The United Empire of Earth Navy caused quite a stir last November when it announced that it would be putting 200 decommissioned Javelin Destroyers up for sale. Each 1,132-foot-long spaceship has the sort of amenities that your average interstellar mercenary finds hard to resist: four primary thrusters, 12 maneuvering thrusters, a heavily armored bridge, private quarters for a captain and an executive officer, six cargo rooms, general quarters for a minimum of 23 crew members, and a hangar big enough to accommodate a gunship. There's even a lifetime insurance policy.
The document that announced the Javelins' impending sale took pains to stress that these warships were fixer-uppers. “They are battle-hardened and somewhat worse for wear,” it read, “and have been stripped of the weapons systems.” Thus, any would-be buyer would eventually have to shell out extra to equip the 20 gun turrets and the two torpedo launchers. The asking price for each ship: $2,500. And that wasn't some form of fictional futuristic space bucks; it was 2,500 real dollars. Actual, real, present-day American Earth dollars.
Despite those caveats, all 200 Javelins sold out. In less than a minute.
The sale brought in half a million dollars for Cloud Imperium Games, the company behind the space-exploration and combat videogame Star Citizen. Cloud Imperium has hit upon a truly futuristic business model. There's nothing new about inviting players to spend real money for virtual goods—a vehicle or weapon or article of clothing that can only be used inside a virtual gameworld. What's new about Star Citizen is that most of its goods are doubly virtual—they can only be used inside the gameworld, and the gameworld doesn't actually exist yet. In fact, its massively multiplayer universe may not be up and running for several more months. Or several more years. Or … longer.
Star Citizen began as a crowdfunding project in the fall of 2012 and has since raised an astonishing $77 million from some 770,000 backers. That's an order of magnitude more money than the next-biggest crowdfunded videogame project. It's several multiples more than any other crowdfunding project of any kind. It's equivalent to the budget of a top-tier game like Watch Dogs or to Snapchat's Series B funding round. And Star Citizen continues to bring in millions of dollars every month. Yet only a few isolated segments of the game have been released so far, and even those are in a very early, bug-ridden form.
Watch a trailer for Star Citizen.
But you can already immerse yourself in the world of the game if you visit the Star Citizen website. Some material is standard-issue get-the-players-hyped language intended to read as if it were written in the year 2015. But a lot of the material on the site—like, say, the sales pitch for the Javelin Destroyer—is addressed to the space-faring peoples of the year 2945. As if it's coming from inside the world of the game.
Chris Roberts, creator of Star Citizen, calls this mode “in-fiction,” and it's a signature element of his new game's appeal for fans who adore the neglected niche of the sci-fi game genre that Star Citizen occupies. And yet for every would-be player who thinks Roberts is the savior of hardcore PC gaming—George Lucas crossed with Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto—there's one who thinks him a charlatan, a 21st-century snake-oil salesman. What's undeniably true is that he's one of the greatest marketers the industry has ever seen.
Beyond that, how does Roberts explain the $77 million secret of Star Citizen's success? “The big thing is the thing that we didn't do,” he says. “Most crowdfunding campaigns engage some people, convince them to become backers, and then the campaign stops. We didn't stop.”
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Mustang Delta | $65 Game Graphics by Cloud Imperium Games
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Aegis Dynamics | $90 Game Graphics by Cloud Imperium Games
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Drake Interplanetary Cutlass Black | $100 Game Graphics by Cloud Imperium Games
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Anvil Gladiator | $165 Game Graphics by Cloud Imperium Games
The Ultimate Science Fiction Game. That's the vision Chris Roberts has been pursuing since he was a teenage movie buff with an aptitude for coding. “I wanted to capture what I felt watching Star Wars as a kid,” he says. “I wanted to be Luke Skywalker in the cockpit of the X-wing fighter.”
In 1990 he pitched this concept to Origin Systems, an Austin, Texas, gamemaker. All Roberts had walking into that meeting was some mock-up sketches and a prototype engine that could depict three-dimensional space battles. That and an irresistible way of describing what was in his mind's eye. He was just 21 at the time, and his apple cheeks and boyish grin made him look even younger. He doesn't have an especially commanding voice—he speaks softly in a narrow register, with a slight British accent that he picked up during a childhood spent in Manchester. But his enthusiasm is infectious, and his sales pitch that day 25 years ago was extremely convincing. “He nailed it,” says Richard Garriott, cofounder of Origin. “Just nailed it. There wasn't a person there who didn't know it would be our best-selling game ever and that Chris would be a rock star.”
Roberts was given all of the resources he needed to make the game, which would be called Wing Commander. It indeed became Origin's biggest seller and spawned a whole “space sim” genre. The game looks dated now, with lo-res graphics and dialog rendered as text—but its nuance and detail was unprecedented. Wing Commander pioneered the perspective that first-person shooter games would later adopt. You saw the world through the eyes of a rookie pilot—the outer-space action, the instruments and buttons in the cockpit, even your avatar's hands on the controls. When your ship got damaged, sparks came out of the dashboard—“very high-end immersion at the time,” as Roberts describes it with a laugh.
Every element of the game was organically integrated; it was all in in-fiction. If you wanted to stop playing, you didn't simply hit a Save button—you clicked on a bunk in the ship's barracks, as if your avatar was turning in for the night. If you died in battle you didn't just see a game-over screen, you watched your own funeral, complete with a 21-laser-gun salute and a eulogy from the captain that described your specific combat experiences. Keep in mind that this was 25 years ago, when gamers were still totally jazzed about the Mario game in the Fred Savage movie The Wizard.
And each new installment in the burgeoning franchise seemed to broaden and deepen the sci-fi milieu. Wing Commander 2 added spoken dialog. Wing Commander 3 featured filmed story interludes (directed by Roberts) with elaborate digital effects and Hollywood actors like Malcolm McDowell and Mark Hamill. By 1998 the franchise had spawned a dozen sequels and spin-offs, a series of tie-in novels, even an animated TV series. For many young gamers, Wing Commander represented what Star Wars had been to Roberts when he was a child.
Roberts became the wunderkind of the multimedia CD-ROM boom, a heady time when it seemed that cinema and interactive entertainment were about to converge and become a single medium any minute now. (For more on that, flip through an early issue of WIRED. Any of them.) When a feature film adaptation of Wing Commander was green-lighted, Roberts himself was tapped to direct, something no game designer had ever been allowed to do. And no game designer has been afforded that privilege since—the movie was one of the biggest bombs of 1999.
But Roberts had caught the Hollywood bug. He soon left the game industry and founded a film production company. He set up projects, pitched studios, and attracted investors. He was credited as a producer on films such as The Punisher, The Jacket, Lord of War, and Outlander. Some of his films garnered critical acclaim, some were even profitable, but none managed to pull off both things simultaneously.
Eventually, in 2011, Roberts decided that it was time to make another space sim. “I'd been burned out on games, and I had thought that you could render worlds better in films,” he says. “But I felt like the technology was there now to create the game I wished I could've done when I was 19.” The thing was, he dreaded having to go hat in hand to the big publishers and ask for the tens of millions of dollars he'd need to develop and distribute a big-budget game. Any publisher would want assurances that the game could sell the millions of copies necessary to earn back its budget—a difficult bar to clear, given that the space-sim genre had been moribund for years.
So Roberts looked elsewhere for funding. At first he sought out private investors with deep pockets, as he'd done on film projects. Then he began to look at the new business models that had emerged in gaming while he was away. Many gamemakers avoid publishers and store shelves altogether, selling their titles on digital distribution platforms like Steam. The makers of the staggeringly successful Minecraft had funded it by selling early access to an unfinished version of the game. And a studio called Double Fine raised more than $4 million on Kickstarter before production on a game had even begun—purely on the promise to revive the defunct adventure genre.
“I thought maybe I could pull this off,” Roberts says.
In October 2012 Chris Roberts' new company, Cloud Imperium Games, launched a Kickstarter campaign for Star Citizen. The centerpiece of the campaign was an 11-minute video, a brilliant sales pitch that deployed all of Roberts' skills as a gamemaker, filmmaker, and rainmaker: insistent orchestral score with portentous voices chanting incoherently, photo-realistic CG footage of gargantuan battleships, alien craft weaving through asteroid fields, and plucky fighter pilots blasting off for battle. The words ACTUAL GAME ASSETS RENDERED IN REAL TIME IN ENGINE flashed onscreen.
Then the video cut to Roberts—still boyish at 44—sitting inside an impossibly cool cockpit that bristled with buttons and knobs and mini-displays on extendable robotic arms. “I'd like to show you something I've been working on,” he says. “I don't want to build any old game; I want to build a universe.”
He goes on to describe a sprawling galactic playground with scores of star systems to explore and more being added all the time. It would have 10 times the graphical detail of anything on the market. “I've never been accused of having a small vision,” he says in the video. “I want to actively push the boundaries of what you can do in a game.”
For a legion of old-school gamers, the pitch was a symphony of dog whistles. One of those fans was Wulf Knight, a 39-year-old IT professional. The original Wing Commander had been a formative experience for him; it even taught him a trade. “I had to learn DOS to get it to run on my old 286 PC,” says the blond-haired, bearded Knight, who online goes by the handle Accelerwraith and offline lives with his wife and two cats in Madison, Wisconsin. “Chris Roberts launched so many IT careers, it isn't even funny. And now, after 10 years, he's making another space sim? It's like Tolkien coming back from the dead!”
Knight's first backing level, at $250, was Rear Admiral. This entitled him to early access to the game and a Constellation spaceship he'd be able to operate in the game, once the game exists. Then he purchased another spaceship—the $300 Vanduul Scythe. By the time the Kickstarter campaign concluded at the end of November 2012, though, Cloud Imperium's own crowdfunding website had been up and running for more than a month. It was now able to take donations directly from backers, without having to share a cut with an intermediary like Kickstarter.
Watch a commercial for the Drake Cutlass.
Cloud Imperium kept accepting money and kept rolling out new ships: the M50 Interceptor ($85), the Starfarer Tanker ($175), the Drake Interplanetary Caterpillar ($225), the Retaliator Heavy Bomber ($250). Gamers like Knight didn't hesitate to snap them up. “I've got a Pokémon complex,” he says. “I have to have them all. They put it out there, I buy it.”
Knight was one of the 200 people who bought a $2,500 Javelin Destroyer. Why not? A month later, he upgraded to the special $10,000 Wing Commander package, which includes 44 ships and access to a private, in-game VIP spaceship lounge called the 1 Million Mile High Club. He's declined some of the other perks he's earned, such as the chance to spend a day with Chris Roberts. “He has better things to do,” Knight says. Like finish the game.
The average Star Citizen backer has contributed $96. To date, Knight's total investment is $22,501. He has no regrets. “I'm a professional, I'm married to a professional, and I have no debts, so I have resources to put into my hobby,” he says. “You could spend this much restoring a car. I know people who have $3,000 paintball markers.”
All that money spent by Knight and hundreds of thousands of other backers funds the work going on at Cloud Imperium's studio, on the Promenade in Santa Monica, California. Inside the building, developer workstations are festooned with the tools of the trade—not just standard-issue fare like high-end PCs and huge monitors but also hulking flight sticks that hardcore space-sim players use to pilot their ships. “I know that people say, ‘They're probably spending all the money on Ferraris,’” Roberts says. “But we really are working on the game! We have four studios!” It's true—there are additional studios in Texas and the UK, and a new one is opening in Germany. All told, some 320 people are laboring on Star Citizen.
Roberts holds a weekly video scrum to check in with all the dev teams around the globe. One studio is working on a space-dogfighting module; another is working on a run-and-gun shooter game module. Another is building the persistent World of Warcraft-style massively multiplayer world. The goal is to eventually stitch them all together into a single product—Roberts' Ultimate Science Fiction Game.
The day I'm there, the scrum is watching a rough cut of a new commercial. It's a work of in-fiction brilliance, a spot that touts the virtues of a spaceship as if it were a real vehicle created in the 30th century by Musashi Industrial & Starflight Concern—one of more than 10 spaceship manufacturers that exist in the lore of the Star Citizen universe.
The ad is being produced by an effects shop that worked on Firefly and Battlestar Galactica, and it's edited and scored like a slick car commercial. Indeed, Cloud Imperium's in-fiction commercials are crafted to play up the unique appeal of each vehicle, whether sporty, rugged, or sensible. “The feel for this Musashi Freelancer ad is meant to be very blue-collar, like an ad for a pickup truck,” Roberts says. “It needs a gruff voice-over, like Sam Elliot's for the Dodge Ram or Denis Leary's for the F-150.” (The team asked Leary to voice the spot but balked at his $100,000 fee.)
Watch the Musashi Freelancer commercial.
Roberts issues his critique, which is more BBDO than C++. “I want to see more of the ship rolling, banking in the exterior shot,” he says. “What lens are you using? Some of those asteroids in the background feel a bit too sharp to me. They need some volumetric dust or fog.”
The spot will be released on YouTube a couple of weeks later, and it helps Cloud Imperium move more than 50,000 Freelancers at $125 a pop. But the video also gives backers a hi-res glimpse of the gameworld and adds a few more details to its lore. “We're essentially building out the world while we're building out the game,” Roberts says. “Like in Robocop, where the cheesy commercials gave you a broader picture of the world.”
Star Citizen's success is unique because of its scale, but plenty of other highly successful crowdfunding projects have tapped into the hunger for reviving old PC game franchises. That shouldn't be surprising—there are a lot of nostalgic and tech-savvy thirtysomething gamers like Wulf Knight, with a lot of disposable income. But there's another wrinkle to it: expertly crafted crowdfunding campaigns like Cloud Imperium's manage to replicate the pleasures of playing a game.
For one, there's the master scoreboard—the ticker that displays total dollars raised for any given project. “We've talked about taking that down,” says David Swofford, Cloud Imperium's director of communications. “But we asked the fans, and they like seeing that number.” More important, many crowdfunding ventures use bonus payoffs that unlock once the total amount raised has reached a certain threshold. These incentives, called “stretch goals,” are separate from individual pledge-based rewards, like the Wing Commander package that Knight bought. Instead they're the rising tide that lifts all boats. At $12 million, Cloud Imperium promised to add Oculus Rift support to Star Citizen. At $24 million, it pledged to add an interstellar public transit system. At $50 million, the stretch goal was hiring experienced linguists to construct distinctive languages for each of the major alien races.
As the scope of the game has increased, the delivery date for the final product has been repeatedly
pushed back. “It's definitely more ambitious now than when I first pitched it,” Roberts concedes. The full game was initially due in November 2014. At this point, the persistent universe is due out at the end of 2015, but it's not clear if that's the full, robust world or just a first peek at a work in progress. It's also not clear whether Cloud Imperium will make that deadline.
Some backers grumble that the developers have gotten distracted, that they're spending too much time designing spaceships to sell and not enough time hammering on the game itself. Others feel like they've bought a sort of shareholder stake in Star Citizen, just as some Kickstarter backers of the Oculus Rift felt they should have had a say in that company's sale to Facebook. “I just don't want to see them … stuff a giant fist up our back-ends once they have our money,” one backer wrote in the game's official forums.
Wulf Knight is more clear-eyed. “Some people think, ‘I put a hundred bucks into this game and you owe me this and this and this,’” he says. “No. Your $100 entitles you to just as much as my 22 grand does, which is zero. You gave them money to make this game. You're not buying anything; it's a donation.”
Cloud Imperium makes it clear in its terms of service that backers are making a pledge, not a purchase—it's like giving $50 to PBS for a Downton Abbey shirt. There's an implicit understanding that your money is underwriting the development of new content in addition to a 100 percent cotton tee. You get a reward, but you also get to feel good about contributing to an enterprise whose mission you believe in.
The first segment of the Star Citizen universe to be offered to backers was a hangar—essentially a garage they could park their spaceships in. The ships don't fly, but backers can clamber around inside of them and sit in their cockpits. Wulf Knight's hangar, which he has shown off in a YouTube video, is dotted with special decorations that have been offered as perks with his various purchases: posters, a trophy stand, a liquor cabinet, a jukebox, a fish tank that he'll supposedly be able to populate with species from around the galaxy. “I have a line a mile long of people who've asked for tours,” he says. So far, though, the game doesn't allow players to visit each other's hangars.
Tour a few Star Citizen hangars.
Star Citizen backers spend a lot of time thinking about what they're going to do when the final version of the game appears. Many have already formed guilds and squadrons. Knight spends a lot of time online with his own 59-member guild, which gets together over group Skype chat. They mostly do team-building exercises, though they also dip into other online games, like Destiny and Evolve. Last June, a pre-alpha piece of Star Citizen was released that allowed players to square off against each other in a limited selection of single-occupant combat planes, but despite being patched, Knight says, it's still too buggy to be worthwhile for group training. “If we put time into learning how it works now,” he says, “that might not be rewarded, because it's probably not going to work the same way in a month.”
Star Citizen gets relatively little attention from the countless gaming-enthusiast websites that breathlessly report every tiny development on big mainstream titles. But Ten Ton Hammer, a site devoted to massively multiplayer online games, has been voicing some Emperor-has-no-clothes skepticism about Roberts' project. “Pushing imaginary ships that cost $2,500 when there isn't a shred of a game,” wrote critic Lewis Burnell, “feels like a con rather than an investment.”
Those who frequent the game's forums respond to such criticism by circling the fanwagons. But mostly they seem insulted that someone would accuse them of coming into this mad project without realistic expectations. One fan podcast, called Tales of Citizens, devoted a whole episode to rebutting such concerns. On another, the host, who goes by the handle Bridger, stresses that he knows it's not sensible to lavish money on Star Citizen before it's finished. “If you're paying more than $45 for this game, then you are one of us,” he says. “But … we're all insane.”
Roberts himself dismissed the criticism in a recent New Year's letter to backers. “Will we build everybody's dream game? Of course not, that would be impossible!” he wrote. “But … I think we'll build something special that people can happily lose themselves in … Star Citizen isn't a sprint, it isn't even a marathon. There is no final finish line the way you would have with a traditional retail game. Star Citizen is a way of life for as long as the community is engaged by it.”
That engagement is happening even without a gameworld to explore. Backers watch the videos, read the lore, scrutinize ships in their hangars, practice their flight combat, and dream about what they'll do once the Ultimate Science Fiction Game is complete. Roberts has already succeeded in building his vast universe—inside each of their minds.
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