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Star Citizen will not be sold, the many backers of the space simulator have been assured.
The pledge comes as Chris Roberts’ crowdfunded title passes the astronomical $41m funding mark.
To answer [those] worrying about the possibility of Cloud Imperium being acquired by another, bigger company – don’t worry! We have no plans nor interest in following this path,” Roberts said.
We don’t need to go to anyone with deep pockets to make OUR dream a reality. To mass-produce hardware like the Rift, you need an outlay of hundreds of millions of dollars. Luckily our ships are digital so we have hardly any cost of goods, just the cost of developing the universe of Star Citizen and running servers that Star Citizen’s universe will be simulated on. Thanks to the generosity of the Star Citizen community we have these two things covered.”
That’s not to say that Roberts is against big-money acquisitions. Indeed, he doesn’t share the concerns voiced by some Oculus backers about the Facebook purchase.
I was genuinely surprised to hear the news that Oculus had been acquired by Facebook,” he added. I know a lot of backers and gamers feel like they’ve been betrayed by Oculus ‘selling out’. I’m not one of them.
In order for the Rift to succeed, it really needed a lot more funding than it has raised from its past two VC rounds. Hardware is expensive: it’s one thing to perfect the technology, but before you can sell a single Rift, you need to spend hundreds of millions on manufacturing and building a supply chain if you intend to make the Rift (and Virtual Reality) relevant for the mass market. Microsoft invested well over a billion dollars just to launch the Xbox One this fall!
My hope is that Facebook’s funding will let Oculus compete with much bigger companies and deliver an attractively priced consumer headset at the scale needed for mass market adoption without the loss of the incredible passion that convinced me to back the project. I haven’t heard or seen anything to the contrary so until I do we are fully committed to supporting the Rift.”
