"The way I look at it is I know I'll never make all the people happy all the time - it's impossible. So I just use the feedback as a barometer."
-Wing Commander and Privateer creator Chris Roberts learns to come to terms with the thousands of bosses he has for his recently-crowdsourced space sim Star Citizen in an interview with Game Informer.
Crowdsourcing is still relatively new to video game development. Some may not realize that in the best crowdfunding scenarios, you're not just getting a crowd's money: you're getting its opinions, too. And with funding that set a record at $6.2 million, Roberts has a lot of investors to answer to.
"It can be scary, but I actually prefer having that direct communication with the people that matter, because all a publisher does is says, 'I think a lot of people would buy the game so I'm going to fund the money for it because I'm going to sell it to millions of people down the road. Because I'm funding the money, I'm going to keep the majority of the profits and I'm going to control it,'" says Roberts.
And speaking of controlling it, it's nice to know that this game will support pretty much all controllers like they early days of PC gaming; yep, bad segway...
The past decade has been fairly frustrating with American developers seeming to be so obstinate, if not just ignorant, against anything that wasn't a gamepad. So hurray for crowd-funding and developers like Mr. Roberts.
Aye, Chris Roberts and Star Citizen look excellent - the level of crowd funding is over $8 million now as well! Really looking forward to this one, and very impressed they'll be providing a wide range of controller support.
The past decade has been fairly frustrating with American developers seeming to be so obstinate, if not just ignorant, against anything that wasn't a gamepad. So hurray for crowd-funding and developers like Mr. Roberts.