Chris Roberts is under a lot of pressure to get Star Citizen right. The new massively multiplayer online sci-fi title from the creator of the legendary Wing Commander sci-fi spaceship combat games raised $7.7 million via crowdfunding on the promise of bringing back the glory days of science fiction combat simulations in a persistent online universe.

Roberts scored the money via Kickstarter and his own web site, Roberts Space Industries, for his new company Cloud Imperium Games, where he is chief creative officer. In an interview with GamesBeat at the DICE Summit game conference, Roberts said he is now working in the public eye. And everything has to pass muster with the thousands of fans who funded his project. On top of this, Roberts believes he’ll raise another round of funding from professional investors, just to ensure that he has all the resources he needs to live up to the eye-popping 3D visuals in his demo.

Last week, he posted about how he plans to handle “death” in the Star Citizen universe. If your spaceship is destroyed and you fail to bail out, you’ll lose your character and pass on the belongings to your heir, especially if you have taken the trouble to get an insurance policy.

Roberts’ game is perhaps the most ambitious crowdfunded online game that has ever been attempted. But he is accustomed to swinging for the fences. He started in games at Origin Systems, the Austin, Texas game studio that Electronic Arts later bought. He became a star in 1990 with the release of Wing Commander, a space combat game that produced nine sequels and spinoffs. For a time, it was a huge business for Electronic Arts, but the copycat sequels bored gamers and drove the franchise into the ground.

Roberts left Origin in 1996 and started his own company, Digital Anvil. Roberts said that no one has really picked up the mantle in sci-fi combat sims since his last company created the ill-fated Freelancer, published by Microsoft in 1999. That game took 4.5 years to make (and six to get to market), and by the end of it, Roberts had left the firm to make movies, and Microsoft acquired his company. Freelancer was not a huge commercial success, but it was memorable. The player went from planet to planet, running missions and building a cool spacecraft. In Roberts’ original vision, each one of those worlds was a living, breathing thing, full of people and adventures. It was a precursor to modern massively multiplayer online games.

Star Citizen will carry on that legacy on the PC when it launches in a couple of years. In the meantime, Roberts will release bits of it so that fans can battle test them. You’ll be able to inspect your ships and then fight in dogfights in the not-so-distant future. Once those modules are complete, they’ll be plugged into the larger game, which includes the online universe and a single-player campaign.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: You have an update, I guess? More things are happening?

Chris Roberts: I did this fairly big update the day before yesterday about how death is going to get handled in a persistent world. Single-player is pretty easy. You die, and you go back to an earlier save point. But obviously, in a multiplayer online world where there ’s lots of other people playing, you can’t go back in time. The universe carries on.

GamesBeat: How do you handle death?

Roberts: The hardcore version is permadeath. Your character dies and you start a new character. That’s hyper-realistic, but maybe not so much fun. Then the other side of the coin is that you never die. You respawn and you’re basically immortal. You just lose time getting back to the spot you were at. I did an update on something I’ve been thinking about for a while that I thought would give a sense of mortality and history and risk, but not be too punishing. It’s a slightly different approach from the way most multiplayer games work.

The big challenge for something like that in the environment where I’m building a game is that I’m doing it publicly. It’s not behind the curtain anymore. You have to figure out how to share concepts with people. You’re never going to please all the people all the time. You’re never going to keep them all happy. There’s always people who are polarized on either side. That’s one of the challenges of a crowdfunded game where you’re open about your development process. Any time you’ll try something slightly out of the norm, it takes some people out of their comfort zone. They’re going to be upset about it.

It generally went over well. I think it could work, and it would fix some of the problems I have with big multiplayer setups, where I have trouble getting immersed in the world. That’s my goal with Star Citizen, to have this living universe. People have history. If you’ve been in a lot of dogfights and escape by the skin of your teeth and I see you in the bar, you’ll have scars on you. Maybe you have a cybernetic arm. You look like you’ve been through the wringer a few times. I haven’t really seen that. That’s kind of like the character version of ship damage, so to speak. That was the recent big thing.

GamesBeat: The usual punishment for death in games is that you have to respawn far away, right? 

Roberts: Yeah. You have to go back to the spawn point.

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Video games dominated Kickstarter last year, with over $83 million pledged to games-related projects, according to the year-end report the company released early this month. And out of the 16 blockbuster campaigns — those that raised more than $1 million — seven of them were for new games.

That’s no small accomplishment for the industry, but it also shows that video games are ripe for crowdfunding efforts. A lot of factors contribute to success on Kickstarter. So what made these seven projects — Star Citizen, Double Fine Adventure, Wasteland 2, Shadowrun Returns, Planetary Annihilation, Homestuck Adventure, and Project Eternity — such breakaway hits? (The role-playing game Project Eternity earned the most with close to $4 million, and that’s not even counting campaigns for hardware like the Android-based Ouya, which brought in over $8 million.) We spoke to the proud developers and a professor at The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania to find out.

The right ‘ingredients’ for success

What makes a good Kickstarter? Professor Ethan Mollick, who coauthored the book Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Business, told GamesBeat in a phone interview that the most successful projects are run by people with established backgrounds, which leads to success in two key ways.

“It builds a social network of fans, which helps a lot,” he said. “And second, it invites credibility.”

Virtually all of the developers behind last year’s highest-earning Kickstarter games are already well known in the industry. Jordan Weisman, the creator of Shadowrun, returned for Shadowrun Returns — one of the reasons Harebrained Schemes studio founder Mitch Gitelman gave us for the campaign’s success.

And Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions found an audience for his campaign by way of his other acclaimed games, like Psychonauts and Grim Fandango. Double Fine Adventure raked in a generous $3.3 million when the asking price was only $400,000.

“I think the success of our project can be attributed to a perfect explosion of good timing, a rabid fan base, and the fact that adventure games are a genre that fans have wanted us to revisit for a long time,” Double Fine producer Greg Rice told GamesBeat.

Mollick explained that the best projects use preparatory material to demonstrate what the developers are going to do and how they’re going to accomplish it. The studios put together established teams, acquire outside endorsements, and know how to use social media effectively — all easier to do when people already know your name and your credentials. That gets you faster and more widespread press coverage, too.

Chris Roberts (the creator of the Wing Commander space-flight simulator series) and his team at Cloud Imperium Games took their task seriously, treating crowdfunding like a product launch and promoting the game even before it hit Kickstarter.

“For Star Citizen, I knew I had to raise a significant amount of money as a minimum — $2 million — a higher hurdle than any other crowdfunded game at the time,” he told GamesBeat. “Because of this, I decided that despite having a well-known ‘brand’ in space sims, I needed to go beyond nostalgia and reputation and show people what the game would look and play like.”

Roberts spent a year building a prototype and doing research so he could deliver on his pitch. Cloud Imperium even launched a teaser site a month before the campaign’s launch to spread news of the game virally.

“Over 30,000 people had signed up and were interacting on our forums before we even announced Star Citizen,” he said.

Kickstarters engage three core groups and follow predictable patterns

The best Kickstarters appeal to three populations of people, according to Mollick. They are patrons, who give money because they want a campaign to succeed; customers, who use Kickstarter as a preorder system and purchase low-end rewards packages; and investors, who want to be a part of what’s happening and tend to buy higher-end packages.

Psychologically, the interests of patrons and investors overlap — they want to feel like they’re a part of what’s happening.

“I think you see the most successful projects engage all three of those [groups] with different sets of packages,” said Mollick, although he wasn’t able to specify whether physical or digital rewards (or a combination of both) mattered more.

“I think what you see here is generally a lot of realism from these folks also,” he said, mentioning that over 75 percent of Kickstarter projects deliver late (85 percent for large projects). “Their delivery times are quite far out.”

Most Kickstarters tend to succeed by small margins and fail by large margins, according to an article that Mollick contributed to on Appsblogger.com. And campaign length and goal size matter, too — you have a better chance for success when operating within a 30-day time period and setting a realistic funding goal. Most of these seven projects fell in that category, lasting for about a month and far exceeding their minimum financial needs.

Video games are a good fit

Video game Kickstarters have two main advantages working in their favor, according to Mollick: The existing, broken funding model through traditional publishers, and the capability to handle preorders cheaply.

With a product like the Pebble watch, he said, the company might lose money on each copy itself. But for games like Double Fine Adventure, each copy sold doesn’t cost anything aside from a potential future sale, so developers can feel more comfortable moving some of that cost up to fund development.

Why else do video game Kickstarters do so well? Community plays a big role.

“Games invoke a lot of passion, just like music and other entertainment,” said Mollick. “So you want to help your favorite artist produce something you love, and especially something pure, and Kickstarter lets them do that.”

He also pointed out that these seven projects were almost all sequels of some sort — like Shadowrun Returns. They don’t all necessarily have the same name attached, but known developers are involved and the audiences for them already exist, so these successes aren’t surprising.

Key advice: Shape your campaign around the community

The developers behind last year’s biggest game projects shared a few of their mistakes and tips for those looking to launch new campaigns in 2013.

Rice stressed the importance of interacting and communicating with the people who will be playing your games.

“My advice to all future Kickstarter projects is to try and think like a fan,” he said. “Figure out what story you’re trying to tell with your project, why a fan should be excited about that, and what kind of things a fan would expect from you. After that, it’s all about being very clear and concise with messaging, having a direct and open line of communication, and coming up with a reward structure that is enticing but won’t break the bank.”

Adam Brennecke — one of the directors on Obsidian Entertainment’s Project Eternity, which hit its target goal in a day — told us that the best advice is to be adaptive to how your campaign is progressing.

“Back a few projects and get a feel for how crowdfunding works,” he said. “Take a close look at projects that get funded and try to figure out why they get funded. Look at successful projects and read their updates. Kickstarter is a great place to test the waters with your idea. If it doesn’t work out, you can always come back with a revised plan without any real risk to you or your backers.”

Mistakes happen: Here’s what you can learn going forward

“Your time is limited,” said Marc Scattergood, a producer on Uber Entertainment’s Planetary Annihilation project. Use it wisely.

“Unless you’re already famous, the most important thing is convince people how awesome your concept is,” he said. “Show the game or the product you’re envisioning, and show it quickly. Then talk about the team and all the extra things that will guarantee its success.

“It’s not done till you run out of time. Keep releasing updates, keep building momentum, and don’t let a single day go where you’re not talking to your community, developing new content and updates to release, and getting people excited.”

In a press world that’s increasingly burned out on Kickstarters, said Brian Fargo of inXile Entertainment’s Wasteland 2, finding ways to gain support is more crucial than ever.

“You have to do work on the front end to create awareness and understand your audience before launching,” he said, adding that without the press, “it is very hard to [get funding] unless you have some kind of built-in audience.”

Fargo described “the only drama” he experienced during the campaign: “In my excitement, I used the word ‘social,’ which had negative connotations to Facebook and the new breed of game,” he said. That’s not a word you want to throw around with core gamers.

“I quickly found out that ‘social’ is a four-letter word with two extra letters and had to explain my use of the term,” he said. “The main point with that was that I stayed tuned in with the audience every moment of the campaign to make sure our message didn’t get confused.”

Developers must spend time analyzing the full scope of costs as well, said Mitch Gitelman, who informed us that Shadowrun Returns is now open for preorders.

“Make sure you understand all your costs when planning your campaign and creating your reward tiers,” he said. “In addition to the cost of any physical goods you’re using for rewards, don’t forget to include the cost of picking, packing, and shipping. Depending on the state you’re in, you may be responsible for taxes on the pledges you collect, and you’d better plan for it because when Uncle Sam holds out his hand, he expects to be paid.”

Shadowrun Returns reached its funding goal after 28 hours, which caused Gitelman and his team to get a little too excited. They released a quick follow-up video in response, mentioning the possible addition of multiplayer and cooperative modes.

“The level of excitement in the community went through the roof at the thought,” said Gitelman, “but we quickly realized that adding these additional modes was a bridge too far and would heavily distract from the single-player game we had envisioned.”

The solution? Harebrained Schemes posted a written update saying that, after a bit of thinking, it had decided those features were “beyond the scope of the project and would cause us to lose focus on the game you reacted to so positively (and the game we really want to make).”

“Backers — and potential backers — told us that this statement increased our credibility because it was transparent, direct communication and showed that we were professional game developers who knew how to focus their project,” said Gitelman.

‘Crowdfunding is a full-time job’

“People need to see something tangible — not just on launch but during the campaign,” said Roberts.

“Even with Star Citizen, where I prepared for a full year, I felt like I didn’t have enough content to share during the campaign,” he said. “If you keep your community engaged, checking in for updates and new cool stuff to see, they are more likely to tell you ways you can improve your campaign and connect with an even wider base.”

The start of the campaign was rough for Cloud Imperium. Roberts recalled how the servers for its dedicated community site, which also acted as a secondary crowdfunding platform, crashed for four days because too many people were trying to back the project.

“Today’s world has a very short attention span, and there was no doubt that we missed out capturing some backers due to the difficulties on our site,” he said. “We reengineered our site to be more robust and also added Kickstarter as an additional option for potential backers. Then we just put our heads down and worked doubly hard to provide updates and engage with the community.”

Because of the extra effort, Roberts feels that the team managed to make up for their losses by the end of the campaign.

“Maybe the biggest factor in our success was that we actively listened and tailored the campaign based on the feedback we got from our community,” he said. “Launching on Kickstarter, a lot of the additional tiers and add-ons that helped drive our fundraising total up came directly from suggestions made by our community. If your community feels like you are listening to them they back the project with incredible passion.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The game industry is still living in compressed time. It went through more gyrations and disruptions in a year than it usually does in a generation. The revolution in games is on our doorstep, but several of the big companies trying to start it have failed to execute. They proved that ambition alone isn’t enough to take on the status quo.

But traditional game makers can’t be too smug. We saw the bankruptcy of THQ and the weakening of many of the strongest video game franchises. Social, mobile, and online forces will continue to reshape the business in the coming year, but nobody was free of trouble.

The good news is that the number of gamers continues to soar (past a billion), and, sometime soon, somebody is going to hit a phenomenal home run. That is why that, in spite of some phenomenal crash landings, entrepreneurs and investors are still going big with new game startups. Those startups aren’t raising as much money as they once did, but the entrepreneurs running them still have fire in their bellies.

We’ve gone back through the archives of GamesBeat for the past year and dug up the stories that made the biggest impact. Here’s our list of the biggest game stories of 2012.

1. Zynga goes into a free fall

In tandem with Facebook’s disappointing initial public offering, Zynga missed its second quarter earnings targets. Demand for its games weakened, and the company’s stock price tanked 40 percent in a day. It never recovered during the year, and the toll was felt by every gaming company. In the third quarter, the results were disappointing again.

The problem for game startups is that Zynga’s value fell by 75 percent, crushing down the values of similar companies in both the public stock and private markets. Game company valuations plummeted, and it is no surprise that the pace of investments slowed in the latter part of 2012. Zynga tried to claw its way back up to recapture the glory days of its IPO. It launched a spate of new titles like FarmVille 2 and moved into mid-core games via acquisition. But the payoff isn’t clear just yet.

2. Mobile goes big

Zynga tried to move into mobile in a big way, but so did everybody else. The migration was huge, since many believed that smartphones and tablets would replace consoles. Rovio’s Angry Birds soared past a billion downloads, and the franchise took off in new directions with Angry Birds Space and Angry Birds Star Wars, not to mention a whole line of new Hasbro toys. Social game companies like Kabam successfully diversified beyond Facebook and invaded mobile — its Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North turned out to be the No. 1 grossing app on the Apple App Store. About 86 percent of Flash game developers expanded into mobile. Like King.com, most of them tested their titles on the web and Facebook and then moved the successful games over to mobile.

By the third quarter, mobile-game startups accounted for 42 percent of all investments in the industry and 22 percent of the transaction value, according to Digi-Capital. That meant that mobile game investments were popular, but they were also smaller since mobile-game studios are still relatively small.

But the mobile market wasn’t easy. Indie game makers could make it big, but they often needed help. Mobile marketers tried everything the could to get their products noticed, but Apple had to crack down on the methods that weren’t good for consumers. Still, mobile promised to be huge. In the U.S., 44 percent of people were playing mobile games. And mobile became the fastest growing segment in games.

3. Kickstarter launches a crowdfunding revolution

While Zynga’s crash hurt funding, developers found a new fountain of money in their own fans. Tim Schafer’s Double Fine Productions tapped the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to fund a new adventure game. It raised more than $1 million on its first day and wound up raking in $3.3 million in 30 days by March 13. Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment jumped on the opportunity and raised nearly $3 million for Wasteland 2, a sequel that no traditional game publishers would touch. Jordan Weisman’s Harebrained Schemes raised $1.8 million for Shadowrun Returns. Kickstarters for a variety of other games such as Obsidian, Leisure Suit Larry, Pitfall, and others also took off, creating a revival for mid-sized game development studios.

Soon enough, crowdfunding wasn’t just a way to run around the gatekeeper publishers. It was an agent of disruption, giving more creators control over their destinies at a time when larger game companies had become risk averse. Ouya proved that as it raised $8.3 million for its Android-based video game console.

And Kickstarter wasn’t the only show in town. Gamesplanet Lab launched its own crowdfunding effort for games. Gambitious focused on raising crowdfunding and seed investment for game studios. And Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen took off in part through web-based donation system.

4. Nintendo’s kicks off the new generation

Nintendo’s run with the motion-sensing Wii was phenomenal, with more than 98 million units sold to date. But for the past couple of years, sales have lagged and Nintendo finally got a replacement console on the market with the launch of the Wii U on Nov. 18. Nintendo aimed to disrupt gaming again by incorporating tablets and asymmetrical gameplay into its new console. It initially sold out, with more than 400,000 units sold in its first week. But that doesn’t look so good in the context of some serious new competition. Apple’s new iPhones and iPad tablets routinely sell more than 2 million or 3 million units on opening weekend. Nintendo executives put on brave faces, but critics have been bearish on the Wii U throughout the past year. Those critics, such as our own GamesBeat editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu, point out a number of weaknesses in the console, such as the lack of a killer app. Analysts expect it to sell out for the holidays, but the questions is how long it will keep selling for. So far, the Wii U hasn’t set the world on fire.

5. OnLive’s collapse

No company held more promise than OnLive, which came on the scene in 2009 with a plan that astonished everyone. OnLive’s “cloud gaming” solution would allow people with low-end computers to play high-end games that were processed in a remote data center and then streamed as videos to the players’ screens. The cloud would allow players to log into their games from anywhere and play as long as they had a good Internet connection. OnLive beat its milestones and surprised the skeptics, launching its service in 2010. It came up with a lot of improvements, but it lost a number of big game publishers such as Electronic Arts as rivals such as Gaikai came on the scene. OnLive’s membership base grew slowly, and it had a tough time competing against free-to-play online games.

So the company kept raising money at a high valuation to keep the lights on. By 2012, the company had burned through more than $200 million in funding. It had more than 200 employees but failed to break even. It hit the wall in August, running out of money. An investor bought the company and ousted founder Steve Perlman. The company went through a bankruptcy alternative and lost many of its employees. It is trying for a comeback but in a much reduced state.

Perlman has moved on to his wireless broadband startup, but his failure to warn people about the collapse was unpopular with employees. This fall sent a shock wave through the cloud-gaming industry, and it was a case of a solid company racing too far ahead of its own revenues until it shattered its own dream.

6. Curt Schilling’s 38 Studios falls apart, forcing him to auction off his bloody sock

Curt Schilling was a baseball hero who pitched his team to a 2004 World Series victory with a wounded foot. After he retired, he started 38 Studios, a game startup with the audacious goal of creating a massively multiplayer online fantasy role-playing world that could challenge Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. He poured more than $50 million of his own money into Project Copernicus, and he hired comic artist star Todd McFarlane and fantasy novelist R.A. Salvatore. It was the ultimate bet on the MMO business. But it wasn’t meant to be.

Schilling took $75 million in loans from Rhode Island in exchange for moving his company there from Massachusetts. But the company’s first game, Kingdoms of Amalur, was a mediocre success, and it ran out of money in June. It laid off more than 300 people abruptly and then filed for bankruptcy. Schilling had to auction off most of his property, including his bloody sock. Instead of killing off WoW, 38 Studios became a cautionary tale for states that provided rich incentives to risky startups.

7. Social casino games take off

Everybody loves a bubble. Speculation that online gambling might be legalized led to a feeding frenzy in the adjacent market of non-real-money social casino games, where people spent money on virtual goods but couldn’t cash their winnings out. Games such as Zynga Poker had taken off over the past five years. But when the Justice Department ruled in December that online gambling could be legal, the floodgates opened. IGT paid $500 million in January for Double Down Interactive, a social gaming company with only 70 employees. After that jackpot, the speculators moved in. Dozens of new startups received funding for their social casino and sports betting games. Analysts report that social casino games will generate $1.6 billion in revenue this year, and that will steadily grow over the next several years. Betable has cut deals with five social casino game companies to convert their titles into real-money gambling games. Zynga’s crash took some of the air out of this bubble, but many are still betting that online gambling will give a big boost to the social casino game companies and visa versa. Zynga itself is betting big on online gambling, and so is Facebook. Will the bubble pop in 2013, or will the marriage of social casino games and online gambling pay off?

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, GamesBeat prepares for the Wii U launch Sunday with all the guides and reviews you’ll ever need, Call of Duty: Black Ops II goes on sale and gets reviewed, and Xbox Live turns 10.

You’ll also find reviews for When Vikings Attack, Angry Birds Star Wars, and a Threeview of Halo 4.

News:

• Sony’s PlayStation 3 hits 70M sold, good enough for third place
• YouTube rolls out new Wii app just in time for the Wii U launch
• Second Quest raises $70K to reimagine Zelda and games through art
• Gogamingo’s startup idea: Compete in tournaments, win real stuff
• Console-quality gaming without the console: OnLive is live in some LG TVs
• Valve cofounder Gabe Newell going to be a hall of famer
• This week in the Nintendo Download: Epic Mickey, Myst, and Hotel Transylvania
• Over 1 million players completed Halo 4′s campaign in the first five days
• Badgeville simplifies gamification for developers
• Rumble Entertainment seeks triple-A quality with Nightmare Guardians tablet game
• After a decade of service, Xbox Live usage hits an all-time high
• ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ Bane signs on as Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell film
• Major League Gaming: Serving 11.7 million viewers in 2012
• ChangYou new free-to-play portal targets midcore and hardcore gamers
• New Grand Theft Auto V trailer balances comedy, drama, and skydiving out of jeeps (video)
• THQ says it is in talks about extending its credit line with bank
• Zynga juggles leadership team as CFO departs for Facebook
• Star Citizen Kickstarter reveals early piloting gameplay
• Sony launches ‘augmented reality’ title Wonderbook: Book of Spells from Harry Potter author
• No second chances: Treyarch will ban anyone caught hacking Call of Duty: Black Ops II
• Here’s what a $99.99 box of Tomb Raider stuff looks like
• PlayStation Plus launches on PS Vita next week
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s unlikely cameo: Former CIA chief David Petraeus
• Halo 4 sold a record-breaking $220M in its first 24 hours
• BioWare Montreal using the Battlefield 3 engine for the next Mass Effect
• Notch: Minecraft PC sales just passed 8 million

Mobile news:

• Glu Mobile lays off employees at two offices, closes a third
• Zynga brings its match-three gem game to mobile
• Mobile developer Intellijoy partners with YogiPlay to improve its educational apps (exclusive)
• Mobile game startup Pocket Gems appoints No. 2 exec as CEO
• After 400 million downloads, Storm8 releases new puzzle game to continue customer engagement
• Kixeye: Zynga is ‘desperate’ to get hands on its secrets
• New Kiip expands beyond mobile game rewards to other apps and platforms
• PlayHaven rounds up $8 million to finance international expansion
• Tapjoy runs into new drama over its app download incentives
• Time to get a bit fit: Fitbit One activity tracker now shipping
• Mobile-and-social app analytics firm Swrve raises $6.25M (exclusive)

Wii U:

• 10 things you don’t know about the Nintendo Wii U
• Wii U players could get an unfair advantage in Call of Duty: Black Ops II multiplayer
• Wii U shortage will be severe during holidays, but new console may not outsell Wii in long run
• GamesBeat’s Wii U roundup: Everything you ever wanted to know
• Here is the Wii U menu music (and more)
• Nintendo’s Scott Moffitt gives us the latest on the Wii U launch (interview)

Reviews:

• Donuts and penguins are weapons of war When Vikings Attack (review)
• Nintendo Land: Where the amusement sometimes ends (review)
• New Super Mario Bros. U is far from new (review)
• What’s in the Box?! Call of Duty: Black Ops II Care Package edition (review)
• Breaking down the four different games in Call of Duty: Black Ops II (review)
• Threeview: Halo 4 reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic
• Angry Birds Star Wars plays off of both franchise’s strengths (review)

Pieces of flair:

• New Skyrim: Dragonborn screens reveal expansion’s inner Morrowind (gallery)
• If Halo’s Master Chief had a dating site profile
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II debuts at midnight openings around the world (photo gallery)
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II multiplayer unlock guide
• All-new screenshots for Call of Duty: Black Ops II
• 2D game characters break into the real world

Space simulation will live on. We’ve reported previously that the creator of Wing Commander, Chris Roberts, successfully funded his next space-sim, Star Citizen, using crowdfunding.

With five days left in the Kickstarter campaign, the developer is making a final push to cross a total of $4 million raised. To help boost interest, Roberts released this video where he addresses fans. Even more interesting, his development team, Cloud Imperium Games Corporation, released an early look at the game’s co-op artificial intelligence:

It’s just a quick snippet of a player flying in formation with his AI wingmen.

Roberts warned GamesBeat that this video doesn’t include the final effects, explosions, or chase camera, but that is all video from the game in action. In fact, they had it running on a rig that only had a GTX470 card, which is one of Nvidia’s weaker 3D processors.

Star Citizen has raised $3.4 million to date. The game is pushing toward $1.2 million on Kickstarter after raising $2.2 million through the game’s official website.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Kickstarter funding campaign for science-fiction space sim Star Citizen surpassed its goal today.

Developer Chris Roberts and his Cloud Imperium company reached their $500,000 goal in less than six days. The total amount raised currently sits at $552,000.

Star Citizen is a PC-only game with a dynamic universe where players get their own spaceship and can fight in the military or branch off and explore the stars. It’s an ambitious looking game with a lot of crazy ideas, but it’s also something that gamers appear hungry for.

““The amount of support from our fans has been overwhelming,” Roberts said. “We had a few hiccups on our own site in the first week of operation, which led us to open up the Kickstarter page. Kickstarter provided better scalability for us and additional options for our fans. In the end, this is all about breathing new life into the PC games business. PC gamers have been left on the sidelines for the last few years. I want to utilize all the new technology that a PC can provide and bring space sims back into the modern area with a bang.”

Roberts is the mastermind behind beloved PC space-sim franchise Wing Commander. He’s been out of games for about a decade, and he’s hoping that Star Citizen is his triumphant return.

“Getting back into gaming is something I’ve been thinking about for several years,” Roberts said. “With all the new tech, it’s a whole different universe for developers, and I’m ready to take the welcomed plunge again. All I can say is that I’m having a blast doing this. With all these backers and pledges and the team we’ve assembled, we can and will raise the bar to a different stratosphere for PC gamers and space sims.”

Prior to the Kickstarter, gamers were pledging support to Star Citizen by donating on Robert’s personal funding site robertsspaceindustries.com. That venture raised over $1.3 million across 15,000 backers, which brings the total funds raised to $1.9 million.

The Kickstarter still has 25 days to go, so (if you take RSI-raised funds into consideration), Star Citizen could still raise as much as other huge gaming Kickstarters like Double Fine Adventure. But even if Roberts sets crowdfunding records, it’s unlikely a game of this magnitude will get through the entire development without the help of an outside publisher.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Kixeye’s chief executive officer calls out Zynga in the midst of an employee theft lawsuit, Microsoft reveals the new Xbox 360 dashboard, and the BioShock Infinite studio loses two more employees.

You’ll also find reviews for Skylanders Giants, the Walking Dead: Episode 4, Unfinished Swan, Happy Wars, Fable: The Journey, and Dance Central 3.

News:

• Nathan Fillion, Wil Wheaton, and more to partake in Firefall live-streaming event
• Preview of Assassin’s Creed III’s soundtrack proves the new composer did just fine
• The Witcher 2 developer’s next role-playing game is Cyberpunk 2077
• Good Old Games adds support for good ol’ Mac OS X
• Wing Commander creator’s new space sim Star Citizen now on Kickstarter
• Epic Games hires Microsoft Game Studios veteran to run Seattle developer
• Big Fish Games launches its first free-to-play game on PCs and Macs
• Twitch helps raise $1.5M from gamers for charity
• Grim but real player stats: 85 percent of social gamers do not return after the first day playing
• Licensed-games publisher Little Orbit lands investment from private equity group
• Forza Horizon to get Rally expansion for $20
• Claritics and Badgeville team up to gamify the enterprise
• Xbox Live members say Obama won second debate
• In midst of employee theft lawsuit, Kixeye CEO takes a blast at Zynga
• Obsidian raises $3.9M on Kickstarter for Project Eternity role-playing game
• Going once; going twice: News Corp. to auction off IGN Entertainment
• Skyrim game files hint at DLC dragon mounts and Morrowind locations
• The 10 most-anticipated games for Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii are all sequels
• Maximize your collections! BankersLab gamifies debt collection (exclusive)
• Beat the GMAT acquired by education giant Hobsons (exclusive)
• New update almost makes the Xbox 360 dashboard useful
• Head-mounted displays are still amazing (and still expensive)
• BioShock Infinite studio loses two more developers
• The Halo 4 leak: Microsoft responds, begins dealing out permanent account bans
• The Walking Dead developer is rumbling about its next comic-book adaptation again
• Call of Duty Elite goes free as Activision charges only for DLC for Call of Duty: Black Ops II
• MHL lets you play a bunch of Android mobile games on your TV (exclusive)

Mobile News:

• Disney’s mobile game star Swampy gets his own animated series
• Nexon partners to take Dungeon Fighter Online to mobile gamers in China
• Striiv launches a free fitness measurement app on the iPhone

Wii U:

• GamePad designer on Wii U motion games: ‘No, please don’t!’
• Nintendo engineers explain the magic of the Wii U GamePad’s video technology

Previews:

• Keep your Dance Central 3 party going with its SmartGlass DJ app (preview)

Reviews:

• Skylanders Giants is a kinder, gentler Diablo (review)
• Threeview: Dishonored reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic
• RollerCoaster Tycoon 3D is a lazy, featureless shell of its predecessors (review)
• Captain Scarlett and her Pirate’s Booty gives you a reason to return to Borderlands 2 … unless you haven’t left yet (review)
• The Unfinished Swan is wonderfully creative but full of emptiness (review)
• Happy Wars brings free-to-play gaming to Xbox 360, and it’s worth every penny (review)
• Fable: The Journey surprises by smart mix of motion controls and storytelling (review)
• Dance Central 3 hops, shuffles, and body rolls its way to greatness (review)
• The Walking Dead Episode 4: Around Every Corner is big on emotion, small on challenge

Tips and guides:

• 8 tips for saving the world in XCOM: Enemy Unknown
• What is the Wii U? Everything you need to know about Nintendo’s new console
• The XCOM field commander’s tactical guide to Enemy Unknown

Interviews:

• Citadel of Sorcery is the most ambitious game you’ve never heard of (interview)
• Three DigiPen grads are thinking big by producing small (interview)
• Why Activision is making Call of Duty Elite into a free service (interview)

Pieces of flair:

• Don’t shake it! Admire some impressive Etch A Sketch gaming art (gallery)
• ‘Our exit strategy is death’ guides Days of Wonder’s board game philosophy
• GamesBeat’s massive Street Fighter tournament: 32 fighters enter, 16 leave
• 15 Street Fighter III peculiarities you may have overlooked

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The server outage reportedly left thousands of would-be pledgers unable to donate, yet the company still managed to raise $1 million in one week. “It’s a testament to the willpower of our amazing fans,” said Roberts. “At a time when most would have given up, some dedicated fans kept trying to log on and eventually were able to get through and make a pledge. We appreciate all those efforts, and now with Kickstarter, we believe we have an answer for everyone.”

Star Citizen is a massively multiplayer online game that Roberts calls “a spiritual successor to games like Wing Commander and Privateer.” In a recent interview with GamesBeat, Roberts said he’s drawing inspiration from recent community-driven successes like Minecraft and Team Fortress 2 and will allow players to create and share spaceship modifications in a marketplace. He also plans to release lots of small updates over time.

“It will feel like things are happening and new events are occurring in the galaxy,” he said. “My goal is to make it feel alive and real to players. We will riff off the players’ own creations.”

Roberts hopes to raise a minimum of $2 million for Star Citizen.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The creator of the legendary Wing Commander sci-fi spaceship combat games is getting back into the gaming cockpit today with the announcement of Chris Roberts’ new massively multiplayer online game, Star Citizen. This is an extremely ambitious online game that aims to bring back the glory days of sci-fi space combat simulations in a persistent online world. The game’s art work and demo show that the 3D graphics animations are as eye-popping as a movie. You can, for instance, check out every inch of a kilometer-long battle carrier without finding obvious visual flaws.

“I want to bring space games back,” said Roberts, the chief creative officer at Cloud Imperium Games, in an interview with GamesBeat. “The space sims just aren’t happening anymore. This is a spiritual successor to games like Wing Commander and Privateer,” which is another Roberts creation.

Roberts teased the game on his web site, Roberts Space Industries, after hackers discovered the site by accident. Now that I’ve seen a demo of Star Citizen, it reminds me how much I miss those epic space battles where you save the human race from the evil aliens. Roberts bets that the future is all about outstanding movie-like game experiences, not casual social networking games. That’s a bet that only someone with decades of game-making experience can make with any degree of confidence.

Reaching back to the past

Roberts (pictured above) is unveiling the game at the GDC Online conference today in Austin, Texas. He’s used to swinging for the fences. He started in games at Origin Systems, the Austin game studio that Electronic Arts later bought. He became a star in 1990 with the release of Wing Commander, a space combat game that produced nine sequels and spinoffs. For a time, it was a huge business for Electronic Arts, but the copycat sequels bored gamers and drove the franchise into the ground.

(Wing Commander, by the way, was the reason I spent $2,000 on a brand-new 486 PC. It was an addictive game where you flew space combat fighters as if they were World War II fighters, an imaginative twist on the space combat in the Star Wars films. I used to play the game so much that my hand got sore from holding the joystick. Naturally, I kept playing and switched to the other hand when the need arose).

Roberts left Origin in 1996 and started his own company, Digital Anvil. Roberts said that no one has really picked up the mantle in sci-fi combat sims since his last company created the ill-fated Freelancer, published by Microsoft in 1999. That game took 4.5 years to make (and six to get to market), and by the end of it, Roberts had left the firm to make movies and Microsoft acquired his compan Freelancer was not a huge commercial success, but it was memorable. In the game, the player went from planet to planet, running missions and building a cool spacecraft. In Roberts’ original vision, each one of those worlds was a living, breathing thing, full of people and adventures. It was a precursor to modern massively multiplayer online games.

“At the end of Digital Anvil, I was burned out,” he said. “I didn’t feel the drive to make games. I didn’t do it to sell 2 million units. I saw a game experience in my head that I wanted to play. That was my impetus. But I was frustrated by development technology. I left four years into Freelancer, and it was two more before it game out.”

Lost in space and re-entry

“There were huge, long cycles. You work hard and then start the cycle again. I wasn’t keen on getting sucked into management. I took a break,” Roberts said.

He took time out of his gaming career to fulfill his dream of making a movie. In that sense, he was also a pioneer of transmedia, or taking an entertainment property from one medium to another. He created the Wing Commander film, a $30 million movie that generated a third of that at the box office. Roberts never directed another film, but he went on to produce films including The Punisher, The Jacket and Lord of War (the latter starring Nicholas Cage). Altogether, he produced 10 movies and worked with a big German film fund that poured $750 million into both films and real estate.

Roberts said that he left games in part because he was frustrated with the technology and felt that film could do a better job of realizing the visions in his head. But now he feels that PC gaming technology has finally advanced far ahead of the game consoles and can now produce high-quality imagery that can look very cool.

“I began to feel an itch,” he said. “I wanted to realize a vision. The picture was in my head. The technology to a point where the stuff we could do was great. And the other aspect is the move to online and digital business models. That’s really exciting to me,” referring to trends such as distributing games digitally directly to consumers.

“Now you can interact with the community directly and get feedback loops,” he said.

And he thinks there’s pent-up demand for cool games. Within an hour of taking its web site live, Cloud Imperium, with no publicity, had 1,000 people signed up for its beta test. Now, 30,000 have signed up. You can test ideas, and you bring games to market that don’t need 10 million fans in order to be a success.

“There’s a shift in the market and the technology,” he said.

Roberts is easing back into gaming. He was scoping out game development trends at the Dice Summit conference in Las Vegas in 2011, where I ran into him. At that time, he was considering his options. He thought about doing a big console game, but he felt that wasn’t so interesting. And he wanted to control his own destiny, not work for a major publisher.

But about a year ago, he starting experimenting with technology. He focused on the PC, where technology is moving far ahead of the consoles. He saw successes such as Riot Games’ League of Legends and Wargaming.net’s World of Tanks. Both are downloadable games that have tens of millions of players.

“I feel like there aren’t so many champions of the PC,” he said.

By April, he formally started Cloud Imperium Games, in West Hollywood, Calif., with chief executive Ortwin Freyermuth, a veteran film production executive and media attorney. Roberts started out with a very small team, working with an established technology, Crytek’s Cry Engine 3. That is one lesson he learned from Freelancer, whose costs soared out of control. The core of his team is no more than 50 people, and he can tap specialists outside of the company.

“I could not have done this in the old days,” he said.

Still, it will take two more years to complete the game.

The design of Star Citizen

As you can tell from the screen shots, the Cry Engine 3 technology can render a full space battle carrier, which is a kilometer in length and resembles the Tiger’s Claw carrier in Wing Commander. If you zoom in on any given yard of the carrier, it still looks real, with rivets, tiles, and bumpy surfaces. The flight deck has as many as 2 million polygons, the surfaces that make up 3D animated objects. But it doesn’t take forever to create these assets. Roberts calls this rendering at scale.

The ship is just a part of a PC-only persistent universe dubbed Star Citizen. You can earn your citizenship via military duty or civic duty. You can become a privateer or freelancer, operating a merchant ship that transports cargo and fights off enemy pirates. Within Star Citizen, you can play a story-driven, narrative game that resembles Wing Commander. Dubbed Squadron 42, the game within a game requires you to perform one mission after another until you complete a full story.

“You sign up for a tour of duty within this galaxy-wide, falling Roman empire,” he said. “On the western borders, some alien barbarian races are invading. On the eastern side is more benign trade.”

The Squadron 42 team is an elite military unit, like the French Foreign Legion. They quell rebellions and protect the galaxy. Players will be able to move from star system to star system through “jump points” that are like folds in space where you can travel anywhere you want. But within star systems, you’ll move at slower speeds. Each ship will have trade-offs in terms of weapons, armor, and speed. The physics models will be very detailed and determine whether one spaceship is more maneuverable than another. Each ship can have four thrusters to change its position in space; if one is damaged, the ship loses its capability to maneuver well. The ships fly by wire, much like an F-35 Lightning II.

Each spacecraft will have a distinct cockpit and a fully-rendered pilot. Each pilot has 100,000 polygons, or about 10 times the usual number in terms of 3D graphics animation. Players can make money flying trade routes. When intercepted, a battle takes place. In cooperative mode, they can tap other players to defend themselves.

Toward the core of the galaxy, the military preserves law and order. But on the edge, pirates likely operate with freedom.

“On the outer edge, it’s like Somalia,” he said. “A warlord may show up and jack your stuff.”

Players will be able to host their own universe and multiplayer version of the game. They will have their own content creation and “modding” tools, so they can modify the game. Ships will “level up” by adding hundreds of components.

In making use of the community, Roberts is tapping into recent successes like Minecraft and Team Fortress 2, which support community creations. In Star Citizen, players will be able to enhance and create modifications to their own spaceships and then be able to sell them in a marketplace. Roberts plans to roll out lots of small updates over time. And players will likely be able to prepurchase their space ships from the company.

“It will feel like things are happening and new events are occurring in the galaxy,” he said. “My goal is to make it feel alive and real to players. We will riff off the players’ own creations.”

There isn’t much competition out there. EA released a minor Wing Commander game on Xbox Live Arcade, but it wasn’t a success. The last major Wing Commander title came out in 1997.

Roberts says he has an “equity commitment” for the game. But he will also try to “crowdfund” part of it on his own web site in order to validate demand for the game. You may, for instance, be able to prepay for your game and get early access to it. He hopes to raise a few million dollars via crowdfunding.

“I believe there are high-end PC gamers who want to have an experience like this,” Roberts said, noting that Dell’s Alienware division gave him an Alienware 18x laptop to show off the game assets.

“I hope that people will be excited about what I show,” he said. “There is still a fan base out there.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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