Can we stop pretending backers who pledged $45 a decade ago loudly proclaiming in here "they're not spending anything until the game does X" have any impact on the game's success or not?
I know I'll catch flak for this post and I don't care; you can check my comment history on my many criticisms of CIG's production over the years if you want to accuse me of gatekeeping or white-knighting or whatever as well. What follows is my perspective on what I consider an annoying karma-farming and non-productive posting trend in this sub.
BLUF: $45 backers have not funded this game since at least 3.0, if not much earlier. Details are below.
The fad has been for a while now for Redditors come in here to proclaim "No New Money Until *x* Happens" and it's getting tiresome.
First of all, for everyone who backed at the Kickstarter with a $45 pledge and (as *so many* people commenting in such threads always declare "not another cent since"): ***thank you***. Thank you for helping get this massive project going. None of this would have been possible without you taking a chance with $45 you could have spent elsewhere on nothing more than a fancy web advertisement, a dream and a lot of promises (many of which have been broken by now). You greatly helped get the ball rolling, and made the project into something worth supporting.
Also, I want to make it clear that I'm fine with people spending their free cash (after taking care of their obligations, families, investments etc) on whatever the hell makes them happy.
Story time: In my late 20s and for a solid decade after I had a race car I built up from a used fast street car, spending thousands a year to strip it down and convert nearly everything of note that affected performance (even the steering rack and column) over to race-spec parts within about 4 years, stem to stern. More money had to be budgeted for spares and regular maintenance required by track clubs. I enjoyed the project, and the years I spent driving it in HPDEs around the nation, making lots of car-enthusiast friends. It was also a *massive* money sink, like a boat (so my friends whose boats I enjoy sailing on tell me), costing thousands a year in just "operating costs" to even show up at tracks, beyond the club and track fees, and that all it enabled a *really fun* hobby. But the realities of jobs and family needs meant I finally sold the car and all spares about a year before I started backing *this* project. I'm a whale now in this thing despite spending a fraction on this hobby compared to that one, having only backed SC for about 8 years now, and I'm fine with the trade. It's my money, I literally budgeted for this game once I really got into it by 2019, and I'm happy to help contribute to making this game a reality for the features CIG had returned to me for my money. Hense I'll be the last to criticize anyone's choice of where they spend their free cash; spend it on what makes you happy, now or for the future. I personally have hit a lot of the ship goals I had by now so my personal funding for CIG has dropped drastically from what I was budgeting years ago as well, a small fraction of it, but I just can't get behind the "nOt aNoThEr cEnT" energy beyond the general sentiment, that's not how this game will succeed and I question the motives of many such comments.
Now it's time then for the bad news to the $45 Kickstarter backers who helped get this whole thing started: that was nearly 14 years ago, and $45 backers are not who have kept this project going since then nor enabled the game to get to where it is now, nor will help it get to ever being finished.
Simple math shows the following instead:
$45 backers have not funded this game by the very simple fact that for CIG to have reached $1B in funding there'd have to be over 22 million *paid* accounts... but there are apparently only slightly more than [6.5 million total accounts](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1tbxgq9/65_million_accounts_milestone_reached/) with (estimated) perhaps [half](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1tbxgq9/65_million_accounts_milestone_reached/oljvpoo/) of those being backers who have put in at least $45. We'll assume it's 50% total accounts that are paid accounts for the purpose of this breakdown, so 3.25M backers. CIG's own numbers (last I saw) showed they have $68M in non-backer funding invested in them as well (with unknown financial growth of that funding since then, so we'll assume it all went to expenses), leaving approx. $1.004B - $68M = $936M having been raised from those 3.25M backers.
Assuming everyone had pledged equally (very not true, but illustrative) that'd mean all 3.25 million backers have pledged at lease $288 apiece.
But as so many commenters proudly proclaim, many have only paid $45 or therabout. At 3.25M backers that would be "only" $146M contributed, or less than one-*sixth* (15.49%) of CIG's backer-raised funds. Given that obviously some percentage less than 100% of backers pledged $45, the $45 backers have contributed even less than that.
I have never seen any distribution of the breakdown of actual backer funding ranges, so can't get more specific than these figures... but it's easy to conclude that the proud $45 backers have helped at most with 10-12% of the game's production, likely even less.
So these self-congratulatory posts of "I'm not helping anymore than the $45 I gave them 10+ years ago" are hilarious in one aspect, tiresome in another, and not representative of the actual backing that has brought this game to this point so far.
Do what you want with your free cash, that's great... just stop pretending you're the engine that has kept this whole thing going.