Renaissance Gaming and the Most Expensive Game Ever
By Alex Kierkegaard / November 12, 2023
Let's do some quick back-of-the-envelope math to get right at the heart of what I am claiming. The five biggest Star Citizen spenders in The Cult [ > ] have collectively spent let's say about $10,000 by now. Could be more, I don't have the exact numbers (but I could easily get them), but it's certainly not less. This amount, divided by the game's $45 pricetag gives us 222, meaning that it takes 222 regular players to contribute to the game's development the amount of funds that my four friends and I have. Which means that each of us contributes roughly 45 times more than the average player. Which means that if we dropped the contributions of the "whales"—meaning of the rich players, or at least those prepared to spend as if they were rich, like me—we would kill the game, but if we dropped those of the normal players, practically nothing would change about the project. Now, there is no other game in the entire history of gaming for which you can say this (except mine, where the phenomenon is even more extreme, more on which later). Does that remind you of any other arrangement in the history of art?
Understand: if all normal gamers had never even heard of Star Citizen, the negative impact on the game would have been negligible: maybe it wouldn't have had such a cool environmental audio system or something (which system btw, named Claudius, is more complex than entire other games [ > ]). But if the rich players had never heard of the game, THE GAME WOULDN'T EXIST AT ALL. At most, it would have been an update on Chris Roberts' 2003 Freelancer—which was in fact the original Kickstarter design document before they started selling ships and the wealthy started speaking with their wallets, and CR took advantage of it to radically expand the design from a mere space-trading game with no walkable planets at all to a full-blown first-person metaverse. Everything about the game has been tuned to appeal to the tastes of the rich—starting first and above all by the fact it can only be played on high-end PCs—and that is exactly how art was created in the pre-Industrial era, and most famously in the Renaissance. And that's where we're back at right now, or at least that's where cutting-edge gaming is. Which means that gaming has finally matured to the point where only the wealthy can appreciate it, exactly as in the old days.
Because it IS a question of appreciation, and NOT of wealth, fundamentally. This can be seen by the curious phenomenon that the people who spend the most on the game also PLAY it the most. I could provide hard data on this, but I don't need to, so I won't: suffice it to say I could plot a graph of money spent versus time played and it would be almost perfectly linear: the $45 players hardly play the game, if at all, while the big spenders log thousands of hours and have basically quit all other games for it. This applies outside my clan as well as inside it: I can see it in every random we invite to join us: those of them who play the most are also big spenders, while the regular players drop off after a session or two, never to be seen again. Of course I am sure there are exceptions to this rule, though I haven't personally encountered any. Nevertheless, in the couple of million people who have bought the game I am sure there are a handful of poor people who play the game a lot, just as there must be some rich ones who hardly play it; but generally speaking the rule is what I am describing, and it is unmistakable, and stunning (keep also in mind that a couple of million people HAVEN'T bought the game: that's just the number of accounts that have played it: I myself have half a dozen of them, and with every referral reward they announce I make one more, so the total number of real people who have bought Star Citizen could well be half or less of that advertised; it may not even have reached one million real players yet).
Now, I won't get into the connection between wealth and aesthetic sensivity/intelligence here. This is social science/psychology stuff that has been studied and elaborated fairly well elsewhere. All I wanted to do in this essay is announce that gaming has finally reached the point where the cutting-edge games at the far-right of The Popularity vs. Quality Equation can only be funded by rich patrons, and can only be appreciated by them, a phenomenon which started with Star Citizen in 2012 and which is even more pronounced in my Battlegrounds since you can't play that at all without spending $600 a year (and the DLC costs $1,200) [ > ], making it the most expensive game in the entire history of gaming and cutting out the poors entirely to the point where they can't even launch the game.
In short, it is a brave new world out there, at the cutting-edge of art, and Insomnia, Cult Games, The Cult and I are at the center of it. Along with Chris Roberts and his 1,300-dev superstudio, Cloud Imperium Games, of course.