Star Citizen & The Rise of Crowdfunded Games

Star Citizen is bringing a highly detailed, user influenced universe to a fanbase that is already funding it.

 

The project, developed by RobertsSpaceIndustries has already generated $116,713,219 & has continued funding goals. With this amount of investment, early access players have gotten a game with possibly the largest scope of its kind. Star Citizen is expected to have a fully persistent economy & universe. Want to take over a processing plant? Maybe run your own pirate merchant squadrons? In the Star Citizen universe, these are barely scratching the surface.

 Many of these features, have now been implemented in the current 2.4.0 Update. You can get early access by purchasing a package that starts you with a ship a hangar & some resources. The game currently has a server side persistence engine running & being tested by the players.

The development team working closely with the players has come up with an ambitious universe and built a community to bring the persistent economy to life.   

 Star Citizens success with crowdfunding showcases the benefits of blurring the line between the development team & the play.ers. What we aren't seeing however is a monetary incentive being included in this process. Instead we see issues in the support for user content that could be fixed if content creators were paid. Game developers could start to follow the lead of crowd source online marketplaces like DesignCrowd & TopTal. If developers monetized the process of adding user generated content to their games, they will gain access to a massive source of development potential & create a new job market. 

If a developer at E3 unveiled a plan to pay content creators who contribute to their games, the crowd would go wild. Roberts Space Industries working in tandem with its community is building a game the ambition of which will showcase the massive leaps games could take if every developer started using this strategy. 

 

Justin Asaya is a lead writer at The Gaming Room © & hosts a Twitch stream @TheAsaya with new gameplay & content