Chris Roberts, creator of Star Citizen, has enlisted the help of CryEngine 3 to create his game. With a triple-A setup, he decided it would be fruitless to release an expensive console title at this stage of the generation. He also suggests using a traditional publisher wouldn’t benefit his product.
”I didn’t think the project would suit a traditional publisher route, because big-box publishers won’t bring you success in the PC space,” he says. “The big successes in PC are like World of Tanks and League of Legends: Riot was nobody before it did League of Legends, and Wargaming was a small, niche publisher.But as time went on, the old console publishing path started to feel very yesterday, and I was thinking, ‘Do I really want to spend three years working on a next-gen console game that would ship just after the new consoles are out to a very small customer base.’ It would get a month’s worth of play and they’d be on to the next thing. So I cut out the first step.”
Such decisions have set Roberts up to make an impact. He knows he must act quickly to succeed.
I’m confident now that we’ll be able to compete with any AAA game out there. I can’t do what I did with Freelancer, or what id did with Rage, and take five years to release it. At that point, the moment in time will be gone. But in two years, it will be pretty great.”