Starbound health check

Hi guys

So it’s no secret that a bunch of early access projects have run into trouble lately. From running out of money to ceasing development for political reasons. It’s not the best time to be a part of the early access party and it’s easy to see why people are worried about the health of the Starbound project.

I wanted in no uncertain terms to assure everyone that there’s no chance of Starbound going that way. Not only is the development of Starbound extremely healthy. (More so than it’s ever been in fact, with more team members than ever and all of us in the same location). But Chucklefish could fund the development of Starbound for another 9 years at least. Even if we didn’t make another penny in that time. This includes all our office costs, salaries and every other kind of company expenditure.  Not only that but every member of the team is super dedicated to getting Starbound to where THEY want it to be. Which is 1.0 and beyond.

So why don’t we hire a bunch more programmers and finish Starbound faster?

I’m afraid it just doesn’t work that way, bringing on a new programmer requires a huge amount of invested time. Programmers need to learn the code base, they need existing programmers to teach them the code base. It takes months of getting up to speed to reap the rewards of that investment. Then you have a huge communication overhead as well as all the businessy time sinks that go along with a new hire. Not to mention finding room to house those additional hires (We would have to move to a bigger office!).

So I hope this is reassuring to the worried out there. Starbound is coming and you can check our progress on the Starbound blog and by opting into our nightly builds.