Six years after closing its initial funding on Kickstarter, “Star Citizen” is in playable alpha.
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For a game that is essentially early access, Roberts and his team seem have figured out how get players to keep spending even before the game hits beta, let alone what we would consider a full release. “Star Citizen” is only in alpha, and it keeps attracting players (both new and returning). “Are we sure that when we put someone in a seat, that’s their seat, as long as they’re good at what they do, or they get promoted into another seat, that we have the room for it?”Ĭloud Imperium doesn’t seem to be in danger of a sudden fall-off in revenue. “Y ou don’t hire someone because we have something we need this month and next month we don’t know,” Facebook’s Jason Rubin (co-founder of Naughty Dog) told Variety in a recent interview. Smart hiring is a key to survival, especially as game development becomes more hit-driven. It also creates an obligation (both morally and financially) for an employer. The company is shifting its resources away from contracted developers, a cost that reached a peak of $14 million in 2015 and has been reduced to $3.3 million in 2017.Ĭontracting allows studios more flexibility and helps manage overhead. Anything above that starts to feel inefficient.īased on the information available, Cloud Imperium’s dev-month cost appears to be lower than $6,000. One rule of thumb for AAA development (and keeping in mind that “Star Citizen” has a larger budget than most AAA titles) is a $10,000 man-month. Cloud Imperium has offices in Los Angeles, Austin, Manchester, and Frankfurt. This can range significantly based on geography. One way to get a sense for how efficient a studio runs is by calculating it’s dev-month cost. Calculating the percentage of staff that are identified as part of development costs and applying that to salaries gives us a rough sense of how much Cloud Imperium is spending on that portion of its staff. Of Cloud Imperium’s 464 employees last year, 397 are classified as part of the development team. Epic Games employs 700 ( many of whom are tending the lucrative Fortnite garden ). Telltale Games had 250 across its multiple games upon its demise.
For a single-game studio, that’s a large number. In 2017, Cloud Imperium reported 464 staff members in 2017. The company’s headcount has grown significantly since the original team of thirteen began six years ago.
Another $1 million is tied to capital expenditures like hardware, software, and office furnishings. This includes accounting and legal services. Cloud Imperium says that only $826,000 went to general and administrative. And yet, for the past three years, CIG has been spending more than it’s bringing in through its revenue streams. Only one percent of that was through traditional crowdfunding.
It’s a game in development that has already brought in more than $200 million in revenue. On one hand, “Star Citizen” is an anomaly. About $48.8 million of that was spent in 2017, putting the company’s most recently reported monthly burn at an average of a bit more than $4 million. According to that document, the company spent $193.3 million since 2012, with $14.23 million in reserve. That’s about 2.5 times what the company has raised from fans in a combination of crowdfunding and sales of game packages, monthly subscriptions, and in-game ships (some of which cost more than $400, and many of which cost as much as a full retail game or two).Īs part of the news surrounding the funding from father and son Clive and Keith Calder, Cloud Imperium Games released an eight-page accounting document. ” Now, more than six years later, the company has raised more than 100 times that amount through private crowdfunding.Ĭloud Imperium announced today it has secured $46 million in funding, leading to a corporate valuation of $496 million. Kickstarter was still a brand new frontier in November 2012 when Chris Roberts’ Cloud Imperium Games raised more than $2 million for its ambitious “ Star Citizen.
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