Will there be an in-game radio in Star Citizen?
TL;DRAn in-game radio isn't a hard no, but licensing and rights problems make it tricky; the team expects more in-fiction music and artists, and says something will probably happen eventually, though form is unknown.
That would be super cool. Are we talking real songs from now or made-up songs from the future?
Talk shows, I don't know.
This question comes up quite frequently. There are a number of ways to do this kind of thing, whether it's the GTA style, where we license a bunch of music and curate it on individual radio stations and just let people tune in and play to that, whether we contract out with folks and create an entirely original selection of 30th-century rock songs or whatnot to fill the thing, or what a lot of people tend to ask for is the ability to broadcast their own radio. And then that ends up opening up a whole other can of worms between legal and content rights. I'm sure most people who are watching on Twitch right now are no stranger to the situation with the RIAA and playing music. I mean, if you had an in-game radio station that you could run, the whole purpose of it was that you would want other people to hear it. So if you were playing Star Citizen and you turned a corner and heard somebody else's radio station playing a song that the RIAA is currently looking out for on Twitch, and you are streaming at the time, you get your channel banned because this person over here was streaming. There are lots of considerations for that kind of stuff. It's not a hard no. The situation is always changing and evolving, all manner of new tech solutions come up. Old backers will remember the jukebox in the player hangars that let you play your own MP3s in the hangar, and it radiated through your own personal hangar and stuff. So that's not to say that there's not some middle ground to be found.
I can at least say that from narrative's point of view, Dave Haddock has definitely been out there, interested in having lore and having actual musicians and music in fiction in Star Citizen. So we do expect to have that music in there; whether we'll have enough, or how long it would take to get enough to warrant a full-on in-fiction radio station, we'll see, right? But at least there will be expectations of having more in-fiction music and artists that are actually part of the universe, rather than just us composing what we think 30th-century music would be.
As we all know, in the future, music is all generated by AI anyway. So we just create some AI. We just generate hundreds of hours of terrible music.
But in case the answer sounds like a no and folks get disheartened, I will say that this comes up internally so often, like Bob just said, speaking on behalf of Dave Haddock and stuff. I have to imagine, based on how long I've been here and the people that I work with, that something will happen at some point. It's just another diegetic, very immersion-building aspect of this universe we're trying to build. So I can't tell you what form or shape it's going to end up in ultimately, but there's too many people here who want something for something never to materialize.
Yeah, I really hope to get the opportunity to record some 30th-century space rock as well.