How much does it cost to make a video game? The development expenses of blockbuster games are closely guarded business secrets, but they have been climbing ever higher over the years towards big Hollywood-style spending.
Industry leaks have exposed how the budgets of major video games are spiralling upwards: $100m, or $200m, even more. One of the bestselling franchises, Call of Duty, saw costs balloon to $700m (£573m), a number only revealed recently when a reporter dug into court filings.
There is, however, one game with a budget that is anything but secret. The sprawling multiplayer space simulator Star Citizen publishes its funds on its website and they are updated in real-time. Currently, they stand at $777,145,107 (a figure that will be out of date as soon as this article is published). Soon it’ll surpass $800m and, possibly in a year or so, breach the ceiling to become the world’s first billion-dollar video game.
Unless beaten to it by another huge game – and there are a few of those in production, although their costs are likely to remain undisclosed – that would make it the single most expensive piece of entertainment ever produced. Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the priciest movie ever made, cost roughly half that.
Star Citizen’s figures are publicly available because it is not investors that are funding this PC game, but the players themselves.
“Fandom is at the beating heart of Star Citizen,” says Rhys Elliott, a games industry analyst at the London-based market research firm, MIDiA Research. “It’s more of a movement than a game. There’s a mutual commitment between the developers and the players to make something cool and revolutionary – something that hasn’t been done before.”
British-American video game developer Chris Roberts – famed for his 1990s Wing Commander spaceship fighting series – launched Star Citizen as a crowdfunded project in 2012, promising to create a digital universe so huge yet still so detailed that players would “forget it’s a game”.
He raised its first $2m on Kickstarter and it has been growing ever since, fuelled by fans willing to put their money into a plan so ambitious in scope that no profit and deadline-focused publisher would consider the risk of making it.
After a few years, an early version of the game became available for fans to test, but it was almost always unplayable, constantly freezing and crashing. Only recently has Star Citizen started to look and feel like a real video game.
YouTube is filled with videos of players cruising around the Star Citizen universe with each other. Their spaceships fly seamlessly from space stations and down through planetary atmospheres to land in sci-fi-styled cities, before they head onwards on foot into caverns deep below the ground. Warp holes have just been added to the game, allowing players to jump between two solar systems.
“Space games are very easy to get excited about,” says Oliver Hull, who runs a gaming-focused YouTube channel with 1.56 million subscribers. “It’s a very pretty game. I think, visually, people see it and they go, ‘Oh what’s this about?’”
Hull, 32, used to play a lot of other games, such as Grand Theft Auto, but now mostly posts videos showing him playing Star Citizen, flying around and looking for things to do, whether it be mining asteroids or attacking space pirates. Often, Hull’s videos show him frustrated when things don’t work as they should. But that is part of the interest, he says.
“To be frank, the game is still in development,” he says. “When something doesn’t work how it’s intended to work … it doesn’t really bother me because it’s kind of a work in progress. If anything, I find it quite interesting from a game development standpoint.”
It’s the rough edges of the game, the promise of what it could be and seeing the game slowly move in that direction, that motivates Star Citizen fans. “I can’t think of many games that do what Star Citizen does,” says Hull. “It’s not finished but I think it’s very attractive – the fact that there’s nothing else quite like it.”
It might not be finished, but people have nonetheless been paying money for Star Citizen for all this time. A starter ship costs $45, and the game now has over 80 flyable ships. The most expensive ones currently available cost more than £500.
The pre-release version allows the development team, Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), to test how the game functions with live players as they develop it. But it also gives funders something tangible to play with, a glimpse into the long and complicated processes of game development, rather than waiting for years until the full release.
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As time goes on, satisfying the community becomes increasingly important. Many fans have now given large sums of their money, including through a controversial money-making scheme in which CIG pre-sells spaceships online that they intend to make in the future. Some so-called “superbackers” have spent well over $10,000.
Fans, says industry analyst Elliot, have been “pouring so much money into it … that they are really emotionally invested”.
Development teams, too, have felt the pressure from the community, with allegations in the industry media made against CIG management for imposing long working hours. A 2016 investigation by the gaming website Kotaku cited former employees who described “crunch” practices in which development teams are asked to work overtime before a big milestone, such as a gaming convention. Roberts told Kotaku at the time that he did not want “crunch as a culture”.
CIG describes Star Citizen as “the largest scale open development game in existence” but that ambition has also meant the game has now been in development for well over a decade, with repeated, frustrating delays. In a 2012 interview with Roberts, the Guardian reported the plan was to release the game two years later, in 2014. Fan forums regularly question if the game will ever be properly released.
But late last year, there were tentative signs of hope. For the first time, CIG revealed what the eventual launch version will look like, offering a clear vision of what will and won’t be included, even if no date was given.
What they did provide, however, was a 2026 release date for a standalone single-player game, Squadron 42, a story-driven narrative set within the wider Star Citizen universe, with a Hollywood cast of voice actors including Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson and Andy Serkis.
More delays are certainly expected, but the end may finally be in sight.
No game made the traditional way, through an established publisher with investors expecting a return, could have weathered 13 years of development without a finished product. Star Citizen has been able to buck the trend of the rest of the industry, which is in crisis, with ballooning costs and regular layoffs. Its main backers are players, not investors, and they have different motivations.
“I think Star Citizen funders saw it as a direct line to fight back against corporatisation and support a passion project of the highest degree,” says Elliott. “Success isn’t just about spreadsheets, maximising value and return on the investment, but putting fans at the heart of it.”