I backed it a lifetime ago and have gone back and forth between “it’s a scam” and “maybe it could happen” so many times that I just don’t care any more. As broken as it is and as slow as progress has been, there has never been anything like it. I check in a couple of times every year and usually have fun seeing the sights for a week or two. I think I’ve had enough enjoyment from it to justify my original cost.
Even though their goals are unreasonable, irrational, and completely mad, they have somehow managed to fund stable development for over a decade and have actually made meaningful progress. Will I live to see it realized? Who knows. I wish them luck for both their sakes and the people who spent big money on this ridiculous dream, but unlike many others, I have no hard feelings personally. I’d like to see it realized someday, but I have no more money to give them even if I wanted to.
When the scam managed to run long enough to, be it by a chance or choice, stop being a scam xD
I spent 40$ on it back in 2013. I looked forward to playing the single player campaign.
Then I found a girl. Went through university. Got a career. Had two kids. Got a divorce. And now I have time to play it again, but feel like I’ve mostly grown out of gaming.
GG Chris Roberts.
My friends were very excitedly talking about setting up a corp in this when it was first announced.
They wanted my buy-in, and I asked if I could be head of HR, to which they said “yes”.
So I bought it, created our corp, and performed my ideal goal: set up a corp recruitment posting called “entry-level Star Citizen player” which required 10+ years in Star Citizen.
We’re now at the point where I have to find my log-in and change that to 20+ for the joke to make sense again.
Man I wish I knew how to scam idiots like this
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Appeal to the authority you give yourself based on *past experience (leave out any negative past experience) *religious/spiritual “insight” can be a substitute here
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Present an ambitious “vision” that claims to require said past experience to fully grasp
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Allow your targets to start building the product in their imagination based on the crumbs you gave them with step 2
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Sell disjointed tangential products that don’t interfere with the player’s dream logic and promise they will connect to your cohesive vision with time
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Find “technical delays”
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Express that you need backers to buy more of the dream to help get through the “technical delays”
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Repeat for 9 years until the market begins to retract
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Open the dream up to asian markets
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???
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Profit
All it requires is being a soulless piece of shit.
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Me having spent zero dollars on this. Only interaction ever was installing that hangar thing back when it was the only thing. Maybe there was some demo when the space station first became available and some fps gameplay test.
Still looking forward to it. If the story is good, works on Linux, I’ll buy it. I remember a decade ago being worried the Haswell and Maxwell PC I was putting together wouldn’t be good enough when Star Citizen would drop. Not very concerned anymore
I can somehow understand the people who funded it in the first place, but who invests now in a project which has already been in development hell for more than a decade and produced barely anything playable. Every whale has already been milked - what return of investment can an investor expect of Star Citizen?
Not to defend SC too much, and full disclosure I don’t play it. But I have friends who DO play it and it seems like they are having a lot of fun?
They aren’t evangelists for the game or anything, so its not a fanboy situation. They just play it a lot, and with lots of other people. They have an online community and meet up IRL for events. Post vids of their exploits. It seems fun to me? I asked them about the bugs and stuff and they fully admit it is buggy and things are broken, they make no apologies for it. They figure out workarounds and share it with the crew. I don’t know, these guys are usually pretty critical of games but they seem happy weirdly. Maybe a cult?
There is no fucking way that I am ever going to pay for a fake star ship or anything so I’m not even considering it. And the entire funding model of the game seems batshit insane to me. But to me it seems like the idea that the game is unplayable doesn’t really match the reality? Its clearly not a good value proposition at all.
It definitely is actually “playable” now, and I’ve had a good amount of fun playing it this year, but it certainly isn’t ready for release or anything.
That said, the network infra they have created is pretty cool: 600+ player servers with relatively little issue, and the goal of 1000 long term is quite a feat of engineering.
They fucked themselves overpromising so much back at the beginning by giving the release dates they did while using like, Unity or something, and now they have the infra/engine to deliver, but nobody trusts them to actually do so.
Are 600 player servers impressive? I’m sure they have plenty of hardware and engineering involved but that doesn’t sound exceptional as much as expected for the scope they’re aiming for.
WoW is a simpler game, in that it’s effectively 2 dimensions and doesn’t involve physics, but that would be a fairly low server population, especially back in it’s heyday. Ditto for many other big MMOs.
EvE has 600+ player battles on a fairly regular basis, much less on a server instance in general.
Is it 600+ players on a single server, or is it like WoW/UO/EQ where the game world is spread across multiple servers, so it’s not ever actually that many people on a single server? It was kind of important for PvP to know where the server lines were because crossing them caused a spike of lag as it switched the server you were on.
If it was a single server that would be impressive. Otherwise, it’s pretty laughable.
It’s still $45 to access the game if you don’t have it yet(and that counts as a pledge, and therefore part of the game’s funding), but yea as a player and a backer I essentially agree. You’re basically spending money to skip game progression after the final wipe before release(whenever that happens).
IMO it takes some of the enjoyment out of the game even in its current buggy alpha form. You can earn basically everything except for the most recently(ish) released ships(and some cosmetic items) entirely within the game.
You do get a game to play for $45 though. A game with a zillion bugs and issues but a game nonetheless. I personally feel like it was worth $45 for the entertainment value I’ve gotten out of it. Not worth the amount I spent(like a decade ago), but the first $45 feels worth it now.
That being said, don’t buy the game if you expect a polished experience.
Gonna get Senior Citizen before full release Star Citizen
Soon the game won’t need funding because it will be eligible for retirement pension
Hint: It won’t ever be 100%
Any and all time I hear of this ‘game’, I can’t help but think that it is a scam. It is perhaps the most decorated and sugar-coated of scams to ever exist. Simply because they’re saying ‘yeah you can kindof play it’ and that alone, is their cover-all excuse. It wasn’t too long ago that they invested in some very expensive office and they proclaimed that they needed it to help further development or whatever bullshit reason they stated it was for.
But yeah they can just do whatever they want and fools will still throw down their money, even though they probably will almost never know where all of it will go to. I won’t be surprised if some of the money is making one guy rich. I wouldn’t be surprised if the money is used to funnel some political campaign. Something. We won’t ever know, but because this project is technically playable, they just throw up their arms being like “what? it’s still developing! we just need more time and money!”.
It is projects like Star Citizen, that has made me have an extremely soured perspective with early access projects. One other game that came to mind was 7 Days to Die, I remember getting that through Humble Monthly. At that time, the game was like 5 years in development and was still in the alpha stages.
It went through numerous changes, both unnecessary and unneeded while progressing. But the years kept piling up. I think it is now fully released but it still doesn’t look 100%. It just lacked what direction it really wanted to go and even then I thought that project was grifting people who bothered supporting it.
Average Store Citizen player
We just need to buy another ship guise, they’re so close to release!
Learn to spell before you make fun of others’ intellects.
Learn to recognize mocking sarcasm before you make dumb comments on the Internet
I made no mistake. You should mind your own education more and spend less time throwing shade online.
Of course you did, which is why you’re trying to attack my intellect instead of addressing what I’m mocking.
It’s ok if people make fun of things you like, that doesn’t mean they’re dumb or anything. Assuming people are dumb for making fun of people who have fallen for the scam for over a decade says more about your intellect than mine.
I love how they say “next year” like that was the expected release date to begin with.
Note that Duke Nukem Forever released (poorly) before this travesty.
What you can play right now in Star Citizen is arguably better than what Duke Nukem Forever will ever be.
I am ashamed to admit that I fell for the scam. It was 2019, and Pyro was right around the corner (except it wasn’t, and wouldn’t make it into the game until 2025). They showed off jump points with a super amazing megastructure ring, an in depth economy simulation, and lots of other really interesting stuff that has still not made it into the game.
Over time, I began to realize I had been scammed. The game just continued to be broken and lacking in features, update after update. Eventually I had enough and sold my account for good in 2024, with the 4th consecutive year of failing to deliver Pyro Since then, I have continued to check in and have not once regretted my decision to cash out of the scam. It is still a buggy and unfun mess. They have scaled back their projections for 1.0 from 100 systems to 5. Their idea of science and exploration is “go here and scan”. It is a shell of the game that was promised years ago, and will never be able to live up to the hype. Overpromise and underdeliver is their mantra.
They have scaled back their projections for 1.0 from 100 systems to 5.
Wow is that the first realistic thing they’ve done?
2016, for me. 42 was supposed to release the next year…such a scam…
Squadron was just another turd on the dumpster fire for me. I didn’t back the project for it, but the fact that it’s been “two years away” for the last decade +, is just another indicator of how much of a scam this thing is. I will be seriously shocked if they manage to finally push it out the door next year, and even more shocked if it is not a totally shit show. There’s no way it lives up to how insanely high it has been hyped up, and I’m just going to be chowing down on popcorn when the shit hits the fan.
$1 billion !?
That is insane.
Elite Dangerous had a budget of £8m… if Cloud Imperium Games can’t release SC for a hundred times that amount it’s because it’s a grift.
it’s because it’s a grift.
Always has been.
Look at the price of those ships you can buy, its always looked like a very obvious attempt to keep rolling in money while always juuuuuuust being a bit too far away to release. But just give us a few more million and we’ll toooootally release it.
You can’t even see the most outlandish prices because the shop has a hidden shop. If you want to see the most expensive ships you have to have spent something like 12k on the game.
I’m not sure if my entire steam library is worth 12k and my library is pretty big.
You did a reverse EriKa KirK there. I think you meant “grift” not “gift”
I did indeed.
I blame Samsung’s appalling autocorrect.
so ducking annoying
🦆
🛞
Probably want to get a different keyboard then (one that doesn’t send them everything you type, for one)
yeah but how sick is the game gonna be after $1 billion in funding
Now imagine it being double that good for just $2 billion!
That’s cause Star Citizen is a grift.
Never preorder.
The fun thing is looking into history… especially the one of Freelancer. It would never have been released if it weren’t for Jörg Neumann who - in short - finished it.
100% selling hopes and dreams. I understand there’s a playable alpha, I was a backer for over a decade. There is no cohesive vision, just endless theory crafting and half baked implementations to maintain the illusion of progress, but every time they add something, they seemingly need to break something else for their 8 ticks-per-second system to be able to handle it…
Hell of a grift.
I have fun. You don’t have to pay more than the 45 € beginner pack, if you don’t want to. Its still rough but you can see how the pieces start fitting together.
they’ve funded a billion dollars and worked over a decade on a game. it should not be rough.
You don’t have to pay more than the 45 € beginner pack
That’s an absolutely obscene ask for an eight-year-old game with no prospects of being finished in the foreseeable future – let alone that it has macrotransactions for things like paints and intentionally puts you at a disadvantage to players who paid hundreds of euros for this stupid piece of shit grift.
nah it’s not pay to win. it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that
Eh,depending on which state the “economy” is in, it can be pretty hard. There’s threads all over spectrum about how Grundy and broken things always are.
If there was much game to actually win, I would definitely call it pay to win.
“Hey come pay yesteryear’s AAA title price for a game that’s been overpromising and underdelivering for the better part of the past two decades” is not the sales pitch you think it is…
Sunk cost fallacy is a bitch. One must be severely delusional to think that after paying however much you did AND waiting for 12+ years, having a barely playable alpha when the original timeline was for a 2015 release AND it’s still being promised for a 2027 release (which, given the state of the alpha, is likely to be missed too), this is in any way acceptable.
How much of a financial investment do you think €45 is over 10+ years? It’s nothing. There’s literally no sunk cost fallacy here
Holy delulu. The fact that you didn’t get anything for over 12 years AND you still protect the company AND urge others to invest is proof of the fallacy here. The inability to admit you’ve been scammed. That you didn’t get what you’ve been promised over and over and over.
Didn’t get anything for over 12 years? Shite, I gotta tell my friends we’ve gotten nothing out of the months of game time we’ve put into the game the last couple of years, especially these past 12 months. CIG has been scamming us with countless hours of gameplay!
Bruh lmao
Where did I urge anyone to buy the game? Or protect the company for that matter?
I’ve watched the pieces “start fitting together” for like 14 years now… There is fun to be had, but it’s an ocean wide and an inch deep imo. SC stopped being fun for me the moment I realized most of the fun I was having was imagining hypotheticals to pass the time while fighting their shit product to function in some meaningful way. This becomes especially painful when you see all of the effort is supposedly going into a single-player game that we’ve barely seen while they fail to deliver an acceptably functional version of the product we actually play and use the ships we payed money for in…
It has other massive problems with the company’s motives. For example: why balance the game to incorporate cohesive and effective multicrew ships, and sell 1 person a 725$(CAD) ship (hammerhead) to invite 6 other people to crew, when they can leave it’s future balance a dream and have everyone in OP F8s (or whatever the current light fighter “meta” ship is at the moment) for 260$ each… 725$ dollar multicrew ship, or 1,820$ in light fighters. hrmmmmm A Hammerhead should melt light fighters according to it’s stated purpose when sold, but it’s been effectively useless for years and years now, as one very clear example of what’s going on overall.
Multicrew will NEVER BE FUN until they’re done milking their base, and they’ll never be done milking their base.
I’ll wait thanks, I have not paid that much in a game all year and don’t intend to start now on something so unfinished.
Agreed, IIRC they have a free weekend every now and then. A couple of years back I gave it a spin, realized what I wasn’t missing, and went back to Elite Dangerous and No Man’s Sky. You know, working space games…
Yeah, NMS and ED are both fun. Though I have found after a while each game becomes “now what?” kinda thing. I have played other sandbox games but in those I struggle to find much purpose in doing anything.
Expanding factions could give long term purpose but it doesn’t really give you anything. Maybe if you got access to a factions finances a bit and could more directly control them, faction owned fleet super carriers kind of thing?
Yup, very much make your own activities games, but both continue to grow. NMS especially just keeps bashing out free updates (Best Ongoing Game again at this years The Game Awards) and has monthly or so expeditions for the new things if you need more direction. Corvettes went over well.
Has NMS been speeding up the pace of new updates too?
I swear I last played it only a few years ago, but now I count 17 new updates after that
Think so ? I put these games down for a while and come back later, explore the new content, muck around for a while, and put them down again… Love 'em both, but not all the time.
True, NMS is certainly doing better at adding new stuff
I bought a $60 ship back in 2013 or whatever and have only tried it a few times since.
I would definitely recommend waiting for when - and if - it comes out as a polished product.
Most of the limited number of projects I backed on Kickstarter have succeeded, but Star Citizen is one of the two lessons I learned about throwing early money at big projects. Can’t believe it’s been over twelve years.
Never cared for SC but Shenmue 3 was my very memorable lesson in the crowd funding market. On the one hand it was released relatively on time, and I got my backer bonus. In the other, there still wasn’t actually a game to play.
Doesn’t matter that you can try the game for free several times a year either. Stop having fun! Grrrrr!
/s
I played this game more than i played red dead redemption for example. Like way more, and it was cheaper. 1 billion is insane, everyone knows that. But there are crypto and nft games that gobblet up 250millions and it’s just a standard asset pack made by a guy in a week and there isn’t as much of an outrage, because people just want to be mad.
“There are worse grifts” is not the discussion point you think it is.
You’re part of the problem.
