They aren’t listening to their community is what. I play almost daily, and all they fucking talk about is ‘wait for 4.0, it’s going to be so much better!’ But they refuse to fix major problems, performance sucks, and the recent 3.24.2 patch may or may not have borked the game in many ways.
They need to perfect the game that already exists, fix the issues and iron out the code before working on more fucking mechanics. I swear it’s so bad. The article calls Chris a perfectionist, but that couldn’t be furtfrom the truth, he is a dreamer, that says put this amazing thing in then forgets about it and moves on to the next thing overnight. The game will go nowhere until he’s gone.
Edit: fixed a spelling error and added some basic formatting.
The interesting part is, if they say the game is complete or at least in “1.0” shape, it will suddenly mean that people will judge it as a product and not just a vision. CIG won’t call it finished as long as they possibly can.
As of 2022, according to its financials, the company has spent $637 million on development, with 2020 – 2022 averaging over $106 million a year. Assuming that the company continues spending around $100+ million a year, it doesn’t take a mathematician to realize that the $790 million raised so far at the time of writing is on the verge of, or has likely, run out.
No, the article is claiming $700M in development costs—based on $637M spent by 2022–and $790M raised. They’re speculating that the company is going to run out of money soon.
That’s not how you calculate profit. Their revenue might exceed their costs so far but they have to keep spending. The game isn’t done and it costs money to just keep the lights on.
Look, I don’t know their financials. I’m just correcting what you claimed and pointing out what the article is claiming which is that their spending appears to be outpacing their revenue.
I actually do appreciate the clarification then, thank you. But I’ll still suggest to the readers of this convo, articles like these aren’t written for the edification of its readers, it’s written to bait engagement. The speculations of gaming journalists on Star Citizen is as reliable as Fox News’ speculation on the Mexico/USA border.
And as someonewho has been following following the numbers, it’s growing in revenue and daily active players every year. They just opened a massive new office in Manchester so they can hire more people. The people they do hire get paid well and stick around for years. If they were worried about cash flow, they have a lot of fat they would be trimming right now, but their expenses and revenue keep growing in step with eachother. They have no investors to pay, no vaults to fill. They make money and spend it growing the business. Those expenses represent 12 years of good wages and benefits for workers.
Star citizens success is a threat to capitalist, investor focused gaming. Gaming news is run by game industry capitalists and has zero oversight or accountability for bring truthful.
I don’t think so, SpaceX claimed (and NASA apparently verified) that the development costs for the Falcon 9 were $300 million. It’s in the Wikipedia article, also here: newspaceeconomy.ca/…/how-much-would-falcon-9-have…
I was under the impression that the Falcon Heavy was a ground-up development. But in any case the Falcon 9 was cheaper, so go figure…
No, it’s horrific. And the reason why is evident in what the previous commenter said.
The most expensive “package” costs $48000. You just don’t see it till you already spend like $10k on the game. They have two additional hidden stores that unlock when you spend money on the game already. The commenter above probably didn’t see those two stores and only knows about the “reasonable” pricing.
All bs and scam atuff aside. This is what happens when you have a leader who never gets told no.
Dude never finished and feature krept freelancer too before Microsoft kicked him to the curb and finished it themselves.
Yep, feature creep is basically this entire dev cycle. Dude just keeps adding more and more and never really finishing anything. I grabbed the game on sale a few years ago, I have maybe 15 hours into it. It’s got stuff to do, but not what I would expect from the money and time that’s been spent on it.
At those time frames it’s not just feature creep you have to worry about, but tech- and social creep as well. Think back what games were popular 12 years ago and what hardware we had. That’s why usually in longterm, large scale projects you have a technological freeze, where you essentially ignore all progress made outside of your project for the sake of completion, which Star Citizen clearly hasn’t done.
I backed it with about 60$ on the Kickstarter and have tried a few alphas. It’s nice but unpolished. I don’t care about the drama and by this point, if they release a game, I’ll be happily surprised - and if not, meh.
Same for me, though I did splurge a bit ($150 I think) to get the game on a USB key shaped like one of the starships in the game. I will never get that USB key…
If they ever get done I will consider spending more time with it, I don’t really care for early access into an unfinished game.
I should have asked for a refund when we had the chance…
Roberts is relatively well-known in and out of the Star Citizen community for being a perfectionist at the best times.
In a parallel universe, Roberts would have been allowed to continue working on Freelancer, and it would still be in development hell in 2024 with no end in sight.
On the other hand, Starlancer is a perfectly contained game with great singleplayer gameplay, story, coop and a lot of attention to detail that shines and rewards good players for playing the game. So he can do stuff well, the correct environment needs to be there for it to happen though.
Yeah, and it’s sad bro. I put about 900 hours into Elite: Dangerous, which I enjoyed a great deal, but it still left me longing for something with more depth. Back then I thought Star Citizen would be the next leap forward in my career as a space trucker who dabbles in bounty hunting and deep space exploration. I wanted to have games worthy of justifying a home cockpit setup, and now it seems like a lost cause.
I really hope someone picks up the torch. Even if it’s just Frontier making a generational leap with the Elite IP.
Elite:Dangerous is sad for its own reasons, too, and I have a similar count of hours logged. Glacial pace of development and a lack of strong game design / sense for balance. I'm still stunned by how much of a selling point the background simulation was, and how limited it actually is in practice (it did get some love over the years, but far too little too late IMO.)
I really wanted to like it, but it just never scratched the itch when I played it. I love stuff like freespace 2, but E:D just never did it for me. Which sucks, because the community search thing sounded really fun at the time.
It annoyingly needs a more complex HOTAS to properly play than most cheap entry-level ones have, while also not having ENOUGH complex need to justify me pulling my godamn keyboard over for
Literally the main reason I don’t play it even though slapping my quest 2 on and space VR flying is fucking fun
I haven’t played E:D so I can’t really make comparisons, but maybe X3/X4 can pique your interest?
I don’t think they can justify a home cockpit setup, they’re also kinda hard to get into (especially X3, you can’t get far without a guide), but hey, there’s a combined 1.5% chance that you haven’t heard of them and that you’ll enjoy at least one of them if you don’t care much about graphics. Or voice acting. Or UI/UX.
X3 is a fun game, with a very developed universe (you’ll see factions conduct invasion in real-time as you do your own thing) with a wide variety of gameplay. The universe of X3 honestly makes Star Citizen seems like a theme park for children.
That being said it is extremely difficult to get into them both because there are so many gameplay options and the UI/UX is subpar (prepare to be constantly fiddling with menu and looking up how to execute a given course of action).
Yeah, I never even bought it after reading the reviews about how janky it is, I want to use a HOTAS and rudder pedals and it doesn’t sound possible in X4
I play it with hotas and it works fine. You’ll absolutely still want to keep a keyboard and mouse handy though because the RTS/management half of the game is really not that well controlled with a flight stick.
I couldn’t find a way to bind a double press in X4, so hold RB and tap X for example. These combinations are essential because there is no other way to use a controller to perform all of the necessary controls. It’s a shame because I would have invested a lot into the game if that was surmountable.
I tried binding in Steam but the controller settings in Steam are kind of terrible too. Half the time I don’t know what a setting does, and I feel like I need to do a training course to understand it. So I gave up and went back to Elite.
I didn’t blame you. Over the years I’ve seen some really impressive controller setting though. You can do a lot things with the steam settings. But yeah, you need to want to really invest in learning how to do it, and then actually remembering what you’ve set.
No, X is absolutely my type of game. Don’t blame me for the horrible controls and menus, I didn’t create that hot mess. It’s also a well complained about part of the game.
I remember how awesome Distant Worlds was, as a community event, and I wish I appreciated it more at the time. 65000 light years and back, I even bought a T-shirt and coin to commemorate the event lol o7
My big in game accomplishment was making it to SagA*, I spent some time in colonia and joined a discord of nerds that hung out there getting big exploration creds. I actually made the trek all the way back to the bubble after spending about a month in the galactic core. It was an epic adventure in my mind, but afterwards it was hard to be motivated for the engineering grind.
I sold my pledges off 9 years ago, the reason I even made a reddit account in the first place. Was getting disillusioned with it back then and I was super excited when I initially backed it, had a decent amount of ships in the hangar at the time, but felt like I was only ever going to see them in the hangar
It is the exact opposite of vapourware, even. They have over a thousand employees in multiple studios across the globe pushing out regular, massive updates.
Imagine actually working on this game. What the hell is wrong with these developers?
I’ve never seen a single game make less progress at a slower speed while also been on sale. Who out there is deluding themselves into believing this will ever be released as a finished product?
There are game studios that have come into existence, had many commercial hits, and shut down in the time it’s taken them to fail to make one game.
It felt like most non-fromsoft clones in terms of the map, though. No one else manages the feel of opening up the map like they do. Elden Ring is much more focused on the open world, so it approaches the use of space differently, but the way you can look back over some areas and see what you just spent hours battling through gives a similar feel of intentionality to the map design.
Lords of the Fallen not giving that feel is part of why I didn’t spend as much time with it as the combat quality would imply.
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