After surpassing the mind-boggling amount of $41 million in crowdfunding Cloud Imperium Games and its Director Chris Roberts are on a roll with interesting Star Citizen news, and today they published two separate videos.
The first showcases a visit to Behavior Entertainment, which is working on the pirate-friendly Asterid Hangar, giving us a nice glimpse on the work in progress for the feature. The second includes a whopping 20 minutes with Chris Roberts himself answering questions from subscribers.
Finally, as a prominent backer and supporter of the Oculus Rift, Roberts weighed in on the acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook:
Like many of you, I was genuinely surprised to hear the news that Oculus had been acquired by Facebook. There has been a lot written this past week about the acquisition and some notable people have come out for and against. I know a lot of backers and gamers feel like they’ve been betrayed by Oculus “selling out”.
I’m not one of them.
Why?
From the moment I first saw the Rift, I knew it was something special. I can tell you firsthand that the team behind the headset has a true passion for making VR tomorrow’s standard.
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.
For an interesting insiders’ view on the benefits of the acquisition, I would recommend everyone read Oculus’ new Chief Scientist Michael Abrash’s blog post on the subject.
Now to answer the myriad forum threads that popped up 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! 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
And last but not least I’m having way to much fun building the universe of my dreams for everyone to adventure in! I’ve been down the big company acquisition route twice before and there’s a reason I am making Star Citizen totally independently!
I'm sure I'm not the only one happy to hear that Cloud Imperium Games will remain independent. In the meanwhile, you can check out both the new videos below.
//www.youtube.com/embed/osx9qKUNCvc
//www.youtube.com/embed/XO1Q_D5tnSk