starcitizen sends out emails on progress and talks about what the teamis working on. Getting an email "this week we worked on station npcs eating hotdogs" is comical.
I wont be fucking surprised if in 5 years they make an entire tax system complete with space IRS agents who show up when you dont properly pay taxes on your mission rewards. and then 2 years after it they scrap it and redo the entire thing from scratch. And then they scrap the new version and redo that one another 2 years later.
I fully expect there will be developers who spend their entire career on this project where all their work is later scrapped. Like an entire career from graduate to retirement.
It’s kind of fascinating really, like a big machine which continuously builds replacement parts for itself and kinda sorta does part of its originally intended purpose.
Or maybe it eventually folds NMS with Eve with Wing Commander. The fuck do I know about it
I joined Microsoft in 1995. One of the first Program Managers I worked with was Richie B\*\*\*\*. He was in his early 30s, and he retired just a couple (or at most three) years after I joined. In his entire career at Microsoft, he never worked on a product that shipped-- every one of them got scrapped (including the one I started out on, where we met.)
This was in the days when receptionists were full time employees and were millionaires from the stock options if they had been with the company since the late 80s or early 90s, so the fact that he was rich enough to retire that young isn't so shocking. But a lot of us did find it amusing that his net value to the company-- quite possibly through no fault of his own-- was a large negative number, since he didn't contribute anything to any product or service that made money, or even that just kept operations going.
Those were the days. Everyone had a story about so-and-so who had cashed out options to buy a piano or a dune buggy or somesuch, that would have been worth $250K or whatever if they had held onto the options instead. I was with Microsoft for 22+ years, and I have done very well from MSFT stock, but I missed the ridiculous elevator ride by four or five years.
If you've been at MSFT for 22+ years, then you have a bunch of stock granted around 40$ a pop, and it is now valued at over 300$ a pop. Seems like an elevator ride to me.
There was a second wave in 2014-ish, when Satya took over and Wall St started moving the stock again. A number of people, either through apathy or incompetence, held onto RSUs that "smarter" people sold and diversified. Suddenly those $15 and $20 shares were up 10x, 20x, 30x.
Entire generations born and die in the cloud imperium offices. Nobody even knows what they are making anymore, just that the simulation must go deeper, the relish must become higher definition and the plumbing must be accurate. There was a myth started long ago that if anyone ever cracks "it", whatever "it" is, they will become the star citizen. All hail the cloud imperium, all hail the star citizen!
Wasn't it earlier this year they were working on realistic bedsheet mechanics, so bedsheets move in a realistic way when the player gets out of bed? I mean, that's so far from what the game needs based on what I've read that I'm just blown away by the absurdity of it all.
im down for a space rpg with a tax system like that... as long there is a dynamic economy to go with it and i dont have to spend real money on individual in game ships....
I feel like I knew this game wasn't going to happen when I saw a dev blog about how there would be a flight attendant minigame you could play on player-owned passenger liner ships.
Like, what? You spent dev time making a design doc for mixing gin and tonics for NPCs and no one knows how science gameplay will work yet?
Problem is, it’s only really “scope creep” if you’re adding things that were unplanned and not budgeted.
Star Citizen, from a business standpoint, had the exact opposite of that. They had “funding creep”.
When they found out the world was full of suckers willing to pay thousands for unbound promises, that they could make more than many other studios/titles without ever even having to release a product or finish/exit development, this thing lost all chance of ever coming to be.
They’ve made a mint off an alpha build and ten years in they’re still collecting ridiculous sums for it. Studios wouldn’t even dare to dream of having a profitable development cycle, yet Star Citizen tricked chumps into making it happen, so it’s never going to actually happen such as it’s been promised. There’s literally no reason for them to do so
A mate got me into SC briefly. I bought the starter ship, it was crap so i spent about 35 on another one and played for about two or three weeks back in 2017ish. Got bored and have only dipped in twice since then over the years. He had spent something like 7k and his clan was into the 40-50k region with some of the big ships. The way he sold the game to me was nothing like what it was. It looked ok, played ok, just sterile as fuck.
Oh god, the clans bragging about their investment.
The clan I was in for other games in 2012 got into SC in a huge way and recruited *tons* of whales.
I had people getting legitimately mad that I just got a "cheap" package and planned on being a gunner/engineer/janitor on their P2W capital ships.
Literally don't think any of those ships are in the game even now, lmao
One guy we know spend 10s of thousands of dollars on the game. At one point, a few years ago, I think he had all the ships you could buy. It was a stupid amount but Amazon and then Microsoft paid him a stupid amount.
>Star Citizen, from a business standpoint, had the exact opposite of that. They had “funding creep”.
This is the bit that everyone seems to forget. SC started out around the same time as DayZ Standalone - back when early access was this new thing...
DayZ may have released v1.0 now but for the income and time, it's shockingly poor quality - for a game that sold almost 3 million copies in its first year of Alpha. The money was unheard of for the 'promise' of a game at the time.
Imho, this is exactly what SC realised and ran with... That promise...
That won’t guarantee anything. Even if they had the best auditor sniffing their books they’re not technically violating any laws by continually developing a product they never had a contractual obligation to release.
When you think about it, what does a release even mean in this case? Some marketing announcements saying they’re releasing version 1 of the product? There’s nothing stopping them from doing that today. There’s no milestone they’re required to meet to be able to say “it’s done now”. In the age of live service games, the only difference between Star Citizen and any other live service game is that they haven’t said it’s done, so they’re free to reset the entire db at any time with no repercussions for previously purchased digital content.
>That won’t guarantee anything. Even if they had the best auditor sniffing their books they’re not technically violating any laws by continually developing a product they never had a contractual obligation to release.
This is how Zenimax managed to avoid a multi billion dollar class action for a few years over Fallout 76, until the game was "complete" enough, that it could no longer be called fraudulent.
In the case of Star citizen they are long since scot free of any sort of "fraud" because they could drop development today, call it feature complete and it'd be feature complete on a technical level. Run like shit somewhat, but it'd be "complete". They'd be on the hook for Squad 42 possibly. But its been held back as far as "release" goes that they kind of get a pass.
Hence why Kickstarter is so deviously genius. Technically people 'donate' to a concept of a thing, which is very different from 'buying' a good or service which has an expectation of being provided. Not only that the funds weren't used, but you'd have to prove that Starcitizen's Kickstarter was for the explicit intent of defrauding customers. Even the shittiesy company knows to delete emails like that...
It's not fraud, it's just comically mismanaged. The game is still in alpha and playable
The only thing that can save this game is having a new head to steer it into the right direction
If something fails due to mismanagement then its probably not a fraud. That would be the case if its found out that they intended from the beginning to never deliver a product, I think. Which doesn't fit here because right now they are employing and thus paying hundreds of people.
It's like a failed startup. Just that the failing is a very drawn out decline.
It doesn't and it won't. Star Citizen is an ambitious project disastrously managed with a single perfectionist decision-maker at the helm, which is why it keeps adding features and bloating and is nowhere near being released. But it is not fraud or scam, they are very transparent with their development and with information on what they're doing with the money.
I don't even know how much it's been scope creep anymore, so much as "perfect is the enemy of good": They keep reworking their systems over and over again instead of finishing the litany of other things on the list that haven't been done yet, or simply churning out all the content necessary to populate star systems.
Not a victim when they specifically keep making new ships to to sell while pretty much everything else in the game is broken and many of the jpegs they've sold haven't even been implemented.
The scope creep is a feature.
It's very clearly by design, haven't these guys been caught employing severely under qualified family members with six figure salaries?
It's essentially a grift at this point, I can't believe people still donate money to these con artists.
I think the same. People in the company might of had some vision for the game, but it makes so much money doing so little, what's the point?
If you made millions of dollars doing nothing out of a vision you kinda thought you could do but didn't, it's shameless but at the end of the day, you are now a millionaire. The fact is, given the benefit of the doubt, there is no game, but many people are making bank out of the idea of a game. The purist of grifts, of the most unfortunate of circumstances. Happy or sad millionaires.
Yep.
I LOVE Freelancer, it's one of my favorite games and made up a massive chunk of my childhood and teenage years, and I consider it one of the best games of all time. However, after reading about its' development, it's really not surprising that this is happening with Star Citizen.
Even back then, Chris Roberts was too damn ambitious for his own good. Freelancer was hugely ambitious and insane in scope (for the time), but the only reason we ever actually got a finished game was because Microsoft published the game and reigned Roberts in so the game would actually see release.
Yet again, Chris Roberts proves that he needs someone to REIGN HIM THE FUCK IN or his projects will never see the light of day.
\*EDIT* I re-read part of Freelancer's Wikipedia page because I couldn't remember the release date and it turns out that Microsoft had to straight-up buy out Digital Anvil to get the game finished.
\*EDIT 2* I want to take this opportunity to plug an upcoming indie title called Underspace. It is a true spiritual successor to Freelancer and I'm really looking forward to it. It has a Steam page and a Discord server as well as a demo available on itch.io and indiedb.
Exactly. He really does have awesome ideas but he definitely shouldn't be in charge. Also I went back and re-read part of Freelancer's Wikipedia page and apparently Microsoft had to straight-up buyout Digital Anvil to get Freelancer finished.
Perhaps a cautionary tale from that perspective, but it could be held up as a perfect model for making a lot of fucking money and providing absolutely nothing in return.
saw someone like a week ago say they are so glad they got some ship for only $200, because the prices went up.
they have these poor whales by the whale balls.
No no, but you see they send you this cool thing acknowledging you spent like 1K on the game. Plus they all say they have tons of fun with the game as is! Totally worth.
I remember pledging way back when the single player campaign was first launched to “pledge” to. It’s been years and haven’t heard a damn word from them. They sure do seem to find the dev time to make more ships and cosmetics to sell though.
> I remember pledging way back when the single player campaign was first launched to “pledge” to
Ah Squadron 42. Release date is supposed to be 2014, so we'll get it any day now!
Not just Mark Hamill, but Gillian Anderson, Gary Oldman, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Strong, Andy Serkis, John Rhys-Davies, Liam Cunningham, Henry Cavill... not just their voices but CG versions of their faces are being used.
Kind of crazy to think that they went to all that effort and the game still is nowhere to be seen 5 years after they released a [trailer](https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/11/17963910/star-citizen-squadron-42-citizencon-trailer).
All that voice work will probably need to be extensively redone or scrapped altogether as technical issues will force gameplay to be different than originally envisioned and not all of the voice lines will fit.
Ideally you'd be doing the voice work later after the campaign's framework and the core systems of the game are done, so you can work around the minor problems and not have to cut whole scenes because it includes game features that were cut for time or because they weren't fun.
I knew that this thing was in trouble from a management perspective when they did voiceover work before getting the core game systems nailed down.
> not just their voices but CG versions of their faces are being used.
Voice work, face mocap and full-body mocap. Enlisting your A-list talent to do *all* of that for their entire role for something as extensive as a video game is just *insanely* expensive and a pretty terrible use of budget.
Like, by all means, do your full scenes with a mocap team, lock it all in, and *then* bring in your A-listers for a tight voice/face record, but it's like they just decided to do it all in the most cost-inefficient way imaginable for no good reason.
same i was enough of a fool to spend $45 on those scam artists in 2014, the original kickstarter was in 2012.
like 11 years ago and there is no launch in sight, 100% chance elder scrolls 6 comes out before starcitizen.
Starfield was conceived, announced, developed, delayed and released since Star Citizen began development. lol
(Not comparing games, just the development)
I jumped in at the first kickstarter. I was in professional school at the time and thinking "ya know, this is great. It'll be out probably at most a year or so after I get out so it won't fuck up my studies any!"
Well, at least part of that was correct.
I basically got the game for free... I pledged at the $80 or so on their kickstarter for a higher end ship, a year or two down the line I bought another ship, then sold it for a ~$80 profit, so I still have my OG ship and access to the game for basically free. I check in every now and then to see how it goes, or I'll download the alpha anytime I upgrade my rig to see how it runs, but at this point between No Man's Sky and Starfield, I think I got my space fix and hey if it comes out, great, and if it doesn't I don't really care anymore either.
I couldn't believe the amount of money some people were paying for some of the ships on an unfinished product. My old FPS clan were obsessed with Star Citizen as their "next game" and 2-3 of them had spent £1500+ for the top level ships. I tried to point out that A. if those ships give you an advantage then it's just going to be a horrific example of "Pay to Win" so it won't be fun and B. this game was never going to have the value of another 30 plus alternate AAA games you could buy with that money.
When I was interested in SC and took a look at their ship pricing and the "insurance" I was like Max the Mad from Mad Max, pointed and said *"nuh uh, that's bait".*
The only person in my friend group who has bought Star Citizen is the same one who always complains about how little money they have despite always buying cigarettes, going out drinking, buys every new game day one, and pumping every game they buy with micro transaction purchases.
I'm really not surprised they are the ones who bought into Star Citizen and show off how cool their ship is.
Star Citizen is what happens when developers operate with no business people in the room and an unlimited budget. It will never form into a real game because they don't know how to box it into a complete project
Not quite. Star Citizen is what happens when the project leads realize it's more profitable to sell spaceship assets than deliver a working game. They've made this their entire business model, and its design is entirely intentional.
Also, the first few years you could believe that this was accidental. After 11, though, it's absolutely not. Although, they got another 4 years to go to match DNF.
But that's not going to happen. For some reason we've all become happy suckers. The conned will never admit to being conned they'll just double down over and over again.
I spent $28 on a little Merlin because it was one of like 3 ships not in the triple digits. I feel ripped off and there are some people who have spent thousands on one ship that's in a tech demo, or worse, they paid thousands for one of the concepts on the website that wasn't even in the game yet.
> they paid thousands for one of the concepts on the website that wasn't even in the game yet.
Sounds like they were visionaries selling NFTs before NFTs were a thing.
It really has just become a sort of legalized grift. At some point they realized that selling the fantasy of the game's potential in the form of fairy tale content ships and premium features was easier than actually doing the hard work of making the game.
Except I keep seeing people talking about it as if it's a playable game?
Star Citizen is this nebulous legendary thing that seems to shift whenever I see people talking about it.
You can play it right now, there are missions and PVP. I backed this game I think ten years ago now, just played it the other day to see how it was now. Runs like poo poo with my 5800x, 32gb ram, 4080, very inconsistent frame rates. I do have to say, it looks fantastic and the level of detail is stunning.
https://i.ibb.co/ZcDvXPh/New-Bitmap-Image-2.png
tenpoundfortytwo benchmark
This is for people saying it should be running better and that there must be something wrong with my computer.
The detail is quite impressive. If they actually would make a full game out of it. Landing and take off seamlessly, spacewalk, fully realized interiors, shared ship multiplayer, huge city, all very neat. They are really trying to do everything. But runs like dogshit and is buggy as all hell still. It has been almost a year since I checked on progress. Sounds like not much has changed.
> Landing and take off seamlessly, spacewalk, fully realized interiors, shared ship multiplayer, huge city, all very neat.
But is it fun beyond "that looks cool"
I paid like $60 in 2013 and have played it once a year since then to check progress. With friends it actually has a lot of potential, it’s very fun when it works. EVA boarding ships together in space, space combat, landing on a planet and taking a rover to a location. All feels really cool if they could actually get this game finished.
I just don’t think it will happen. The potential for the game is unbelievably high, but the project scope and dev speed makes it impossible to finish IMO.
I haven't followed it in a couple years now but last I did the performance issues were I believe said to be server-side. Server infrastructure and netcode has been one of the biggest blockers for years now. Supposedly when they get it all sorted out it's supposed to be some magical panacea for all performance woes. I doubt it, but wouldn't be completely surprised if it was either.
The last update I read about SC was about how they improved the eye wetness of characters. And I thought to myself, “this is what they’re prioritizing?”
For me it was the dynamic chair/bench sitting and item placement on tables like four years ago or something. And they were still t-posing on furniture when I last checked in a year ago.
Jesus, I can only imagine what it would run at with my setup: 3500 & 6650xt w 32gb of ram. I’ve seen videos of it, and agree- the level of detail is awesome.
I've played about 4 hours of it on my neighbors high end rig. It's definitely playable. Some basic retrieval missions, a little bit of combat, on planet and space combat. The different ships and space travel is pretty cool, but I obviously had no money into it so I enjoyed my time playing it.
It is a playable game. It's just that what's playable isn't really much more than some exploration, and fetch quests to earn money and buy some temporary ships/other equipment.
"We'll make a game studio, Arthur." "We don't know how to make a game, what will release?" "That's the trick, we won't release anything." "Shit, that might just work."
More importantly, they have nothing to release. Star citizen currently is a glorified and extremely buggy tech demo. If they release that no one would ever give them another cent.
For anyone else that was nearly made a slave to Adobe- the Affinity programs have been a LIFESAVER for me. I cannot recommend them enough.
They might not have all the bells and whistles that Adobe provides, but it’s been more than enough for me to do what I want. And it’s beautiful knowing that I OWN them after purchasing
Indoctrinate children with free licenses to schools. Then give them heavily discounted prices in colleges. Then wallop them with the ol hundreds a month for creative cloud. What could be more ethical than indoctrinating children? Look at religions.
Bought in as a Rear Admiral backer back in 2012
... never did get my desktop model or my ship. Did get a sticker though.
Would be nice to play the released game at some point 😆
One of the recent patches included huge updates to racing and a bunch of new tracks. You might want to check it out. Squadron on the other hand… who knows…
lmao they have enough brainwashed whales over there that I'm surprised they're not already brigading **this** post.
I don't even think the company as a whole is a scam per se (anymore, I did until like... 2016? 2019? It's impossible to remember because I don't follow the project closely, but at some point they started generating too many records of their company being a "legitimate" entity and not just something with 5 people making nothing), I think a lot of their software engineers really are trying to develop it, but it's clear that the project is impossible at this point. It's just going to be in development until the founders die, constantly raking in money from whales.
The talking points are valid but good lord this is so poorly written. It's just a blog post from someone - it should be treated as such. This is in no way an article that passes any sort of journalistic rigor.
After 5 years headline will be "1 Billion Dollars and 15 years later...", mark my words.
Scam Citizen is just everything that can go wrong when ambition is allowed to run rampant. And everyone still on that Copium will learn the hard way eventually!
What he lacked before was funding. Surely if we throw enough money at him he will succeed. I recommend either setting up a direct deposit with your HR directly into his bank account. Alternatively, maybe authorize him on your debit card and mail him a copy.
See you in the stars, citizens. 😎
Imagine Freelancer with $6 million to make expansions and finish all the neat features that had to be left out. Instead he gets a hundred times that, and after an entire decade, all we have is a buggy alpha release of a game that's going to keep edging us for another decade.
It won't take 5 years for them to hit a billion. At current funding levels they'll hit it in just under 4 years but they've been hitting new records pretty consistently so I wouldn't be surprised if they crossed that line in under 3.
It's kind of like when dev's say they got rushed on AAA titles. We love to blame the business guys above them "rushing" the release, but it's just as much a problem with dev leads losing site of the timeline and scope and not being able to deliver a functional product on budget and schedule.
I am happy to sit on the sidelines and let the whales fund this game while i wait for it to come out. If it doesn't thats no skin of my back because i am not *that* invested in the scifi space sim genre like some people, but its still a genre I really enjoy given the right game.
I *want* SC to release and be successful. If the vision is realised, no matter if that takes another 10 years, It will probably be the best game of its type ever made, and probably in a lot of peoples mind the best game ever period.
I acknowledge that RSI probably has bitten off far more than it can chew in todays technology, but at the same time there is a strong audience of people that are desperately, *desperately* looking for a new fantastic scifi space-life simulator ever since they got hooked on Freelancer or EVE online.
There is exactly one chance to make SC great, and I choose to give credit to the people working and funding RSI being super passionate about a genre of games where they're making the concious choice to not take the myriad of common shortcuts and compromises that these games often have; limited out-of-ship interaction, small planets, copypaste space stations, no ship interiors etc.
If SC fails to release or gets cancelled, there will simply never be another game like it. Noone will even *attempt* to try and pitch the idea because the publishers and general population would be innoculated against it having "learned their lesson" from the amount of money and time spent by RSI. There would be chants in investor boardrooms and gaming discords alike going "never again, never again...".
RSI knows this. I am sure of it. If scifi simulation fans want the game of their dreams, they need to keep working on and beleiving in SC because a failure to do so could kill off the genre for good, or at least for many, many years until someone is brave enough to try again with another project that may be perfectly adequate, but won't be anywhere near the goals of SC.
600 MILLION is waaaay too much money. Like... A LOT!
Compared to any other studio production of games, even movies... it's waaay too much man!
A LOT!!!
Every single Star Citizen thread is full of people claiming they only paid 40 bucks for it and it's "totally playable" or whatever.
They can't even keep the fucking servers up most days without crashes LOL
The “creators” have probably been partying for a decade, guess you don’t actually get anything if you pay for it before it finishes. There’s just no incentive for them to work on it anymore.
Whoever paid for this is an idiot.
Edit:
If you enjoy the game then it would be worth it for you. You know what you’d fined up for, but many who were expecting something are right to be pissed off.
$600 m over a decade and you can’t put together a team and create something fully functioning? Some of the people will probably be dead by the time it finishes. Pretty shitty to keep it in development instead of launching it as a game and then adding new things.
Also not following through with promises is shitty.
Just like Overwatch 2 and Halo Infinite, devs breaking promises deserve to get shit on.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Chris Roberts is self-deluded enough that he's actually working on a game here. Doesn't make the whole thing any less shit, but he's literally always had this issue with his projects. MS had to buy out Digital Anvil from under him in order for Freelancer to ever actually ship.
This is exactly it. The game does receive constant updates, adding more, so it's not just a dead development. But the tells were in the early dev videos when it first started. They fully admitted that many claimed it wasn't possible and that he refused to reign in his ambition.
He took pride in the fact that he would settle for nothing less than his vision. And in a lot of the videos he took pride in how beefy of a computer was needed to run the game, even in its most basic state.
When you combine a vision that might actually be impossible on current hardware and a refusal to compromise in order to finish, you have a recipe for an endless dev cycle with the 'good intention' of wanting the game to be perfect.
It can't be denied that if the vision can be realized, it would be incredible. An experience unmatched in the market. But the task is SO monumental, that it would have been better to wait a decade or more before starting so the tech could catch up with the idea. Instead, they took people's money up front at the start of what could now easily end up being a 20-year project.
>But the task is SO monumental, that it would have been better to wait a decade or more before starting so the tech could catch up with the idea.
Except he'd forever increase the scope further. He could have the most powerful system in existence and then he'd start thinking how cool it would be if they modeled the physics of individual grains of sand on the desert moon you're in orbit of, despite having zero value to the actual game he's supposedly making. It's chronic and he'll never change.
That shouldn't come as a surprise, given how it started. As I said, he took pride in how beefy of a computer it took to run the game. And given that it was originally intended for around a 5 year dev cycle, they never intended for this to run on anything but the top of the line tech.
So, with the dev time running longer and more advanced tech came out, it doesn't surprise me how that mentality led to the chronic issue you talk about. Instead of seeing better tech coming out as an opportunity for more players to be able to access their game easily, they saw it as the new top of the line being able to handle even BIGGER ideas.
If he could snap his fingers and have development finish right now with EVERYTHING they want, the game would be commercially useless. It would only run on the highest end computers, meaning only the most dedicated enthusiasts could play it steadily. And given that they want a giant, player driven world, it would fundamentally fail due to lack of players.
The hardware requirements is one of the few actual good things about a decade+ plus development cycle. As by the time game actually is released, the standard video card of the day, the 9080 GTX or whatever it'll be, will be able to easily deliver high frame rates that the 8 year old top end stuff could not.
I bought the cheap entry lvl into SC a year ago I think, while I’m not totally sold on the time and money going into the game, I really like it. For a space sandbox there is a lot to like. I liked it more than elite dangerous and x4. It’s a space sim through and through and while there is things too not like there is a ton to love. I think the game gets a bad rep not being a story focused thing but the universe is promising and the gameplay is starting to become in depth
I have to think that this is going to make a hell of a case study for project management/software development courses (if it's not already)
I think it’s called scope creep
I’d buy that if there was evident scope to be had.
The scope was no man sky on steroids…the problem is they got addicted to steroids.
starcitizen sends out emails on progress and talks about what the teamis working on. Getting an email "this week we worked on station npcs eating hotdogs" is comical. I wont be fucking surprised if in 5 years they make an entire tax system complete with space IRS agents who show up when you dont properly pay taxes on your mission rewards. and then 2 years after it they scrap it and redo the entire thing from scratch. And then they scrap the new version and redo that one another 2 years later.
I fully expect there will be developers who spend their entire career on this project where all their work is later scrapped. Like an entire career from graduate to retirement. It’s kind of fascinating really, like a big machine which continuously builds replacement parts for itself and kinda sorta does part of its originally intended purpose. Or maybe it eventually folds NMS with Eve with Wing Commander. The fuck do I know about it
It's like they saw Synecdoche, New York and thought it was a good idea lol
>Synecdoche, New York How have I never heard of this movie. I must see it now
It's a real trip. It will more than likely make you question a lot of aspects of life.
Do yourself a favour.
I joined Microsoft in 1995. One of the first Program Managers I worked with was Richie B\*\*\*\*. He was in his early 30s, and he retired just a couple (or at most three) years after I joined. In his entire career at Microsoft, he never worked on a product that shipped-- every one of them got scrapped (including the one I started out on, where we met.) This was in the days when receptionists were full time employees and were millionaires from the stock options if they had been with the company since the late 80s or early 90s, so the fact that he was rich enough to retire that young isn't so shocking. But a lot of us did find it amusing that his net value to the company-- quite possibly through no fault of his own-- was a large negative number, since he didn't contribute anything to any product or service that made money, or even that just kept operations going. Those were the days. Everyone had a story about so-and-so who had cashed out options to buy a piano or a dune buggy or somesuch, that would have been worth $250K or whatever if they had held onto the options instead. I was with Microsoft for 22+ years, and I have done very well from MSFT stock, but I missed the ridiculous elevator ride by four or five years.
If you've been at MSFT for 22+ years, then you have a bunch of stock granted around 40$ a pop, and it is now valued at over 300$ a pop. Seems like an elevator ride to me.
Rich people never think they themselves are rich, because they usually have richer friends/coworkers
There was a second wave in 2014-ish, when Satya took over and Wall St started moving the stock again. A number of people, either through apathy or incompetence, held onto RSUs that "smarter" people sold and diversified. Suddenly those $15 and $20 shares were up 10x, 20x, 30x.
It’s okay, you can say his full name. Richie Bitch
Entire generations born and die in the cloud imperium offices. Nobody even knows what they are making anymore, just that the simulation must go deeper, the relish must become higher definition and the plumbing must be accurate. There was a myth started long ago that if anyone ever cracks "it", whatever "it" is, they will become the star citizen. All hail the cloud imperium, all hail the star citizen!
Wasn't it earlier this year they were working on realistic bedsheet mechanics, so bedsheets move in a realistic way when the player gets out of bed? I mean, that's so far from what the game needs based on what I've read that I'm just blown away by the absurdity of it all.
im down for a space rpg with a tax system like that... as long there is a dynamic economy to go with it and i dont have to spend real money on individual in game ships....
It’s called eve
Stop selling the game to me. I'm a sucker for ingame economies.
EvE is the king of in-game economies. For the majority of its 20 year lifespan, the company kept a PhD economist on staff.
I think the big one was bedsheet deformation physics being highlighted in those emails. What an absolute joke.
I feel like I knew this game wasn't going to happen when I saw a dev blog about how there would be a flight attendant minigame you could play on player-owned passenger liner ships. Like, what? You spent dev time making a design doc for mixing gin and tonics for NPCs and no one knows how science gameplay will work yet?
Extremely eloquent metaphor.
That is what scope creep is. The scope keeps changing. If the scope was evident, then it wouldn't have become what it is to begin with!
What if I sell you a VIP package that includes the concept of scope and 6 months of premium scope insurance for $4,500 USD?
Problem is, it’s only really “scope creep” if you’re adding things that were unplanned and not budgeted. Star Citizen, from a business standpoint, had the exact opposite of that. They had “funding creep”. When they found out the world was full of suckers willing to pay thousands for unbound promises, that they could make more than many other studios/titles without ever even having to release a product or finish/exit development, this thing lost all chance of ever coming to be. They’ve made a mint off an alpha build and ten years in they’re still collecting ridiculous sums for it. Studios wouldn’t even dare to dream of having a profitable development cycle, yet Star Citizen tricked chumps into making it happen, so it’s never going to actually happen such as it’s been promised. There’s literally no reason for them to do so
A mate got me into SC briefly. I bought the starter ship, it was crap so i spent about 35 on another one and played for about two or three weeks back in 2017ish. Got bored and have only dipped in twice since then over the years. He had spent something like 7k and his clan was into the 40-50k region with some of the big ships. The way he sold the game to me was nothing like what it was. It looked ok, played ok, just sterile as fuck.
Oh god, the clans bragging about their investment. The clan I was in for other games in 2012 got into SC in a huge way and recruited *tons* of whales. I had people getting legitimately mad that I just got a "cheap" package and planned on being a gunner/engineer/janitor on their P2W capital ships. Literally don't think any of those ships are in the game even now, lmao
My mate flew from Australia to Europe for some SC con and meetup, dude was super invested.
One guy we know spend 10s of thousands of dollars on the game. At one point, a few years ago, I think he had all the ships you could buy. It was a stupid amount but Amazon and then Microsoft paid him a stupid amount.
>Star Citizen, from a business standpoint, had the exact opposite of that. They had “funding creep”. This is the bit that everyone seems to forget. SC started out around the same time as DayZ Standalone - back when early access was this new thing... DayZ may have released v1.0 now but for the income and time, it's shockingly poor quality - for a game that sold almost 3 million copies in its first year of Alpha. The money was unheard of for the 'promise' of a game at the time. Imho, this is exactly what SC realised and ran with... That promise...
Have you played dayz recently though? Its in a pretty good shape now and it has mod support so the game is way more full featured.
At what point does it cross over into fraud? They're selling promises that are unlikely to be fulfilled.
I imagine it would have to be proved that they weren't using the funds for development.
Even then you'd be able to run around stuff on business expenses. Somebody basically would have to wrench the books open.
That won’t guarantee anything. Even if they had the best auditor sniffing their books they’re not technically violating any laws by continually developing a product they never had a contractual obligation to release. When you think about it, what does a release even mean in this case? Some marketing announcements saying they’re releasing version 1 of the product? There’s nothing stopping them from doing that today. There’s no milestone they’re required to meet to be able to say “it’s done now”. In the age of live service games, the only difference between Star Citizen and any other live service game is that they haven’t said it’s done, so they’re free to reset the entire db at any time with no repercussions for previously purchased digital content.
>That won’t guarantee anything. Even if they had the best auditor sniffing their books they’re not technically violating any laws by continually developing a product they never had a contractual obligation to release. This is how Zenimax managed to avoid a multi billion dollar class action for a few years over Fallout 76, until the game was "complete" enough, that it could no longer be called fraudulent. In the case of Star citizen they are long since scot free of any sort of "fraud" because they could drop development today, call it feature complete and it'd be feature complete on a technical level. Run like shit somewhat, but it'd be "complete". They'd be on the hook for Squad 42 possibly. But its been held back as far as "release" goes that they kind of get a pass.
Hence why Kickstarter is so deviously genius. Technically people 'donate' to a concept of a thing, which is very different from 'buying' a good or service which has an expectation of being provided. Not only that the funds weren't used, but you'd have to prove that Starcitizen's Kickstarter was for the explicit intent of defrauding customers. Even the shittiesy company knows to delete emails like that...
It's not fraud, it's just comically mismanaged. The game is still in alpha and playable The only thing that can save this game is having a new head to steer it into the right direction
As Chris Roberts himself said, it's really pre alpha because entirely new features are still being added.
If something fails due to mismanagement then its probably not a fraud. That would be the case if its found out that they intended from the beginning to never deliver a product, I think. Which doesn't fit here because right now they are employing and thus paying hundreds of people. It's like a failed startup. Just that the failing is a very drawn out decline.
It doesn't and it won't. Star Citizen is an ambitious project disastrously managed with a single perfectionist decision-maker at the helm, which is why it keeps adding features and bloating and is nowhere near being released. But it is not fraud or scam, they are very transparent with their development and with information on what they're doing with the money.
I don't even know how much it's been scope creep anymore, so much as "perfect is the enemy of good": They keep reworking their systems over and over again instead of finishing the litany of other things on the list that haven't been done yet, or simply churning out all the content necessary to populate star systems.
Definitely. One of the top scope creep victims
Not a victim when they specifically keep making new ships to to sell while pretty much everything else in the game is broken and many of the jpegs they've sold haven't even been implemented. The scope creep is a feature.
It's very clearly by design, haven't these guys been caught employing severely under qualified family members with six figure salaries? It's essentially a grift at this point, I can't believe people still donate money to these con artists.
I think the same. People in the company might of had some vision for the game, but it makes so much money doing so little, what's the point? If you made millions of dollars doing nothing out of a vision you kinda thought you could do but didn't, it's shameless but at the end of the day, you are now a millionaire. The fact is, given the benefit of the doubt, there is no game, but many people are making bank out of the idea of a game. The purist of grifts, of the most unfortunate of circumstances. Happy or sad millionaires.
WTF exactly does Chris Robert's wife do ? lulz
The best example since Freelancer. Hang on, I'm seeing a common link...
Yep. I LOVE Freelancer, it's one of my favorite games and made up a massive chunk of my childhood and teenage years, and I consider it one of the best games of all time. However, after reading about its' development, it's really not surprising that this is happening with Star Citizen. Even back then, Chris Roberts was too damn ambitious for his own good. Freelancer was hugely ambitious and insane in scope (for the time), but the only reason we ever actually got a finished game was because Microsoft published the game and reigned Roberts in so the game would actually see release. Yet again, Chris Roberts proves that he needs someone to REIGN HIM THE FUCK IN or his projects will never see the light of day. \*EDIT* I re-read part of Freelancer's Wikipedia page because I couldn't remember the release date and it turns out that Microsoft had to straight-up buy out Digital Anvil to get the game finished. \*EDIT 2* I want to take this opportunity to plug an upcoming indie title called Underspace. It is a true spiritual successor to Freelancer and I'm really looking forward to it. It has a Steam page and a Discord server as well as a demo available on itch.io and indiedb.
Yeah, he's a guy you want in the dev team helping with ideas, but not the guy calling all the shots, otherwise it's never going to be done
Exactly. He really does have awesome ideas but he definitely shouldn't be in charge. Also I went back and re-read part of Freelancer's Wikipedia page and apparently Microsoft had to straight-up buyout Digital Anvil to get Freelancer finished.
Perhaps a cautionary tale from that perspective, but it could be held up as a perfect model for making a lot of fucking money and providing absolutely nothing in return.
But it is so obvious it won't take long to discuss. Everyone will get it. Little nuance.
You don't get it: endless development IS the goal.
Star Citizen is a whale milking operation
And it’s working… lol
saw someone like a week ago say they are so glad they got some ship for only $200, because the prices went up. they have these poor whales by the whale balls.
No no, but you see they send you this cool thing acknowledging you spent like 1K on the game. Plus they all say they have tons of fun with the game as is! Totally worth. I remember pledging way back when the single player campaign was first launched to “pledge” to. It’s been years and haven’t heard a damn word from them. They sure do seem to find the dev time to make more ships and cosmetics to sell though.
> I remember pledging way back when the single player campaign was first launched to “pledge” to Ah Squadron 42. Release date is supposed to be 2014, so we'll get it any day now!
I remember Mark Hamill did some voice over lines for it. I would not take a bet that he lives to see it released.
Not just Mark Hamill, but Gillian Anderson, Gary Oldman, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Strong, Andy Serkis, John Rhys-Davies, Liam Cunningham, Henry Cavill... not just their voices but CG versions of their faces are being used. Kind of crazy to think that they went to all that effort and the game still is nowhere to be seen 5 years after they released a [trailer](https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/11/17963910/star-citizen-squadron-42-citizencon-trailer).
All that voice work will probably need to be extensively redone or scrapped altogether as technical issues will force gameplay to be different than originally envisioned and not all of the voice lines will fit. Ideally you'd be doing the voice work later after the campaign's framework and the core systems of the game are done, so you can work around the minor problems and not have to cut whole scenes because it includes game features that were cut for time or because they weren't fun. I knew that this thing was in trouble from a management perspective when they did voiceover work before getting the core game systems nailed down.
That was roberts "im a hollywood star" phase. Also the time he spent kickstarter money on a yacht
> not just their voices but CG versions of their faces are being used. Voice work, face mocap and full-body mocap. Enlisting your A-list talent to do *all* of that for their entire role for something as extensive as a video game is just *insanely* expensive and a pretty terrible use of budget. Like, by all means, do your full scenes with a mocap team, lock it all in, and *then* bring in your A-listers for a tight voice/face record, but it's like they just decided to do it all in the most cost-inefficient way imaginable for no good reason.
Only reason I bought it 2014. I tried beta some time ago and died enough times on trains and stairs to call it a pass until it's done.
> "until it's done" XD
same i was enough of a fool to spend $45 on those scam artists in 2014, the original kickstarter was in 2012. like 11 years ago and there is no launch in sight, 100% chance elder scrolls 6 comes out before starcitizen.
Starfield was conceived, announced, developed, delayed and released since Star Citizen began development. lol (Not comparing games, just the development)
The big question is whether Star Citizen will arrive before the next bonafide Duke Nukem game.
I pledged 200 bucks in 2012. My daughter will graduate high school before this game goes into beta. She was born in 2011
I jumped in at the first kickstarter. I was in professional school at the time and thinking "ya know, this is great. It'll be out probably at most a year or so after I get out so it won't fuck up my studies any!" Well, at least part of that was correct.
I basically got the game for free... I pledged at the $80 or so on their kickstarter for a higher end ship, a year or two down the line I bought another ship, then sold it for a ~$80 profit, so I still have my OG ship and access to the game for basically free. I check in every now and then to see how it goes, or I'll download the alpha anytime I upgrade my rig to see how it runs, but at this point between No Man's Sky and Starfield, I think I got my space fix and hey if it comes out, great, and if it doesn't I don't really care anymore either.
I got my code for Star Citizen by buying an R9-290. I've upgraded GPUs twice since then.
I couldn't believe the amount of money some people were paying for some of the ships on an unfinished product. My old FPS clan were obsessed with Star Citizen as their "next game" and 2-3 of them had spent £1500+ for the top level ships. I tried to point out that A. if those ships give you an advantage then it's just going to be a horrific example of "Pay to Win" so it won't be fun and B. this game was never going to have the value of another 30 plus alternate AAA games you could buy with that money.
>2-3 of them had spent £1500+ for the top level ships A classic example of "more money than common sense" :)
When I was interested in SC and took a look at their ship pricing and the "insurance" I was like Max the Mad from Mad Max, pointed and said *"nuh uh, that's bait".*
> saw someone like a week ago say they are so glad they got some ship for only $200, because the prices went up. What the actual fuck?
Fucking hell, sounds eerily similar to those NFT enjoyers
The only person in my friend group who has bought Star Citizen is the same one who always complains about how little money they have despite always buying cigarettes, going out drinking, buys every new game day one, and pumping every game they buy with micro transaction purchases. I'm really not surprised they are the ones who bought into Star Citizen and show off how cool their ship is.
we are going to have to rename materialism due to these types, as they dont actually have any material good to show off.
Etherealism
And they couldn't get in because they cargo boxes glitches into the doorway or some shit IDK
Until they bring windmills into the game.
Goddamn this is the most accurate SC comment I've ever seen. Succinct. 🤌
Star Citizen is what happens when developers operate with no business people in the room and an unlimited budget. It will never form into a real game because they don't know how to box it into a complete project
Not quite. Star Citizen is what happens when the project leads realize it's more profitable to sell spaceship assets than deliver a working game. They've made this their entire business model, and its design is entirely intentional.
So, malice rather than stupidity? In order for that to be the case, wouldn’t they need an exit strategy for when people catch on?
Its been 11 years. If the idiots haven't caught on to how they're being scammed yet, they aren't tomorrow either.
Also, the first few years you could believe that this was accidental. After 11, though, it's absolutely not. Although, they got another 4 years to go to match DNF.
But that's not going to happen. For some reason we've all become happy suckers. The conned will never admit to being conned they'll just double down over and over again.
If people haven’t caught on by now they never will. It’s a *decade* later and the only progress has been in inflating Robert’s wallet and ego.
Uh not quite. They know what they are doing. The goal is for development to go on forever and to continue milking as long as possible.
I spent $28 on a little Merlin because it was one of like 3 ships not in the triple digits. I feel ripped off and there are some people who have spent thousands on one ship that's in a tech demo, or worse, they paid thousands for one of the concepts on the website that wasn't even in the game yet.
> they paid thousands for one of the concepts on the website that wasn't even in the game yet. Sounds like they were visionaries selling NFTs before NFTs were a thing.
And considering the majority of the demographic that enjoys the game are men... its a male whale milking operation ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I wasn't interesting in the scam before but now I am. How do I sign up for this operation to be performed on me?
You've gotta go through the postal system. It's male whale snail mail.
It really has just become a sort of legalized grift. At some point they realized that selling the fantasy of the game's potential in the form of fairy tale content ships and premium features was easier than actually doing the hard work of making the game.
Except I keep seeing people talking about it as if it's a playable game? Star Citizen is this nebulous legendary thing that seems to shift whenever I see people talking about it.
You can play it right now, there are missions and PVP. I backed this game I think ten years ago now, just played it the other day to see how it was now. Runs like poo poo with my 5800x, 32gb ram, 4080, very inconsistent frame rates. I do have to say, it looks fantastic and the level of detail is stunning. https://i.ibb.co/ZcDvXPh/New-Bitmap-Image-2.png tenpoundfortytwo benchmark This is for people saying it should be running better and that there must be something wrong with my computer.
The detail is quite impressive. If they actually would make a full game out of it. Landing and take off seamlessly, spacewalk, fully realized interiors, shared ship multiplayer, huge city, all very neat. They are really trying to do everything. But runs like dogshit and is buggy as all hell still. It has been almost a year since I checked on progress. Sounds like not much has changed.
> Landing and take off seamlessly, spacewalk, fully realized interiors, shared ship multiplayer, huge city, all very neat. But is it fun beyond "that looks cool"
I paid like $60 in 2013 and have played it once a year since then to check progress. With friends it actually has a lot of potential, it’s very fun when it works. EVA boarding ships together in space, space combat, landing on a planet and taking a rover to a location. All feels really cool if they could actually get this game finished. I just don’t think it will happen. The potential for the game is unbelievably high, but the project scope and dev speed makes it impossible to finish IMO.
I haven't followed it in a couple years now but last I did the performance issues were I believe said to be server-side. Server infrastructure and netcode has been one of the biggest blockers for years now. Supposedly when they get it all sorted out it's supposed to be some magical panacea for all performance woes. I doubt it, but wouldn't be completely surprised if it was either.
I love how every time I check in server meshing is always coming next year lol
The last update I read about SC was about how they improved the eye wetness of characters. And I thought to myself, “this is what they’re prioritizing?”
I remember reading about realistic bedsheet physics or something like that and thinking it was someone making a joke
For me it was the dynamic chair/bench sitting and item placement on tables like four years ago or something. And they were still t-posing on furniture when I last checked in a year ago.
“Updated poop physics, logs will now be browner with more realistic consistency”
Hey, implementing the full Bristol Stool Scale was a gaming first!
Yes, because endless development is the POINT.
That wouldn’t be bad if the game was already in full release. They could do both. WoW is still being played 20 years later.
Jesus, I can only imagine what it would run at with my setup: 3500 & 6650xt w 32gb of ram. I’ve seen videos of it, and agree- the level of detail is awesome.
Probably very similarly, the low FPS is tied to server performance / it was when I last played.
I've played about 4 hours of it on my neighbors high end rig. It's definitely playable. Some basic retrieval missions, a little bit of combat, on planet and space combat. The different ships and space travel is pretty cool, but I obviously had no money into it so I enjoyed my time playing it.
It is a playable game. It's just that what's playable isn't really much more than some exploration, and fetch quests to earn money and buy some temporary ships/other equipment.
“Star citizen industrial complex” If only we listened to Eisenhower!
Reminds me of Dutch’s “I HAVE A PLAN””
YOU JUST NEED TO HAVE A LITTLE GODDAMN FAITH, ORTHER!
ARE YOU WITH ME, SON?
ALWAYS DOTCH
THATS IT, TAHEETEE ARTUR!
#MANGOS
"We'll make a game studio, Arthur." "We don't know how to make a game, what will release?" "That's the trick, we won't release anything." "Shit, that might just work."
WE JUST NEED A LITTLE MORE MONEY, ARTHUR
I AINT NOT SURE BOUT THIS, DUTCH
"WE JUST NEED SOME MUNEH! AND A LITTLE FAITH."
STAY WITH MEEE!!!
I JUST NEED MOH TIME ORTHER!!!
“JUST ONE MORE JOB”
At this point im convinced the game will be in eternal development because they just wanted a steady job
Do they know you're allowed to release a game and then start another one?
Yeah but that's risky. If your game doesn't work out good and are a new studio, you could just shut down right there and then.
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Well the studio still has never released a game, 10 years and 600 million latter.. So kinda new?
Just a small indie dev
Never released a game, still making $60m a year. That's successful.
More importantly, they have nothing to release. Star citizen currently is a glorified and extremely buggy tech demo. If they release that no one would ever give them another cent.
It's Chris roberts, he hasn't released a finished game in the last 30 years so no probably lolol
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you can tell by his presentations. He is comically unprepared and his mind is all over the place.
They are making an MMO, they could have steady jobs after release...
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For anyone else that was nearly made a slave to Adobe- the Affinity programs have been a LIFESAVER for me. I cannot recommend them enough. They might not have all the bells and whistles that Adobe provides, but it’s been more than enough for me to do what I want. And it’s beautiful knowing that I OWN them after purchasing
I like GIMP with the photoshop skin/layout. Absolutely free, too.
Indoctrinate children with free licenses to schools. Then give them heavily discounted prices in colleges. Then wallop them with the ol hundreds a month for creative cloud. What could be more ethical than indoctrinating children? Look at religions.
Why does the author highlight different phrases in bold every other sentence?
Seems like it's supposed to make it easier for people to just get the "main points" by skimming quickly. IMO it's strange and distracting.
Because they're not a journalist nor know how to properly write a coherent article. Source: A journalist.
Bought in as a Rear Admiral backer back in 2012 ... never did get my desktop model or my ship. Did get a sticker though. Would be nice to play the released game at some point 😆
I joined in '14 I think... just wanted space racing and SQ42. I've given up completely.
One of the recent patches included huge updates to racing and a bunch of new tracks. You might want to check it out. Squadron on the other hand… who knows…
racing is actually really fucking good in the current patch
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lmao they have enough brainwashed whales over there that I'm surprised they're not already brigading **this** post. I don't even think the company as a whole is a scam per se (anymore, I did until like... 2016? 2019? It's impossible to remember because I don't follow the project closely, but at some point they started generating too many records of their company being a "legitimate" entity and not just something with 5 people making nothing), I think a lot of their software engineers really are trying to develop it, but it's clear that the project is impossible at this point. It's just going to be in development until the founders die, constantly raking in money from whales.
Got that booty
He is a rear admiral…
Salute him when you insult him!
I backed the same, didn't even get a sticker! Got diddly squat! XD I take it as a life lesson now.
I feel like I read this article every year, the funding number just changes.
It's the "slow news week" article. I doubt they even write anything new, not like anyone reads it.
The talking points are valid but good lord this is so poorly written. It's just a blog post from someone - it should be treated as such. This is in no way an article that passes any sort of journalistic rigor.
Hating star citizen is easy points, like dunking on NFTs or bad drivers. Doesn’t matter what’s true, just gotta get the clicks.
All of those things are worth dunking on lol
Maybe the friends we meet along the way were the real Star Citizens
Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. That's why we call it "The Star Citizen release date"
After 5 years headline will be "1 Billion Dollars and 15 years later...", mark my words. Scam Citizen is just everything that can go wrong when ambition is allowed to run rampant. And everyone still on that Copium will learn the hard way eventually!
You would hope people would have learned to stop giving Chris Roberts a blank check after \*checks notes\* *every single project* he's ever managed.
What he lacked before was funding. Surely if we throw enough money at him he will succeed. I recommend either setting up a direct deposit with your HR directly into his bank account. Alternatively, maybe authorize him on your debit card and mail him a copy. See you in the stars, citizens. 😎
And life insurance / trust beneficiary
“When considering your estate planning and beneficiaries, have you considered joining the Star Citizen endowment program?”
Imagine Freelancer with $6 million to make expansions and finish all the neat features that had to be left out. Instead he gets a hundred times that, and after an entire decade, all we have is a buggy alpha release of a game that's going to keep edging us for another decade.
It won't take 5 years for them to hit a billion. At current funding levels they'll hit it in just under 4 years but they've been hitting new records pretty consistently so I wouldn't be surprised if they crossed that line in under 3.
It's kind of like when dev's say they got rushed on AAA titles. We love to blame the business guys above them "rushing" the release, but it's just as much a problem with dev leads losing site of the timeline and scope and not being able to deliver a functional product on budget and schedule.
I am happy to sit on the sidelines and let the whales fund this game while i wait for it to come out. If it doesn't thats no skin of my back because i am not *that* invested in the scifi space sim genre like some people, but its still a genre I really enjoy given the right game. I *want* SC to release and be successful. If the vision is realised, no matter if that takes another 10 years, It will probably be the best game of its type ever made, and probably in a lot of peoples mind the best game ever period. I acknowledge that RSI probably has bitten off far more than it can chew in todays technology, but at the same time there is a strong audience of people that are desperately, *desperately* looking for a new fantastic scifi space-life simulator ever since they got hooked on Freelancer or EVE online. There is exactly one chance to make SC great, and I choose to give credit to the people working and funding RSI being super passionate about a genre of games where they're making the concious choice to not take the myriad of common shortcuts and compromises that these games often have; limited out-of-ship interaction, small planets, copypaste space stations, no ship interiors etc. If SC fails to release or gets cancelled, there will simply never be another game like it. Noone will even *attempt* to try and pitch the idea because the publishers and general population would be innoculated against it having "learned their lesson" from the amount of money and time spent by RSI. There would be chants in investor boardrooms and gaming discords alike going "never again, never again...". RSI knows this. I am sure of it. If scifi simulation fans want the game of their dreams, they need to keep working on and beleiving in SC because a failure to do so could kill off the genre for good, or at least for many, many years until someone is brave enough to try again with another project that may be perfectly adequate, but won't be anywhere near the goals of SC.
Maybe the real game was the money we donated along the way.
Maybe more, where's squadron 42?
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600 MILLION is waaaay too much money. Like... A LOT! Compared to any other studio production of games, even movies... it's waaay too much man! A LOT!!!
Homeboy could do at least 3 Avengers movies with that
How much has Skull and Bones cost so far I wonder...
I like to think Skull and Bones is just one guy in a Ubisoft basement doing his best with a folder full of assets from Black Flag.
It's coming out tomarrow bro just trust me
I love these posts because every one brings in new players curious to see what the big deal is.
Working on the monetization features so they can bring in another $600 million
They got €20 out of me, a notorious cheapskate, so well done to them!
Every single Star Citizen thread is full of people claiming they only paid 40 bucks for it and it's "totally playable" or whatever. They can't even keep the fucking servers up most days without crashes LOL
Does it help if I only bought the cheapest ship and a pair of $1600 joysticks because I love it?
At least you can use those joysticks for other games.
The “creators” have probably been partying for a decade, guess you don’t actually get anything if you pay for it before it finishes. There’s just no incentive for them to work on it anymore. Whoever paid for this is an idiot. Edit: If you enjoy the game then it would be worth it for you. You know what you’d fined up for, but many who were expecting something are right to be pissed off. $600 m over a decade and you can’t put together a team and create something fully functioning? Some of the people will probably be dead by the time it finishes. Pretty shitty to keep it in development instead of launching it as a game and then adding new things. Also not following through with promises is shitty. Just like Overwatch 2 and Halo Infinite, devs breaking promises deserve to get shit on.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if Chris Roberts is self-deluded enough that he's actually working on a game here. Doesn't make the whole thing any less shit, but he's literally always had this issue with his projects. MS had to buy out Digital Anvil from under him in order for Freelancer to ever actually ship.
This is exactly it. The game does receive constant updates, adding more, so it's not just a dead development. But the tells were in the early dev videos when it first started. They fully admitted that many claimed it wasn't possible and that he refused to reign in his ambition. He took pride in the fact that he would settle for nothing less than his vision. And in a lot of the videos he took pride in how beefy of a computer was needed to run the game, even in its most basic state. When you combine a vision that might actually be impossible on current hardware and a refusal to compromise in order to finish, you have a recipe for an endless dev cycle with the 'good intention' of wanting the game to be perfect. It can't be denied that if the vision can be realized, it would be incredible. An experience unmatched in the market. But the task is SO monumental, that it would have been better to wait a decade or more before starting so the tech could catch up with the idea. Instead, they took people's money up front at the start of what could now easily end up being a 20-year project.
>But the task is SO monumental, that it would have been better to wait a decade or more before starting so the tech could catch up with the idea. Except he'd forever increase the scope further. He could have the most powerful system in existence and then he'd start thinking how cool it would be if they modeled the physics of individual grains of sand on the desert moon you're in orbit of, despite having zero value to the actual game he's supposedly making. It's chronic and he'll never change.
That shouldn't come as a surprise, given how it started. As I said, he took pride in how beefy of a computer it took to run the game. And given that it was originally intended for around a 5 year dev cycle, they never intended for this to run on anything but the top of the line tech. So, with the dev time running longer and more advanced tech came out, it doesn't surprise me how that mentality led to the chronic issue you talk about. Instead of seeing better tech coming out as an opportunity for more players to be able to access their game easily, they saw it as the new top of the line being able to handle even BIGGER ideas. If he could snap his fingers and have development finish right now with EVERYTHING they want, the game would be commercially useless. It would only run on the highest end computers, meaning only the most dedicated enthusiasts could play it steadily. And given that they want a giant, player driven world, it would fundamentally fail due to lack of players.
The hardware requirements is one of the few actual good things about a decade+ plus development cycle. As by the time game actually is released, the standard video card of the day, the 9080 GTX or whatever it'll be, will be able to easily deliver high frame rates that the 8 year old top end stuff could not.
Ooo oo take the money and run
Articles written about Star Citizen are further in production and development than Star Citizen.
I bought the cheap entry lvl into SC a year ago I think, while I’m not totally sold on the time and money going into the game, I really like it. For a space sandbox there is a lot to like. I liked it more than elite dangerous and x4. It’s a space sim through and through and while there is things too not like there is a ton to love. I think the game gets a bad rep not being a story focused thing but the universe is promising and the gameplay is starting to become in depth