Star Atlas tries to sell $30k ship NFT. Nobody buys it.

[Bambooza]

I was thinking this over if it's possible to make a direct competitor to SC with 100 million seed money.
Two of the major delays and hurdles that sc has faced is that its scope of development has drastically changed. The other issue is Chris himself and his vision of perfection which can easily be seen in the rework of things like lights from a point light to one that better mimics long fluorescent bulbs or the new eye details. While this fidelity is neat in tech demos and showcasing in trailers I am not sure it's even noticed while one plays the game.

As for the first issue, this has had the biggest impact and has been one of the biggest delays caused the most reworks, and overall a huge waste of money. If you go over the development of SC you can see how much time and energy has been put into reworking the engine which then has the knock-on effects of requiring vast reworking of assets and level design. Even recently they had to rework all the planets in the Stanton system. Most of the ships will still need multiple reworks as new features go from concept to working models along with changes to the UI.

While some of this is a normal part of development, normally a lot of this theoretical is flushed out in pre-development along with the design documents.

This all leads to can you with 100 million make a SC clone. While technologies like planet tech and cloud tech are new to the industry and would take some time to fabricate they are still doable the biggest issue really comes down to the number of artistic and designer hours required to craft all of the objects in the game.

Now it would be interesting to take the 100 million as seed money, with a small development team take Unreal engine and start adding in the missing technologies and tools then bring on the artists and designers and sell cosmetic items as NFTS. As for selling ships while it is working in SC for the moment, I am not sure it's great for the overall gameplay balance and longevity.

 

[Raven_King]

SA looks so scammy it's comical.

Maybe CIG will comment on SA's project at some point, but they're not under any threat. The less free publicity they give SA, the better. If SA don't produce a game, or produce a bad one, they're finished and CIG win by not having wasted their breath, publicized an alternative sink for CIG's current and future backer's new money and having their audience remain focused on CIG's own offerings.

If SA do somehow actually make a game, and it's any good, you never know, CIG might find grounds to sue them for copyright infringement or somesuch.

If you had @Montoya's hypothetical $100m to make a game, you'd be infinitely better off doing it as a venture capitalist with experienced colleagues, investing in small to mid-sized dev studios and help them get the next big game out, in any halfway-normal genre. The global market for videogames (what an antiquated word!) is growing so fast. Acquiring a significant share of a company with a few games under its belt, several titles in development, and long term goals and vision seems like a far better bet than speculating on a Ponzi scheme or betting it all on one game.