aleksendr posted:

It may not be fun for those wanting live or PvP interactions, but some players sometime just want to chill back, see the stars and pew-pew at some poor helpless Ai pirates. The game model does not require a minimum viable population like most mmo for participating in some content, so why not have both kind of players enjoy the game ? You can play Mal Reynolds on the frontier if you want to or go all Diamond Frogs and mess up other players for fun. Being able to pick either make for a better game in my opinion.

TrustmeImLegit posted:

When you were stewing and started to think this would be a good Own/thing to post (I refuse to think low enough of someone that they would think this is funny), did you hatebang it out all at once or did you measure it out in a grudge match that was interrupted by sobbing?

Ayn Marx posted:

Please stop doxxing, I am begging you

MeLKoR posted:

CIG can release whatever piece of poo poo MVP they want on the PC and there is nothing the whales can do, not so in the consoles. Someone in a publisher is going to have to put his name in the delivery voucher. I doubt they'd be tricked with another Pupil to Planet movie.

aleksendr posted:

A publisher is not needed to release on console, but you must have enough $$$ to cover the platform holder minimum overhead provision. Either MS or Sony will ask you to cover certification cost and probably ensure by contract that a minimum number of units are to be produced so all the resellers (EBG, Best Buys, Ect) will have a resonable ammount of units available for sales. As for the quality of the game, as we saw with the tons of Wii crapware or late PS2 garbage game, platform holders dont care much about quality as long as its not overtly offensive or break the console.

The best worst case scenario is that SQ42 somehow pass certification, they grossly overestimate the interest of the public and somehow still manage to brick the console at random while updating due to their complete inability to code a patcher.

aleksendr posted:

SQ42 somehow pass certification

Eldragon posted:

You are totally missing the point. Solo mode itself isn't a problem: Its that you get to bring your stuff with you when server hopping. Want that expensive autism chariot? You should be forced to to earn it in PVP land from start to finish.

To rolls this back into SC: Assuming CIG managed to make a game, they will probably be forced to do the same thing because the SC carebears already lose their minds over the mere thought of "Non-consensual PVP".

D_Smart posted:

https://twitter.com/dsmart/status/821030391737946117

Pelican Dunderhead posted:

tbh it's all they can do to make money off the burning trash heap that is unironic starship troopers. Do commandos really expect that sq42 is going to sell a hundred million copies on pc when anyone who actually gives a gently caress owns a copy already plus ten different ships?

Foo Diddley posted:

I think Chris said that SQ42 would sell at least five million copies, on top of all the copies that have been preordered already

HycoCam posted:

I'm thinking publishers would love to see CR move to the consoles. Publishers have to curious if the $300 chariot transactions would work on a console. After all, who wouldn't want to get into "the give me $35million a year for a few cut scene videos" market. Activision is probably looking at Infinite Warfare and thinking to themselves--drat, we did all the work to crank out a title and all we had to say was we need more money and we'll see you next year!!

Mirificus posted:

Foo Diddley posted:

I think Chris said that SQ42 would sell at least five million copies, on top of all the copies that have been preordered already

EminusSleepus posted:

One more. Ridiculous mechanic is that your ship replacement time will vary because they need to simulate the materials and if your autism chariot is made up of special rare autistic metals then tough luck you will need to wait longer.

TheAgent posted:

quote:

The next-gen development consoles are impressive enough to work with our high standards, but I want to say this: nothing is being taken away here. The net benefit of releasing Star Citizen and Squadron 42 on the future XBOX and PlayStation consoles far outweighs the bad. It allows us a bare minimum overhead that expands to nearly limitless levels on PC.

This was always a PC game first but not only a PC game. Our scope and effort always included other ways to bring in revenue to make the Best drat Space Sim Ever, to bring you and everyone that believes in the project every hope, dream and feature possible.

Myself and everyone here stands by that, just as we hope you continue to stand by us.

MilesK posted:

Also those spaceship parts are manufactured in player owned factories where you have to manage your NPC employees to keep up production. Hire too many cheap uneducated NPCs and your going to get hit with delays.

boviscopophobic posted:

This post was supposed to go in the Theoretical Cetology thread, but it's closed for "archiving", whatever that means. You can check there for the previous forum snapshot/demographic estimate that I refer to below.


JAN 2017 RSI DEMOGRAPHICS UPDATE

About 6 months and $25M have elapsed since the previous demographic snapshot of the RSI forum population. Updated funding-related statistics are summarized below. The methodology is mostly the same as in my previous post, so you can refer to that for details as well as an explanation of the meaning of each graph.

First off, the forum account vs RSI account rate discrepancy has stabilized at about 3.5, meaning that 3.5 RSI accounts are currently being created for every forum account. This ratio obviously spikes during free fly events.




For the funding-related graphs, the basic funding assumptions remain the same as last time, but there are three updates to the methodology. The first relates to closed accounts. Thanks to the wave of refunds post-Streetroller, I learned that is possible to determine with reasonable confidence if an RSI account has been closed, which generally indicates revocation due to refunds or possibly other misbehavior such as hacking. This latest set of summary graphs includes only accounts that were "alive" at the time of the snapshot. The previous set of graphs included a certain number of "dead" accounts, which affected the accuracy of the title counts.

The second change is that I've aggregated all titles not associated with a funding level into an "OTHER" title, except for a small set of user titles that I deemed to be CIG-related. These titles, namely "Staff", "Developer", "Creator", "QA", and "Game Master", are assigned the aggregate title of "CIG". Some other user titles that are arguably CIG-related, but which I did NOT include in the CIG set, are "Bug Moderator" and "Moderator". Note that some developer accounts may mark themselves as such as such only by their account name; these would not be included in the CIG count.

Finally, to counteract title churn from people changing their title, I look at each account's titles over a number of forum snapshots and use the one that implies the highest funding level. Since user titles can be "understated" but not "overstated", so to speak, this should be a reasonable procedure if user funding levels are non-decreasing. Thankfully, since CIG almost never grants partial refunds, an assumption of non-decreasing funding levels should not introduce too much additional error. (Note: if no funding-related titles are available, then CIG-related titles are prioritized over "OTHER" titles.)








The contribution of concierge-level backers (High Admiral and up) has slightly increased -- 56.4% under the mid funding scenario, versus 53.6% last time. If we compare the graph of estimated average user spending by quarter of enlistment with the previous version, we get the following average per-user increases:



This indicates that accounts of all "ages" are continuing to put money into Star Citizen, possibly more so for pre-2014 accounts. However, note that an increase of $10-15 or so is a small fraction of the likely average transaction amount -- recall that this period includes Gamescom, Citizencon, the anniversary livestream, and the holiday sale, which featured pricy concept ships, cash-only sales, capital ship sales, etc. Depending on what you think the average transaction amount is (which I have not attempted to estimate), you could translate this into an estimate of the size of the current paying backer population.

Another longitudinal view of the backer population can be obtained by constructing contingency tables at various time snapshots. For example, the following is a comparison of highest user titles achieved through early August 2016, versus early January 2017. Because of how highest titles are computed, this table contains some unknown fraction of users "leveling up" through spending, and some users simply adjusting previously understated titles upward. I believe that the dominant contribution is leveling up, especially when looking at movement between the higher tiers, but I have not attempted to quantify this.



Note that we have two new pseudo-titles: "DEAD", indicating that the account died off (refunds etc.) between Aug 2016 and Jan 2017, and "UNBORN", indicating that the account was made between Aug 2016 and Jan 2017. So for instance, we can see that of 92 completionists as of Aug 2016, 1 of those accounts got a refund. Of 193 wing commanders as of Aug 2016, 31 were promoted to completionist and 2 got a refund, etc. Notably, 22 CIG accounts "got a refund", which most likely means they left the company.

As a rough measure of the propensity of backer subpopulations to level up, we can construct a matrix of outflow percentages. In this table, the number in a particular row/column indicates the percentage of the population with that row's title that advanced to get the corresponding column's title. So for instance, 16.06% of all Wing Commanders in August became Completionists by January. Similarly, 0.37% of Civilians became Freelancers/Colonels, etc. The hottest cells consist of concierge backers (High Admiral and up) moving up one or two levels, and CIG accounts moving to the exits.



If we are interested in inferring refunds specifically, then we need to look at pairs of snapshots that are closer together in time. Otherwise we can miss salient developments -- for instance, if a Civilian in August became a Wing Commander in November then got a refund in December, it would only show up as a Civilian refund in the above table. Using a set of several snapshots I derived the following counts for account deaths per highest title. I also noticed a large number of newly established Civilian accounts showing up as dead. To exclude possible low-effort banhammered trolls from the refund counts, I only counted Civilian accounts if they were confirmed as being alive for at least 45 days in at least one historical snapshot.

• Completionist: 5
  
• Wing Commander: 4
  
• Space Marshal/Lieutenant Commander: 19
  
• Grand Admiral: 27
  
• High Admiral: 70
  
• Vice Admiral: 47
  
• Rear Admiral: 58
  
• Freelancer/Colonel: 116
  
• Bounty Hunter: 67
  
• Mercenary: 61
  
• Scout: 32
  
• Civilian: 448
  
• CIG: 26
  
• OTHER: 74
  

Since this is a small and very much non-random sample, the likely accuracy of the funding scenario assumptions (already not that good) is probably far worse for refunded accounts. On the one hand, Civilians are assumed to have a low average contribution partly due to the proliferation of free accounts; however, a refunded account would obviously not be a free account. On the other, high-value accounts may not be refunded for anywhere near their nominal value, due to grey market transactions.

If we go ahead and apply the min/mid/max funding assumptions anyway, we get refund totals of $407,420, $674,587.50, and $941,755, respectively. For another estimate, also problematic, we can consider the self-reported refund amounts from /r/starcitizen_refunds. From reading through the posts that stated actual refund amounts, I arrived at an average per-user refund of $1366.10. Applying this to the 1028 non-CIG refundees, we would get a total of $1,404,350.80. These estimates are of course only for the refunded forum population. The multiplier to get the total amount of refunds in the entire RSI population would likely be well less than 2.5, which is the ratio of all RSI accounts to all forum accounts.


CONCLUSIONS

All previous caveats about the accuracy of these estimates still apply. In addition, there are particular problems with trying to estimate refund amounts. Nevertheless, I think we can conclude that the refund outflows, while CIG certainly would find them annoying, are probably small enough in total that they can be easily compensated for with an extra concept sale (if we don't account for increases in engineering debt).

There are indications that funding is leaning even more heavily on concierge-level backers; this might be a good topic for follow-up analyses. Account age does not appear to play a large role in incremental spending.

Previously I speculated about a soft per-user average spending ceiling around $200. This now seems to be more of an artifact of the bounded time window the backer populations have had to spend their money in. As that time window lengthens, fresh spending continues apace and it remains to be seen when there will be a large-scale change in backer purchasing behavior.

aleksendr posted:

That would bring SQ 42 into the top 20 pc bestsellers, Among titles like WOW, The Sims 1, 2 & 3, Starcraft, Half life, Civ 5 and Diablo 3.

The best game (as unit sold) Christ ever did was WC 3, with roughly one million units. Probably in part due to EA marketing money.

aleksendr posted:

This graphic might be misleading. The funding by user is receeding, but the number of users is a lot bigger than before. Funding seem to be at equilibrium at roughly 30M$ a year and the refunds, while good news for a few, are not putting a dent into the whales willingness to spend and growing sunk cost fallacy.

This should be looked at like a church operation and not a regular company. Its the new church of videogames, where you donate on faith principle for hope of a perfect game.

Chalks posted:

It shows that new backers are spending substantially less than their predecessors did. This shows that no matter what CIG does to try to attract new backers they're not finding new whales. Free fly weekends may increase the exposure of the game, but it they do very little to increase funding.

The graphic basically shows CIG getting closer and closer to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to supporters. You can't throw marketing money at it, you can't do some PR - they've already reached everyone who gives a poo poo.

It's no wonder they've started to look for fresh fishing grounds with consoles. I don't think they'll find the same whales there though.

D_Smart posted:

The platform holders are not the publisher; unless it's a 1st party title. So anyone who puts a game on the console, is the publisher. In this case, it would be CIG/RSI; not the platform holder (Sony|Microsoft).

MeLKoR posted:

Don't they have to conform to a strict performance/stability standards to get the publisher and/or console manufacturer's approval for release? Someone is controlling what gets release on any console, right? Unlike with PCs I can't just code some poo poo for a console and put it online, right?

Polish Avenger posted:

Yeah MS/Sony have to approve all of the stuff you want to release on their systems, which goes for patches too. That's why Blizz, in the case of Overwatch, can get the PC patch out but can't predict when the console patches will hit very well.

D_Smart posted:

Wrong. Have you ever heard of Xbox Game Preview? The equivalent of PC early access? No? look it up and see the number of games (including Elite Dangerous, Everspace etc) which launched there.

TrustmeImLegit posted:

This isn't how game development works at all. Maybe educate yourself on how games are made before self righteously posting.

I mean Jesus Christ even this clown schooled you

MeLKoR posted:

Don't they have to conform to a strict performance/stability standards to get the publisher and/or console manufacturer's approval for release? Someone is controlling what gets release on any console, right? Unlike with PCs I can't just code some poo poo for a console and put it online, right?