Reports say Star Citizen is a modern Icarus and their wings of cash are melting

The hits keep coming for the PC game Star Citizen. You may remember the game as Kickstarter’s 2012 $4.2 million dollar baby. You may also know that this game has been in some sort of development limbo, actually hell, for some time. You see, Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games have essentially built giant wax wings with $89 million dollars of pledged money since the start of this campaign and now, according to an article by The Escapist, they are flying it right into the molten core or the sun.

In the report, The Escapist publishes statements from a collection of people with ties to the project. Many paint the studio itself as toxic and cancerous, which is disappointing but also not an absolute surprise. The same could probably be said for a few studios. The concern with this is that stories of turnover have come from CIG for a good bit now. The big bullet points of the story, though, start talking about the fate of the project and where all that money has gone. One of the sources said “They’ve spent $82 million dollars, and what is there to show for that? There’s a demo, a racing demo, a single first person shooter level, and an area where you can walk around. For $82 million.”

The Escapist’s report also echoes some concerns that have been said before as well. Roberts and CIG have gone from trying to create an amazingly elaborate game to doing their best Billy Mays impressions by shouting “BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!” when they want an excuse for more money. From reading the report and speaking with a few backers of the game, I don’t really think that the issue at hand is raw greed, it’s more of a perfect example of Jeff Goldblum’s quote in Jurassic Park. “You were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Even though focus has”more about the campaign and less about the actual game,” according to sources that spoke to The Escapist.

Therein lies the greatest problem of Star Citizen, every time I hear about this game, it seems there is some new feature or mode being added in. I wouldn’t be half surprised if Roberts turns around and says that he’s sorry people are upset but to make it up, they’ll add a space-based MOBA into the game and features 150 different characters. It wouldn’t be surprising because when someone says  “The thing you have to remember about Chris Roberts is that, before this, he hadn’t made a game in 12 years. He has no concept of what can and can’t be done today with that amount of money, or for a game like this. Chris Roberts hadn’t made a game in 12 years, and he was actively ignoring the input of people who have been in and a part of the industry that entire time,” or “It’s never been done because it can’t be done,” it really sounds like no one can make Roberts and CIG realize that proof of concept can only go so far.

Fans of the game are still funneling money into the promise of a game, I can’t say anything on that as I’ve put money into stupid projects as well. Games like Mighty No. 9 or The Stomping Land are a dime a dozen to games that deliver exactly what is promised, like Undertale. It just that according to these reports, and concerns that have been published on the internet for the majority of this year, there isn’t an end in sight any time soon. If the developer really only has $8 million of the $90 million left, they’ll either need to cut fat or dig a deeper hole of debt. It doesn’t look good from the outside.

Sources warn that the game will be a shell of the grand adventure that had been painted, that actually sounds reasonable, but the hardest hitting quote of the report simply states, “He wants the game to be everything to everybody. And now it’s nothing to nobody.”

Let me ask you, have you backed Star Citizen? Has your faith in the game wavered in this last year? Why or why not? Let me know below.

Josh Knowles

Longtime games journalist and Florida resident. I'm a Guinness World Record holder, wordsmith extraordinaire, MOBA fan, devoted dad and husband. I'm here to spread the gospel of video games.