Star Citizen eschewing Kickstarter to talk to gamers directly

Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts doesn't want anybody coming between him and his crowd-funded game's end users.

Speaking to Gamasutra, Roberts said crowd-funding essentially cuts out the middle men.

"In the old days, this is the presentation I would've given to [EA executives] John Riccitiello and Frank Gibeau at a greenlight meeting," he said of the project's pitch.

"Ultimately, [crowdfunding is] the same sort of device, but it's for a different audience. I'm pitching to the people who ultimately count - the people who are going to buy the game."

Interestingly, Roberts chose to host the crowd-funding campaign himself rather than go through one of a number of platforms.

"The problem I have with Kickstarter is that it's better than the publisher setup, but it's still another party," he said of the decision, noting that he didn't want to split his eventual audience,

"The idea was to do it all in one place, not to have some of it on your site, and some of it on Kickstarter," he explained.

"The downside is that they've had a lot of time to work through the kinks. Our site's gone down quite a few times because there are too many people visiting it."

This is absolutely true; although things seem to have settled down now, we were completly unable to access the site earlier, and the pledge tally and backer counter are still disabled. At last check, 3000 backers had forked over $160,000.

Roberts debuted Star Citizen overnight; his fame as the creator of the much loved Wing Commander series has brought plenty of attention to the project.