As someone that played star citizen and enjoyed the gameplay very much, this game has been basically ruined by greed for years now. They basically discourage playing the actual game with these practices. Sure, you can work your ass off and make a butt load of money to buy a bunch of cool guns, armor, and ships, but as soon as they do a server wipe, which they do fairly regularly, most if not all of it will get wiped clean. But if you give them real money you get to keep everything after a server wipe.
I even had a friend where his ship, bought with in game currency, glitched and he was able to keep it several updates later with no issue while mine disappeared. We both bought them with in game currencies at about the same time. Mine disappeared as soon as the update came out and he had it for almost two years! To me that sounds like it’s intentional and they could totally get away with letting you keep your stuff but they choose not to.
And look, I’ve played early access games before and I’m used to playing games that do a server wipe every once in a while or saves being incompatible with the new version, but I’m talking every update and multiple times a year. It makes it so the only sense of progress you feel is when you buy a ship with real money so you can still have it on the next update. It’s a very exhausting game.
Last I saw, Squadron 42 (the single player version of the game) is function complete and undergoing optimization, but SC the multiplayer game will never be finished in my mind.
I played this game and threw some money at it. I wanted it to succeed. Recently there have been plenty of developments that convinced me to quit this game completely. This one just gives me more confirmation I did the right thing.
I think CIG is at its tipping point now and it will be game over for Star Citizen in a few years.
SC has so much potential. There is real magic in some of the game they have produced; the aesthetic is fantastic and the fundamentals are solid… all of which makes what they’re doing to run the game into the ground so fucking disappointing.
i have been waiting for long time for them to add enough content to be worth buying. If they are going this route, i guess i’ll forget about getting the damn game entirely
Not to get political, but instantly dismissing things as “looks like Trump” is so ironic as that’s exactly what those types of people do to reality. It also really brings the point home further when you are just repeating rhetoric without understanding the existing support.
I’d be more-generous and just call it a wildly-mismanaged development process that ran out of control, and where they have no realistic way of fulfilling all the promises they made at this point.
This is not to imply that one should throw more money into the hole, mind.
In a traditional development environment, the publisher would have bailed on this a long time ago.
EDIT: I do think that it does highlight two things, though:
The risks with this kind of funding structure for game development.
The fact that there are a lot of people who really badly want a modern, good space combat video game.
I really don’t think that it’s all that abnormal, aside from the funding structure.
Lots of video games — including even some pretty successful ones — have dev studios that screw up the scope when they estimate what they can accomplish with their financial and hardware budget.
The problem is that if you’re a video game developer and you look at the state of your game and you know that it doesn’t meet up with what you’re hoping to make, you can maybe go to the publisher and say “we screwed up and need more money”. And the publisher — who is familiar with the industry and has the ability to actually come in and take a look at what’s going on with your development process and has bean-counters whose job is to make a cold, clear-eyed call on this — is one entity who is hopefully is going to make an objective call.
But with Star Citizen, that structure doesn’t exist. The developer can just keep go begging for more money.
Take https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daikatana: “The aim was for the company to create games that catered to their creative tastes without excessive publisher interference, which had constrained both Romero and Hall too much in the past.”
Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever: “Broussard and Miller funded Duke Nukem Forever using the profits from Duke Nukem 3D and other games. They gave the marketing and publishing rights to GT Interactive, taking only a $400,000 advance.” That was self-funded, so there wasn’t some outside party saying “no more”.
In 2009, with 3D Realms having exhausted its capital, Miller and Broussard asked Take-Two for $6 million to finish the game.[8] After no agreement was reached, Broussard and Miller laid off the team and ceased development.[8] A small team of ex-employees, which later became Triptych Games, continued development from their homes.[14]
In September 2010, Gearbox Software announced that it had bought the Duke Nukem intellectual property from 3D Realms and would continue development of Duke Nukem Forever.[15] The Gearbox team included several members of the 3D Realms team, but not Broussard.[15] On May 24, 2011, Gearbox announced that Duke Nukem Forever had “gone gold” after 15 years.
The problem is that the developer knows perfectly well that the game doesn’t meet the kind of standard that they’d hoped for and which they’d gotten players expecting, but they aren’t willing to cut their losses and just wrap things up. And the publisher wasn’t in a position to cut development off. In Duke Nukem Forever’s case, happened when they exhausted their own capital, because employees aren’t gonna work without pay.
But in Star Citizen’s case, even that brake doesn’t exist. They aren’t using their capital. They’re using player capital that they got in exchange for promises, and I don’t think that players are nearly as good as an outside publisher at performing cold, hard, objective analysis of the development process. CIG dug themselves into a deep hole. Once they’re in that hole, there’s not really a good way out. If they just stop development at any given point, they aren’t going to have something that players are happy with. The only route they have out, to not fail, is to make more promises, try to get more money, and somehow try to develop their way to a successful game. So they’re gonna keep doing that until all of the players cut them off, which can take a long time. A publisher would say “you blew through numerous deadlines in the existing development process, and I don’t think that you’re a good investment”, or said “no more money unless you give me a hard, short timeline for wrapping this up”. I think that CIG knew pretty well that there was no point where they could wrap things up in a handful of months and meet player expectations, so their choice was always “fail” or “keep kicking the can down the road in hopes that they could fix things”.
I don’t disagree, but I …don’t entirely agree either.
It’s absolutely true that devs are pretty bad at estimating costs, because it’s not their job. (And they’re usually good at estimating timelines, but bad at insisting on them.)
It’s also true that games blow over budgets and deadlines all the time, and yeah I remember when Duke Nukem Forever first became a joke and then a meme.
But consider that DNF was completed by a small handful of devs who ran with an almost-finished game that they knew they could make happen. In contrast, there is no finish line for Star Citizen. There is no path to success. As you say, they can’t drop it and be satisfied, so they make more promises and ask for more money. But here’s the key: They KNOW they cannot fulfill those promises - existing or future. It’s impossible at this point! The only thing they’re doing is delaying the inevitable, which would be fine if it was their own time and money; but since they’re constantly begging for money from optimistic gamers with promises they have no intention of delivering on, they are grifting. No excuses, no conditions, no “but maybe…” just pure con-artistry at work.
It’s not a scam guys. GUYS It’s not a scam quit calling it that. Just because saps, I mean marks, I mean people bought $400 digital ships over a decade ago and haven’t seen shit yet, doesn’t mean this game won’t release any day now.
If they were smart they would put all of their eggs into squadron 42, make it as good as they can
They did, it’s why star citizen was lagging behind so hard for so long. All the production focus went into squadron 42 like 6ish years ago. Squadron 42 is announced for release next year and since the announcement they turned production focus back to star citizen. Still SC 1.0 is going to be years away still because they’re so damn slow with everything they do…
Along with the game—which originally had a targeted release date of 2014—Lord was supposed to have received numerous bits of physical swag. “So aside from [the game], I’m supposed to get a spaceship USB drive, silver collector’s box, CDs, DVDs, spaceship blueprints, models of the spaceship, a hardback book,” he said. “That’s the making of Star Citizen, which—if they end up making this game—might turn into an encyclopedia set.”
That was back when only $200 million had been sunk into the development.
A farce, if you go by the last time I tried it a year or two ago. And before you tell me I need to keep checking it out: I backed the kickstarter. I have given them plenty of time.
If this ever magically becomes a game, great. As it is, it's been one very long grift and I am glad I didn't give them anything beyond what I lost in that initial backing.
“Load up and play” is a very loaded statement. When I tried it, about a year ago, it was a buggy, glitchy, crash-prone mess that ran like deepfried garbage.
I get it. They deserve a lot of criticism. But pretending it’s vaporware when there’s a tangible product you can try - buggy or not - is a really stupid argument.
The way they designed this game I swear to god the entire thing is one giant MLM and Star Citizen is the product they want you to sell to everyone else.
I remember seeing this idiot all over the Steam forums back in the day. I wouldn’t trust anything he makes even if it wasn’t blockchain related. His games suck, and he himself is a huge, arrogant asshole.
massivelyop.com
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