$1.1 million is ridiculously modest. That said, you're leaping to some weird conclusions and just presenting it as a fact that they (I assume both inXile and Obsidian) expanded the budget with bank or other loans. We have no evidence they've done so. I'm really pretty sure they haven't. I could check, I guess, or you could ask Sawyer or someone else on formspring, but I'm pretty sure neither studio is doing that.
I have no idea how
you are leaping to the "weird" conclusion that I was presenting anything as "fact" when I clearly stated that "my guess" (you may want to check a dictionary for the meaning of the word "guess") is that they used the crowdfunding capital in order to get a bank loan.
My
guess, however, is based on real-life experience. So while it may still be a guess, I'd consider it a fairly educated one. I was certainly not presenting anything as fact though.
As for my real-life experience, I personally own a stake in a small cap company and after a major customer bailed out of a contract earlier this year, this company was in desperate need of a credit.
Ever since the worldwide financial crisis, banks aren't exactly lining up to grant credits to small caps so the bank demanded that the owners of the company (including myself) should raise the company's own capital by a few €100K. The bank wanted to consider granting a credit only if these conditions were met.
So... based on this real-life experience and my general and personal knowledge of how banks "tick" these days, I would not be overly surprised if Obsidian used the crowdfunding capital in order to obtain a credit under unknown conditions.
They might have also approached a private equity fund (in fact, most banks, probably including Obsidian's home bank, have their own PE divisions these days) and got the money from there after presenting the capital they raised from the crowdfunding campaign.
It is a known fact that Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games have an additional source of funding in addition to the crowdfunding (which stands at over US$7 million right now).
Chris Roberts has not revealed who the other investors are but from everything that has been revealed he is obviously tied up in a business relationship where he needed to prove to the unknown investors via the crowdfunding campaign that there was a substantial public interest in getting Star Citizen to be made.
On a whole I'd consider a budget of US$1.1 million -which is what Obsidian originally asked for- laughable at best. Unless Obsidian has taught their devs some crazy Yoga and survival techniques, I don't see how a game of PE's scope could be made in 18 months time with that budget and not even with the US$4+ million they managed to raise eventually. There is just no way. There must be another source of funding, whether it is a bank loan, private equity or their super-secret treasure chest
.