Here is a letter from Chris Roberts, creator of the Wing Commander franchise and the upcoming Star Citizen:
When I said I missed old school difficulty to gaming you probably didn’t think that I would make the pledge process more difficult than fighting the toughest boss monster in Demon’s Souls!
Well neither did I!
Wednesday morning we set out to prove that PC gaming and Space Sims are not dead… and prove it, we did!
We’re absolutely floored by the attention and humbled by your comments. We hoped everyone would be excited about the big idea behind Star Citizen and Squadron 42 — but we had no expectation about the kind of praise and interest we received yesterday.
The downside of all this attention was that the huge number of people from all around the world trying to learn about Star Citizen and make their pledge, crashed our custom crowd funding page and also took down the core community site.
Until then, we were on track to break crowd funding records. Now, thirty hours later, we’re only just getting the core site back online. The proper crowd funding page is still unfortunately down, but we have a backup site that, while not having the full range of features we intended, can take people’s pledges. With this site we have to update the data manually as there is no way to easily collect the crowd funding statistics on a live basis, which is why you haven’t seen a counter on the backup site. We are working very hard to get the main crowd funding plug in to play nice with the rest of the site, so we can deliver the seamless experience we envisioned when opting to have the crowd funding integrated into the main community site. Don’t worry, no one has lost their golden ticket, and we will ensure that everyone who makes a pledge on the backup site is connected to their community account. Please be patient while we organize this process.
We didn’t just set out to raise money to build a game; we set out to build a community. The intention was never to shut off the forums, disable the Golden Tickets or stop the flow of information after the launch; anything but. We hope you’ll bear with us as we get the community back online. The features you’ve enjoyed for the past month will continue — the Comm-Link, RSI Museum and Time Capsule — along with much more information about Star Citizen and chances to interact with its development team. As we move forward in this endeavor, you are our strongest asset; a vanguard of dedicated fans who will help us build and promote this game.
If you’re one of the lucky few warriors that snuck past the Java trolls and WordPress goblins to access the pledge site yesterday, thank you so much for your dedication.
If not, we promise we’ve beaten back these evil interlopers and ask you to pledge and spread the word to make this new universe possible. We are listening to you on the forums, are committed to giving you daily updates and will be rolling out some exciting new features in the coming days that hopefully make up for our initial snafu.
We lost the opportunity to break the first day record, but the race isn’t over yet! We currently stand at $455, 590 raised from 4,564 pledges which is pretty impressive considering the outage we’ve had. Seems everyone wants the RSI Constellation and physical goodies!
But we need get this up. Space Sims trumped RPGs in the old days, let’s get a little of that inter-genre friendly rivalry back!
If you haven’t made your pledge yet, please do as I would hate for the technical problems to have derailed our initial momentum. We still have a ways to go but I have no doubt with your support we will get there. This is our chance to tell the world: PC gaming and space sims are BACK!
Chris Roberts
Cloud Imperium Games
http://www.
