Always remember “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
There’s a lot of bullshit in the Star Citizen controversy. Hating it generates a lot of revenue for Massively and The Escapist (two of the worst tabloids in the industry). Just play it once during a free fly before you judge. If everyone did that, these articles wouldn’t exist.
I love these encouragements. Yes,by all means,play it during a free flight event and see what a POS tech demo it is. Good luck completing a single mission without dying to endless bugs or having top notch hardware to even hope of it being a fairly decent experience.
In the year 2024 CIG doesn’t even know what FSR 1 is. They’ve been promising Vulkan for years now. Even single indie dev games have it to some extent.
Pitchforks and rabble rousing is fun, but I actually play the game. It is a fun time, worthy of hundreds of hours as it is right now. Many people have thousands of hours. The growing number of players and growing revenue tell a different story than your ill informed guesses and chipped shoulder. This is as much a tech demo as any other early access game. I know this because I actually play it regularly. The lived experiences of the vast majority of players outweighs the angry whinging of people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
Who cares if it never finishes? It’s fun now. I have had much more than my money’s worth of fun. $50 ten years ago is still paying off in enjoyment now and it’s getting better with every update. This is what the overwhelming majority of the growing number of thousands and thousands of regular players all say. Crying about it doesn’t change facts.
Star Citizen is a game that exists, so sure, maybe “scam” isn’t the right word for it, but they’re still insanely sketchy. They constantly make promises they never meet, constantly beg the community for more funding when they already have an outrageous amount of funding, add insanely overpriced microtransactions to try to profit off whales, etc…
SC is driven by hype and nothing else. So many years later it still runs like ass and is very barebones, there’s a giant question mark on where all that money went and how the project is being handled. No Man’s Sky had a fraction of the budget and size and they managed to do so much more.
At best it’s the worst managed video game project of all time.
Ten years on and you think their growing players count and revenue is still just hype? No. The people who try thebgame are sticking around. If it was just hype it would have died years ago. It is genuinely fun to play right now. I can tell you this because I’m having lots of fun in it right now. When is the last time you played it?
Where does any game spend it’s money? That’s not ever public info. The fact that SC is publicly posting its revenue is opening them up to this double standard they are better than other companies with. We know they just bought a massive new building to hire more devs, so the evidence suggests they spend their money on development. They don’t spend any of it on dividends for any already rich ultracalitalist investors because they don’t have any, so they already have every other AAA company beat. (Those investors also invest in gaming journalism).
They do have investors. And at any rate, it makes no difference if the money is instead going to the founders family members. He hired his unqualified spouse (openly admitted to not know what SEO was and how metrics worked) for a senior position and they changed her surname and told employees to not reveal that they were married.
He turned into a snake and convinced Eve to eat the fruit of knowledge, he dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and he is the real developer of Spore. His wife is actually a Hitler clone. CIG funded 9/11.
And how exactly does a free fly invalidate the article about refunds requiring an NDA? Nobody is questioning whether there’s is some semblance of a game in a project that has been in development for over a decade, it would be a massive red flag if there’s wasn’t. What people are questioning is why is there a secret shop page that players can access ONLY after they’ve spent a thousand dollars on the game, and then another secret shop page after they’ve spent 10k? What’s up with the predatory practices?
Is your response “No no no, don’t look at those controversies. Look at how pretty the game is”? A free fly event doesn’t invalidate the claim that you might need to sign an NDA to get a refund. It doesn’t invalidate the claim that the devs had to pull 7 day work weeks. There are loads of criticism that the free fly does not address at all. These articles would exist even if everyone tried the free fly.
From my experience games that get “hate articles” are games that are already doing questionable things. You don’t get such articles circulating about good games because that shit just won’t stick. When it comes to SC and CI that shit does stick.
They aren’t half as shady as every other gaming company. These things are blown way out proportion and CIG is held to double standards. They have crunch time and NDAs for disgruntled assholes? Oh no, the world is over, this company is pure evil like none other! It’s really not a big deal that this one refund has an NDA. Their others don’t, so it’s a weird thing, but to say this is proof of wrongdoing is fallacious grasping. To believe what Massively has to say about Star Citizen is like listening to what fox News has to say about Climate Change. Every little thing they can spin into making cig look bad they take, even things every other company does without issue. Hating SC gets way more engagement and ad revenue then almost any other kind of critical article in gaming. Just look at any post about SC on this community compared to others. It’s insane. And I don’t use that term lightly.
“A” refund, from “one” redditor who has provided no proof. On a subreddit that’s been known to brigade. I’m not saying CIG is a saint, but I feel like a rag piece and the outrage need to hold off for more info.
Seeing is believing and it would sway myself and many more. Until then, it is just another article written based on an unsubstantiated reddit post. And I’ve seen enough Reddit posts be bullshit to need to see that NDA before believing.
What’s your reason for asking? I’m assuming because you linked a rag piece and not the original reddit thread for context?
I’d need to see at least two different people with the same claim submit redacted copies. One of which should not have any history on the refunds reddit. One motivated person could forge an NDA, and again, I wouldn’t put it past that community to hallucinate yet another slight.
I am just curious how you know this? The SC reddit sub is huge compared to the refunds sub.
Just seems strange to claim to be so focused on “proof”, while seemingly making your own claims without any data. Shouldn’t there be a common standard?
Right, because the refundians are a loose collective, and CIG is a company. You can’t point at a singular post and go “there’s the brigading,” mostly because they get removed by mods, but hate groups brigade. But to cite a source, the Derek Smart “90 day cash flow” claim is a good place to start.
CIG has plenty of things to rightfully criticize, but this isn’t one of them until multiple people from multiple sources come forward. It’s sensationalist bullshit until proven otherwise.
Who said anything about CIG the company. I was referring to the size of the SC subreddit vs the refunds subreddit; specifically (420K vs ~25K). How would this brigading even work? What mostly gets removed by mods? Negative threads about SC or alleged brigaded votes? There are tons of critical threads about SC in various subreddits, so they don’t get removed.
Don’t see what Derek Smart has to do with star citizen as of now. His twitter is focused on crypto and “web 3.0 gaming”, why is this relevant.
That being said, you can find a subreddit that was run by star citizen fans about Derek Smart. Seems like it was archived due to constant rule violations.
Do you actually have any evidence or this just something you feel is right?
More info on this issue would definitely be interesting. But to be perfectly honest, I don’t believe star citizen fans are interested in any good faith discussion on this topics.
Man, moving the goalposts from CIG to the subreddit? Talk about bad faith. Nah, don’t have the time and crayons for a refunder. Enjoy your hate-filled existence lol
Do you have any source for that claim regarding MOP and The Escapist? Just bringing up that quote isn’t a magical “I am right” button.
I tried their free trials 4 times. Twice I encountered game breaking bugs (required a restart and switching servers respectively).
Let’s ignore that for now. I will start with the good things. The planet to space transition was pretty cool, not going to lie. The cities were also detailed and looked nice (the first time you take the train in one of the cities, it does contribute to the world building). That being said, both the planets and the POI have nothing to offer in terms of actual gameplay structure. The cities might as well be a menu based system for purchases/interactions. The planets just have some random uninspired mission locations that all feel the same. You might as well have a separate map that you enter via cutscene.
But the biggest issue was the horrible gameplay. It’s one of the reasons I believe star citizen is a scam.
I will use a small trading indie game called Merchant of the Skies as a comparison point. It was developed by a husband and wife duo in less than 12 months. The game has:
Dynamic world impacted by trading activities. City taxation/reputation, new resources, new locations, new ships and upgrades all open up as you complete various trading missions.
Bazaar system. There are several location on a map that have weekly bazaars. Certain days have peak visitors while others are off days. You have to time your arrivals/trading.
Supply and demand system in bazaar sales. You over/under price your goods depending on how much of your ship’s inventory you want to sell. This is also tied to the weekly visitors intensity system.
Refueling system. Locations on the edge of the map have refuelling station that are few and far between. There is a simple RNG system for bonus fuel during travels.
Mail/passenger travel side missions. You can occasionally help travellers and deliver mail. It’s fun to align this with your trading activities.
Different late-game ships that you can pick depending on your play-style (it’s not only about cargo capacity, it does actually have a relatively big impact on how you go about the game).
This is just the gameplay that is relevant for comparison. There is also in-depth base-building, complex trade fleets and delivery scheduling, a simple RPG system, a simple ship employee system, a simple bank system, a resource gathering system, rudimentary exploration (map is randomized on each run), a mainline story and a bunch of different side missions.
Now compare that to star citizen. No supply/demand. No world impact. No economy. There is nothing to do except get more money to get ships. Sure you play with other players, but is there any kind of competition in terms of trading? They don’t even have a functional escort system where you can hire NPC ships for defence against griefers.
And crude gameplay is not limited to trade. FPS combat with single digit ticks? Exploration with one fully explored system? I will add that they sell non-functional “exploration ships” for hundreds of dollars; some of them are literal JPEGs. There is a bunch of other stuff that they’ve marketed but have simply not implemented or completely abandoned after the initial cash shop sales campaign (data running, journalism spaceships, refuelling spaceships, passenger transport spaceships, medical spaceships, farming spaceships, flying bazaar spaceship, mine laying spaceship, the list just goes on and on).
And this is after ~12 years and allegedly ~$750 million spent on development.
I will speculate a lot of that money goes to the founder’s family, key insiders and friends and they knowingly lie about their capabilities, intentions and just make shit up to sell JPEGs.
You don’t have to agree with the last point, but am I wrong with respect to trading/hauling in SC?
“People give them money for a game” as a business model seems to be applied evenly for everyone else except CIG and Star Citizen. They were given money by fans to make a game. It currently is playable and is in active development. You put up an example where the game has similar systems but radically different gameplay. Star Citizen has gameplay, it is a fun activity to play with friends and it has a thriving ecosystem (despite your clearly untrue claim otherwise). You don’t play it, only know about it in the abstract, and don’t seem to understand game development.
Hating Star Citizen feels less like genuine criticism and more like angry people grasping at a meme.
Why you hate this game is a mystery. It hasn’t done anything to you and is working to fulfill the promises it made. But you are acting like a 3 year old child who wants it immediately and fuck the waiting.
What exactly did they release in terms of trading/hauling gameplay? Can you be specific?
If anything the post suggests whatever they did release is still pretty crude (as one can assume based on the feedback given in the thread - this is basic stuff).
In context of a multiplayer game, you would want some sort of dynamism and player interaction. Something along the lines of “planet X is building Y, requiring delivery of Z within the next 2 IRL months.”
Successful completion of this mission would result in % discount on trade NPC escorts (which don’t exist in SC) or additional NPC security on major trade routes. Pirate players and NPCs pirates would need to try and stop traders/haulers from successful completing the mission within 2 months. You know, real gameplay for traders and other “classes” with an impact on the game.
I am a 3 year old because I think trading/hauling gameplay in SC is complete shit after 12 years and raises questions about the where the money is going? Come on…
I don’t hate the game. Hate is reserved for serious things. I do think it is a scam and outlined why. It’s a reasonable assumption considering the history of SC.
Something along the lines of “planet X is building Y, requiring delivery of Z within the next 2 IRL months.”
I have literally never seen that in a game. Every single MMO out there abstracts it’s economy unless it’s a specific world event requiring x number of deliveries by players to trigger. Stop holding SC to unrealistic standards.
These sort of mission/events are extremely common in MMOs, I believe there are examples from 20+ years ago. You yourself admit that they exist.
I am saying that trading/hauling gameplay in SC is comically primitive (while selling ships in the cash shop, some in the form of JPEGs, for hundreds of dollars). If you try out SC’s trading gameplay, it is not unreasonable to wonder where the money is going.
I agree, events are common. But there is no MMO that uses that setup as a basis for it’s economy. The basic economy behind trading mechanics is always abstracted because you can’t risk the players crashing the economy. Games have tried and they’ve always gone back to an abstracted system just like Star Citizen.
And every ship they sell started out as a jpeg. Every single one of them. That they aren’t done turning them into game assets doesn’t mean they will stay that way.
Where did I say that my hypothetical world event should be tied to a close to IRL economic simulation? How would the world event I described crash the economy? It is an abstraction to drive gameplay for both trader/haulers and pirates. This is basic stuff…
I don’t consider JPEGs that cost hundreds of dollars (some I believe cost thousand+) that you haven’t delivered in a decade to be legitimate. At the very least, you should offer no questions asked refunds if you can’t deliver the product in 10 years (while still being a going concern).
“Wow, this half developed feature is so interesting, here’s a list of improvements that should be made to make it fun!” are 3/4s of the comments on that thread.
‘Proud’ owner of a 300i, still waiting on that ‘Rework’ from 2014 2018 ???.
No, just no. You compared it to a very single game that can run all of that from a single back end. I created a similarly simple economic simulation in an Excel sheet from a single supply/demand curve in college, in a weekend.
And then you go on to knock them for not being feature complete when they tell you that themselves. They absolutely are still developing, they’re releasing the second system in the next big patch.
Nobody is going to argue with you that it’s had issues. But at least give it a fair comparison. That’s what’s got people upset.
I left out features of Merchant of the Skies that are not relevant for a comparison.
The fact is that after 12 years and ~$750M allegedly spent on development, the trading/hauling gameplay is more crude than a indie game developed by two people.
That they are “still developing” is irrelevant. It is not unreasonable to question where the money is going considering how crude the gameplay is (if it even exists as we can see from the journalism spaceship JPEG).
Because they’ve got about a million things to do. So yeah, it’s pretty basic gameplay right now. Nobody is denying that. But to reduce multiple engine switches, court enforced stop work orders, and assets in production to “they spent everything over a decade and all they have is a jpeg”, is just ridiculous.
I have played it and it spends the entire time trying to make me buy virtual ships for real money. And this isn’t microtransactions either, this is substantial quantities of cash.
If it was just a bit of a cash grab but it was otherwise an okay game I guess it would be acceptable. But there’s nothing to the game, all you do is you fly around in your basic ship because you refuse to buy a good one, and shoot pirates. It doesn’t do anything that you can’t do in Elite Dangerous or No Man’s Sky.
I used to work with a guy who had thrown away upwards of $10,000 at this game. The last time it came up, he told me he had spent over $8,000, and that was several years ago and he didn't seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. When I asked him what he got for that money, he showed me the one ship he has. He had one ship. The rest were still in development and wouldn't even be released for years.
He spent more than some cars cost, for a handful of digital space ships, 90% of which aren't even finished. I have no idea how to reason with people who do this sort of thing.
I have a bunch of ships in the game. The most fun I’ve ever had in the game was after a reset I ignored all of the other ships I had and just focused on starting with the cheapest ship in the game and earning my way up. I had a blast.
I haven’t touched the game in probably 3 years, basically just waiting for more things to get finished before jumping back in. But it is hard to get excited for the game with how long it has been and how… not good things have been in the company.
These people have a mental illness. They’re being taken advantage of by unscrupulous companies. They’re in exactly the same boat as people with gambling addictions. We should feel bad for them, but not (always*) as bad as homeless folks, who are still worse off.
*One of my elementary school teachers was married to a gambling addict. The guy was secretly hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of heavy construction equipment to pay off some of his loans. The guy ended up in a police chase and took his own life before he could be arrested. His wife, the teacher, was left massively in debt (he had secretly remortgaged the family house to pay for gambling debts) and grieving the loss of her husband but also in shock at discovering the extent of his crimes and debts. Really awful situation and nothing but profits for the casinos!
Some people are defending things tooth and nail when trying to reason. Not only things like this either, might be something purchased or some ideology.
Did you mean “empathizing”? I’m having difficulty empathizing with cases like that too. I mean, ugh, it’s mind-boggling, $10k is a life-changing amount of money for most people and this guy threw it away on a game that’s not out yet. Still, people like him are being exploited for personal gain, and that is also wrong.
I mean it’s not like any person has ever to decide between “should I buy something fun” (whatever the definition of “fun” is), or rather “should I just go and donate 100$ to a random homeless dude”
Bloody hell, I spent a little over two dollars buying Elite: Dangerous (a similar space game) when it was on sale about five years ago and haven’t spent any more money on it since. I can’t even comprehend spending 10,000 dollars on an incomplete game.
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.
Marketing and sales strategies are excellent for this game. It unifies in game purchases focused on whales like with mobile games and selling early access to an alpha. There’s also an aspect of collectibles and exclusivity like with NFTs. It‘s also cult like in many aspects. An utopian perfectionist vision evangelized by a prophet.
Well this article is kinda saying that they are barely keeping their head above water as it is, and CIG is vastly mismanaging money and driving development heavily on how many ships they can sell in that year.
So if anything I'd say that this strategy doesn't seem to be working out for them anymore
The only part I believed they might actually deliver on since it isn't boggled down by network issues, but I guess even that was too much to hope for. I still remember the 2018 lie of "it's weeks away from being shown" only for them to not show anything or the next 5 years. If it weren't that troublesome to get it (and it's a small sum anyway) I'd probably fight for a refund out of principle alone.
If they’re keeping their head above water, even barely, it means they are keeping their head above water. Without delivering a product. For YEARS.
They’re earning money by selling empty promises year after year. Not a lot of money. They’ll never become billionaires from this game. But there are lots of people in there (mainly executives and CEO and whatever) earning a decent salary. On empty promises! It’s as close to a scam that it can be without being illegal.
I guess, but the fact they are now laying people off is for sure a sign that things aren't going well enough. CR might live the rest of his life in a mansion but his legacy is in a crapper and he's not gonna get another chance at this (at least I hope people wouldn't fall for it twice).
He basically pivoted the WC success into making movies (the Kojima model) and the Wing Commander movie was so bad that it killed both the franchise and his career in film. He still had money so got to be a producer on a few flicks, but never had any creative control again.
And Freelancer was so horribly mismanaged that it basically “blacklisted” him as far as game dev went.
Star Citizen was basically an attempt to take advantage of the crowd funding craze that somehow also keyed in on what is largely the rise of “influencer” games where people care more about the dream of doing something than actually doing it (Dwarf Fortress and EVE Online are earlier examples where the vast majority of fans will never play the game but might buy it to “try it”).
Speculation, but I assume the attempts to make a bunch of tech that does what everyone else already does but poorly is trying to build out a portfolio for a buyout.
And it is worth understanding that Wing Commander… very much benefited from being “first” and for having a few celebrities involved. Even by WC4 there were “third party” games like Star Crusader that were basically better in every possible way. And Star Wars had been doing x-wing games since '93.
And then Freespace hit in 98 and was a revelation (with Freespace 2 in '99 basically being the gold standard to this day).
In a lot of ways, Squadron 42 was so anticipated mostly because we hadn’t had anything in the genre for years by that point (Darkstar One sort of existed?). Sort of like how almost all the xcom sickos played UFO ET and found it “fine” and a lot of the JA2 sickos played 5.56 and… anyway. Or us Silent Storm fans who tried to tolerate Hummer & Sickle.
Dwarf fortress is a finished game and the original version, which is awesome as is, was always free. Not at all comparable to star citizen or eve online
Dwarf Fortress is very much NOT finished. Its roadmap is already more complex than most live game feature sets and Tarn and Zach are generally pretty adamant about it likely never being "finished"
Maybe consider reading more rather than just having a knee jerk reaction of “comparison to thing I don’t like, bad. I MUST REPLY!!!”
That is true of basically every game. It is why we moved away from “Game, wait a year, expansion, wait a year, expansion. new game” on to DLC and now straight up live games. It is just a reality of development as it lessens crunch (you can put features off for later updates) and removes the old ramp up/down model.
The issue is not that star citizen is trying to be a live game. It is that it is horrendously mismanaged and helmed by a “rockstar developer” and his family. Apparently the brother actually DOES know how to ship a product, but he isn’t the one who runs around telling people to prioritize bedsheet deformation. Or to insist on needing 64-bit coordinates rather than using the industry standard approach of only loading a few cells within range of the player (and then lots of complex shenanigans to update the rest at a much lower rate). And so forth.
And I am not even going to complain (too much) about the sp campaign never coming. That is what I bought a decade or whatever ago and I am still pissed that was immediately dropped in favor of making the game Microsoft said “… fucking no. Release Freelancer god damn it” to. But the majority of current players want star citizen so… fine.
But the issue is just that there is no competent leadership. And all anyone has been able to figure out is “If we keep releasing ships, people will keep buying them”.
Because if they had gotten a vertical slice in? This would have eaten ED’s breakfast and NMS would never have had a chance at recovery. It was everything that every elite game has been working toward (and Evochron already did a decade or so ago…) and would actually give people stuff to do with those ships. Add in new solar systems, game systems, etc after the fact.
They would have over a hundred thousand players on a closed beta game? Goddamn that seems like a shit ton for a beta but I’ve also never looked at any game’s player count.
They didn’t get 100k players. The players they got counted multiple times. Someone got swallowed once but Bobby got swallowed 35 times because he’s a dumbass. That counts a 36 people getting swallowed.
It’s by the same folks that made that quasi-mmo Conan game. The bones were in it. It was just unpolished and sparse. If it’s the same core team and they’ve learned their lessons the Dune game should be pretty dope. I’m hoping it shows other MMOs that MMO isn’t a playstyle.
Oh shit did they make the Conan with the directional attacking and blocking? Age of Conan? I remember that game making my PC bleed, but I forced my way to play it at less than 30 fps.
Jesus christ. People need to realize that this is a scam. No video game is worth thousands of your dollars, especially a decade old game still in alpha.
It isn’t a scam, just incredibly mismanaged. Chris Robert’s has a very hard time saying “this is good enough” and that makes the company bleed money as they repeatedly remake things. People then don’t tell Chris no. They weren’t making a good space Sim, they were making the best darn space Sim evah!
They’ve completely redone the flight model several times to various levels of success. Time frames get so damm long that they have to go back and remake huge chunks of the game in order to keep things up to snuff graphically.
I get the feeling that they never felt the need to stress out about timelines as the funding kept rolling in, in fact the funding accelerated over time! The game has 183 different ships all designed down to the tiniest detail in the game right now. That’s a fuck ton of work hours, but ship sales gets the funding rolling so they have to keep cranking out new ships.
I do really like playing the game, but it is really a shitshow for management. There was one point where they had to throw away a massive amount of work because one studio was making things that didn’t fit the metrics for scale and animation of the rest of the game.
Edit: and ships are a dumb thing to buy anyway! You can earn them in game anyway for really not all that much work. It’s the most cost inefficient grind skip I’ve ever seen in a game.
this is just a long winded way of saying it’s a scam. if you ask for money promising something and you have no plan of delivering, it’s a scam.
they have to keep developing and redeveloping because they have a bunch of idiots with more money than sense pumping money to them. if they actually finish the game and release it chances are revenue will come crashing down. selling a promise is much better than selling a finished product because people like to wishcast and throw money at their own hopes and imagination. anything missing they fill in the blanks. surely the game will deliver eventually.
Are you asking this about any other games? GTA6 doesn’t have a release date yet, do you have the same worry?
… Genuinely, I do see the difference between the two, but it’s weird to me that people are calling it out for things that aren’t said. They say enough; if you can’t make complaints based on reality, that’s a bit lazy.
Edit: for what it’s worth, I’ll “move the goalposts” on this one if you come back with some nonsense around how they haven’t delivered anything yet. I’ve played a fair few hours on my ship (probably a few hundred over the last decade), despite not having invested millions of pounds.
Sorry, I’m confusing a conversation I saw the other day that said we’d have had two GTAs in the same time star citizen had been in development for. Weird comparison.
Do you think they don’t intend to deliver? If so, we fundamentally disagree.
yes it is. if you’re asking for money you should have a reasonable plan for paying it off. you can’t just take money and say well, let’s just see how things turn out.
well, you clearly can, but I’m not gonna pretend it’s legit
it’s out? I can finally buy the finished product? awesome! I couldn’t find it on steam though. surely it must have come out on steam, such a big release.
maybe I’m typing “star citizen” wrong. could you link me to the store page? thank you for informing me, I’m so ready to take back everything I said once I start playing.
i don’t care about people alpha testing unfinished games. I’ve been talking about release. they said “it’s out”. where is it. what’s the plan. when was it finished. why is it not out. stop trying to feed me bullshit, you’re confusing me with someone who lives on hype alone. if I were I’d be playing the star citizen half-game myself.
I mean you don’t live on hype, neither do i, but you do live on hate, as someone else here already pointed out, in fact you seem to engaged by hating this game, and anyone who likes it, it seems unhealthy. idk, maybe do some introspection if the yearly star citizen clickbait makes you rage to this degree and consider not using the web for a while, and seeing the rest of your comments across the site only backs up this assessment.
you have called for people to be jailed due to not making the games you want, ffs
hate? what’s with you guys weirdly anthropomorphizing a game that’s only maybe halfway done in a decade? you got too invested, too attached maybe, that someone calling it a scam seems “hateful” however that works? rage? lol wtf have you seen anyone rage before, mate? calling something a scam is not personal, it’s not even an attack. and it’s definitely something I live on. I have called people to be jailed for swindling.
how much money has this game extracted from dummies over the past decade? how much money’s worth is “playable”? I was gonna say “out” since that was the original claim but obviously the answer is zero. the games not out. but I’ll settle for playable since apparently you guys have already given up hope on an actual release and have settled on playing half baked demos bit by bit.
pointing out that you’re being scammed is not hate. it’s a wake up call. I understand though, an alarm clock seems hateful to me too when I’m enjoying my dream too much.
you called Ubisoft to be jailed because they dissolved your favorite game studios, also your entire basis in calling it a scam is it not being done in a time span to your liking, what else is this but a poor excuse for you to dogpile some hate on something other?
sorry i didnt realize you were rummaging through my comment history to find something to attack because you cant come up with a good argument in the relevant conversation so i thought you meant i was talking about this scam.
I don’t know what depths of your ass you pulled that the team of the latest prince of persia is my “favorite game studio”. I think you should be jailed for playing with people’s livelihoods despite their success merely for more profit, yes.
a time span to my liking? how about any time span? tell me when it’s coming out mate. where’s the plan? you don’t know why I’m calling it a scam, you don’t know what I criticized about it… why is it so hard for you to follow a conversation?
I wouldn’t say running through, I did see it while looking at other stuff tho
and yes, a time span to your liking, because you clearly don’t actually care about any of the work they are doing, so by your definition anything you see that’s not already done the first time you see it is a scam that should get someone tossed in jail
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.
Star Citizen looked so fucking cool when it was announced like 15 years ago. Since then it’s dipped lower and lower every single time new info comes out.
Like, the hopeful dumbasses that got burned initially like my dumb ass did with No Man’s Sky, I kinda get… but how the absolute fuck are they still getting sales?? Are there seriously still people that don’t know it’s a scam?
Worse. The die-hards may as well be cultists at this point. They delude themselves as hard as MAGAts. (I know a few guys who’ve been off-and-on players for years, and they still try to convince me to join them!)
As someone who has exactly one ship in the game, it’s not ‘bad’ if you just want to go ‘live a space life’ and do stuff like that.
It’s cool you can go do stuff in-world and not have loading screens, and just fly around ships doing trading, PVE missions, or doing space stuff, it’s enjoyable. There’s not much else to it, but if that’s what you expect it’s fun.
I don’t get the cultists thinking they’re playing the game in some future state where it’s anything more than that, though. I spent like… fuck, maybe 100 bucks? For the hours I put in, I enjoyed it but I’d never put in the 10s of thousands of dollars other people have dumped into this game.
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