physical swag. “So aside from [the game], I’m supposed to get a spaceship USB drive, silver collector’s box, CDs, DVDs, spaceship blueprints, models of the spaceship, a hardback book,” he said. “That’s the making of Star Citizen, which—if they end up making this game—might turn into an encyclopedia set.”
So if they still are on the hook to provide all that stuff and many people are in a similar situation to this guy, that’s a lot of merch that they gotta produce after they have done the game.
Currently Star Citizen is at the #1 spot for the most money spent on a video game’s development on this list. And that’s including adjustment for inflation.
On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.[16] It holds the Guinness world record for the longest development for a video game, at 14 years and 44 days,[17] though this period was exceeded in 2022 by Beyond Good and Evil 2.[18]
I assume that the reason that the Guiness Book of World Records doesn’t accept Beyond Good and Evil 2 is that they probably require an actual release.
Duke Nukem Forever was released on June 14, 2011, and received mostly unfavorable reviews, with criticism for its graphics, dated humor and story, simplistic mechanics, and unpolished performance and design. It did not meet sales expectations but was deemed profitable by Take-Two Interactive, the owner of 2K Games.
Beyond Good and Evil 2 has been referred to as vaporware by industry figures such as Jason Schreier due to its lengthy development and lack of a release date.[3] In 2022, Beyond Good and Evil 2 broke the record held by Duke Nukem Forever (2011) for the longest development of a AAA video game, at more than 15 years. In 2023, the creative director, Emile Morel, died suddenly at age 40.
It’s free and open-source (though one of the devs put a build up for $20 on Steam, which basically amounts to a donation). I’d definitely recommend it to someone who enjoys Project Zomboid and Rimworld.
Welll…it depends. If you count DLC, there are games that have greatly outpaced inflation.
The Sims 4 costs nothing for the “base game”, but with all DLC – and that is still coming out – it’s presently about $1,100.
Another factor is that in many cases, the market has expanded. Like, in 1983, it wasn’t that common to see adults in the US playing video games. I am pretty sure that in a lot of countries, basically nobody was playing video games in 1983. in 2023, 40 years later, the situation is very different. The costs of making a video game are almost entirely fixed costs, separate from how many copies you sell.
So…if there is a game out that that many, many other people want to play, it’s going to sell a lot more copies.
I don’t really see the point in getting upset about a price, though – I agree with you on that. I mean, unless the game was misrepresented to you…it’s a competitive market out there. Either it’s worth it to you or it’s not, and if it’s not, then play something else. If someone is determinedly charging some very high price for a game in a genre, and a lot of people want to play that genre and it can be made profitably at a lower price, some other developer is probably going to show up sooner or later and add a competitor to the mix.
I like the theme, like the ambiance, like the open world, and absolutely hate the combat in that game. Have you ever played Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead? Same sort of setting and game, but turn-based, and significantly more-complex, and particularly since I see Rimworld on your list, I’m wondering if you might like it.
I think that most of the games that I’ve really enjoyed have been ones that tend towards the “full price” side money-wise, but which I have played for a long time, replayed a number of times, not just done a single pass. Gotten DLC on. Often modded.
Think:
Fallout 4
Oxygen Not Included
Caves of Qud
Civilization V
Stellaris
Noita
Kenshi
Nova Drift
Kerbal Space Program
Rimworld
Mount & Blade: Warband
The amount I’ve paid per hour of play on those is tiny.
My real constraint is the amount of time I have. I mean, I haven’t really been constrained by what it costs to play a game. I have a backlog of games that I’d be willing to play.
The waste, from a purely monetary standpoint, is overwhelmingly games that I buy and touch briefly, and don’t find myself playing at all. Frostpunk sounded neat, because I like similar genres (city-building), but I completely disliked the actual game, for example. A few Paradox games (Stellaris) I’ve really gotten into, but a number I’ve also found completely-uninteresting (Europa Universalis, say). There are apparently a number of Europeans who are extremely into the idea of their historic people taking over Europe, for example, and Paradox specializes in simulating those scenarios. I just don’t care about playing that out. Sudden Strike 4 – I’ve really enjoyed some real time tactics WW2 games, like Close Combat, but couldn’t stand the more arcade-oriented Sudden Strike 4.
If you could give me a Noita, but high resolution and with some neat new content and physics I’d happily pay $100.
I’ve played Nova Drift for about 180 hours. That game presently sells for $18. So I paid about ten cents an hour. The price of the game is a rounding error in terms of the entertainment I got from it. Paying ten times as much for a sequel or DLC comparable to the stuff in the original game would be fine as long as I were confident that I’d enjoy and play it as much as I did the original game.
Sudden Strike 4 is about $20. I played it, forcing myself back to it, made it to about an hour total. So I paid about $20 an hour, or about 200 times the rate for Nova Drift. And I didn’t enjoy that hour much.
In general, my preferred model would be for publishers to keep putting out DLC on highly-replayable games as long as people are interested in buying it: when I find something that I know I like, I want to be able to get more of it. If the Caves of Qud guy would hire more people to produce more content and just sell it as DLC, I’d be happy with that.
I think that part of the problem in the case of Caves of Qud is that traditionally, the roguelike genre was aimed at having relatively-quick runs. So losing a run isn’t such a big deal. Your current character is expendable. But many roguelike games – like Caves of Qud – have, as they’ve gotten ever-bigger and gotten ever-more-extensive late games, had much, much longer runs. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead can have a character easily last for weeks or even months of real time. If you sink that much time into a character, having them die becomes, I think, less-palatable to most players. So there’s an incentive to shift towards the RPG model of “death is not permanent; it just throws you back to the last save”.
Just as some roguelikes have had longer runs, some games in the genre have intentionally headed in the direction of shorter runs – the “coffee break roguelike”. The problem there is that roguelikes have also historically had a lot of interacting game mechanics in building out a character, and if you put a ten-minute cap or so on a run, that sharply limits the degree of complexity that can come up over any given run for a character.