Now before you go ahead and point out that Grand Theft Auto V cost $265M to get out there, and there can’t possibly be anything of that magnitude that’s crowd-funded, I’ll need to quantify what “most expensive of what” is.

In this case, it’s the effective funds used for actual game development. Rockstar didn’t really spend the entirety of the $265M solely on game development, like coding and development of art assets, in fact: $150M of that was spent on marketing alone. When you chunk away distribution costs(the actual physical disks), the royalties(that amazing soundtrack cost a pretty penny) and other miscellaneous organization costs, then that number goes down quick.

Which is why this graphic from Chris Roberts, when sharing his decision to go with the crowd-funding route for Star Citizen, is interesting:

If this were true, then the $39M Star Citizen has currently raised, taking into account the processor fees, can be taken to mean that it’s the equivalent of $124M in publisher-backed money — handily beating the $115M “dev” costs for GTA V.

However, there’s a bit of a murky line with crowd-funding: at what point would you consider pledged money as revenue vs money for development. Especially considering the fact that at this point, in this particular case, the project is fully-funded(and has been for awhile).

But maybe that’s an unfair question, how many crowd-funded projects actually reach these stratospheric levels of funding?

Which, in turn, may also be an unfair question. How many crowd-funded projects have this level of almost frenetic regular information drops, as evidenced by their broadcast schedule(which are funded separately by subscribers, they don’t use money from the crowd-funding campaign for their “marketing” efforts):

• Mondays @ 3PM: 10 for the Chairman, where Chris Roberts answers 10 questions from subscribers
• Wednesdays @ 9AM: Wingman’s Hangar, office updates and developer interviews
• Fridays @ 3PM: The Next Great Starship, a reality-show style competition for 16 teams to design a starship that will be included in the game universe(sponsored by 3rd party partners)

Is the distinction to be the most expensive video game in development solely all about the numbers, “justified” by their level of transparency and frequency of communication?

Arguably not. In this regard, Star Citizen attempts to make good on their promise by breaking into emerging technologies like Physically Based Rendering or PBR:

Or by refining/expanding a previously identified feature, like mining:

Should they continue on this trajectory of meticulous but careful not-quite-feature-creep-but-really-close-to-it advancement, they may well deserve another title: The Most Expansive Video Game in Development — the one game to rule them all.