Yes. That's what crowdfunding is. From the customer, in advance, funded straight to software development. The customer is funding the development, in thinly veiled corporate PR speak bullshit that CR has been doing for more than half a decade during the times when he was at Origin Systems and later Microsoft, who dumped his ass and completed Freelancer themselves, only this time it's the suckers that he's managed to cultivate with decades of his manipulative PR bullshit koolaid that these negative IQ degenerates fall for without even questioning their overlord.
The entire fucking premise of SC's pitch in that initial video 12 years ago, is that (paraphrasing, not completely accurate) "no publisher, no deadlines, you are the publisher, we're answerable to you, transparent development".
So, yes. Star Citizen DOES cost "the customer", in excess of $655 million USD, as of now.
That's what SC drones tell themselves to split the dev budget into two, to cope harder, and get wet every night holding CR's pic on his private yacht, but reality's often disappointing.
Star Citizen is one game, which comprises of it's SP (SQ42) and the MP (Star Marine, ToW, PU etc). It uses the same fucking engine, same fucking assets, same fucking middleware, and was part of THE SAME FUCKING KICKSTARTER AND CROWDFUNDING PACKAGE, until 2016 when CR decided it was better for PR koolaid to split the project into two, claiming two games and two budgets, less bad coverage in the news if they pretended it was two projects entirely and the SC cultists fell right into his PR shithole with more ammo for forum wars to spread the lies, coping and seething since then.
Naming it SQ42 and having even a separate installer and execution file/launcher, doesn't make it a different game. A braindead monkey would be able to decipher this.
Imagine a Doom, Unreal, CoD or Battlefield game dev saying "Oh, that's Test of Valor, our single player campaign experience, which we decided will now be a standalone game instead of the basic fucking expectation that it's part of the same package, was announced so and costs another $70 that you suckers will pay us, but hey it features Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill and Gillian Anderson! Please buy the early access of our pre-alpha now! Until stocks last for this digital download!". SC drones with brain damage will believe this, of course. Every other normal human being with a functioning braincell will tell the publishers to fuck right off.
Oh, and the budget, as of typing this is $655.5 million USD (and counting) in crowdfunding, by customers
and $63.25 million USD by private investors, which, as of now, makes it a total of now, is ~$719 (rounded off) million USD, and counting.
Reserve funding for the project is ALWAYS under $50 million USD every year, at least for the last 5 years.
That's almost $670 million USD spent, in 11 years of dev time, for a fucking "PRE-ALPHA" that has 1 OUT OF THE PROMISED 100 STAR SYSTEMS on the Kickstarter, oh yeah but we'll just forget all that and use the customer's funding for fucking bartender AI instead.
Forget fucking Pyro and 4.0 which is another fucking year away, let's just casually namedrop 3.21 on Spectrum right before Citizencon and pretend no one is surprised, but oh hey here's 3.22 with replication layer preview and Team Elimination! which chugs a fucking 4090 into a single digit performance slideshow, and the TTK of a fucking bullet sponge with rng recoil and desync. Let's all cry with CR at CitCon on how we're this close to getting dynamic server meshing next year, despite announcing it 5 fucking years ago.
Nice coping and seething though.
www.tweaktown.com
, not just a ship pack!
