Why did CIG feel the need to create the Roberts Space Industries subsidiary to brand Star Citizen? Why not just market Star Citizen under CIG directly?asked by Profit Driven
TL;DRRSI began as the in-universe fictional ship manufacturer, became the public face of fundraising, and was then made a subsidiary and trademarked brand, while Cloud Imperium is the real company building the game.
Well, so basically RSI was originally conceived to be this fictional future manufacturer of spaceships. And the whole idea was sort of to take you into the world of Star Citizen, 800, 900 years in the future, and you're visiting the site of a future Boeing or whatever. And so we set it up, and what happened was one of the web guys put Roberts Space Industries up there as a default because we hadn't come up with a name. And then like all these things, well, okay, I guess that kind of makes sense. I've made space games before, so I guess that kind of ties in the brand. And so it's really the company in the game in the future. But obviously it's been front facing for the game, us raising the money. So at some point we decided, well, we better incorporate it and make it kind of like a subsidiary, because we've essentially built brand value in RSI over Cloud Imperium. But the best way to think about it is RSI is the future fictional company. Cloud Imperium is actually the real world company that's building the stuff. And we've basically set up RSI now and trademarked it or whatever, because it's basically become a brand for what we're doing. And I would say if we were doing any other space game, probably it would be through RSI. But right now Star Citizen is pretty much all we're doing. And since it's going to be Wing Commander and Privateer and Freelancer and a bunch of other things all rolled into it, I'm not sure we're going to be actually doing anything other than that, because Star Citizen is just one big, long, huge ongoing project.