Scam Citizen.
And there isn’t even a game yet.
X4 is more game than Star Citizen. Elite Dangerous is more game than Star Citizen. Both these games are still getting updates that expand and build upon their mechanics. But the time Star Citizen becomes 1.0, these other games will have already surpassed it.
Hell, graphically Star Citizen used to be cutting edge… Like nearly 10 years ago. Now it just looks kinda “normal”.
Pay to win what? Is there a game yet?
There is a game, but there are resets on progress and it only goes up to about 100 players.
JPEG wars
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.
The Amway of videogames.
ince then it’s dipped lower and lower every single time new info comes out.
I couldn’t disagree with this more, but you likely have lower standards for your entertainment.
Star Citizen is a scam. Stop giving them money.
Star Citizen is a scam.
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:
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The risks with this kind of funding structure for game development.
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The fact that there are a lot of people who really badly want a good space combat video game.
It’s possible that it wasn’t a scam to begin with.
But now? Now it’s impossible for even the most dewey-eyed dreamer to see it as anything less than a deliberate hustle, perpetrated by amoral grifters.
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 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 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”.
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They can’t. Star Citizen is the Trump of videogames
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.
Oh my god… that’s the perfect summary.
Give it to activision blizzard for a 20+ year old game instead that you could be playing for free.
Those are not the only two options.
Played it on a free weekend a few months ago after hearing about it for over a decade.
Shit sucks.
Looks pretty, and that’s where the good parts end.
Everything, and I mean everything, is insanely tedious and the inventory system is godawful. After 10+ years of “development”.
Avoid this garbage.
Exactly. Your game is bad if I have to look up how to do something as simple as equip a weapon. Your game is bad if I have to run around like an idiot for 15+ minutes after every death before having the chance of doing something enjoyable again.
OH MY STARS! THE GAME THAT SPONGED CROWD FUNDING FOR MILLIONS IS TRYING TO GRAB MORE MONEY!? UNTHINKABLE!
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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.
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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…
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that has promised not one but two games that are not coming out.
Not just the games. Don’t forget all the feelies, the physical stuff they promised to manufacture.
This guy lost a court case trying to get a refund on his $5k seven years back:
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.
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.
Not even beta or EA.
What do you call the thing you can load up and play right now?
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.
Sure, like most early access things.
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.
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Which you can Access… Early.
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Eheh for a second I thought EA was Electronic Arts.
Like a beta game is unstable but before the beta you get the EA stage/release where it’s just doesn’t work but is still for sale.
Wait… the game where you can buy a bundle of every ship in the game for $48,000 might be pay to win?
Weird huh? Before this article I really couldn’t tell. But I think they might be on to something…
As someone that played star citizen and enjoyed the gameplay very much, this game has been basically ruined by greed for years now. They basically discourage playing the actual game with these practices. Sure, you can work your ass off and make a butt load of money to buy a bunch of cool guns, armor, and ships, but as soon as they do a server wipe, which they do fairly regularly, most if not all of it will get wiped clean. But if you give them real money you get to keep everything after a server wipe.
I even had a friend where his ship, bought with in game currency, glitched and he was able to keep it several updates later with no issue while mine disappeared. We both bought them with in game currencies at about the same time. Mine disappeared as soon as the update came out and he had it for almost two years! To me that sounds like it’s intentional and they could totally get away with letting you keep your stuff but they choose not to.
Holly shit thats despicable, you mean people who actually earn shit the hard way lose there ships!
And look, I’ve played early access games before and I’m used to playing games that do a server wipe every once in a while or saves being incompatible with the new version, but I’m talking every update and multiple times a year. It makes it so the only sense of progress you feel is when you buy a ship with real money so you can still have it on the next update. It’s a very exhausting game.
Normal Store Citizen behavior.
If you feel tempted to try Star Citizen, just go play Elite:Dangerous. You’ll have a much better experience for a fraction of the cost, and still get to do all the things you were hoping to do in SC.
Including the insane grinds for no payoff (I still love E:D)
At least ED is a finished product.
I mean I paid $45 dollars for a ship a decade ago and have since made 100s of hours of wonderful memories with my friends. I wish I got scammed more ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I spend about 100 on the game. I paid like 45 or 50 for the base game then spend about 50 to upgrade my ship. Honestly, I don’t feel ‘scammed’ at that price point. I feel bad for the dudes who spent thousands on ships though.
Star Citizen still exists? I started when I was in my twenties and now I’m pushing 40!
Game development as a service.
I’m convinced this game is a Lacanian social experiment.
Also how can a game be play to win if there is no game?
Did this game even release? I worked with a guy 10 years ago that invested heavily into this game and would always tell me “its about to be released”
Last I saw, Squadron 42 (the single player version of the game) is function complete and undergoing optimization, but SC the multiplayer game will never be finished in my mind.
In alpha I think? They have a playable version afaik, but not released, no. Can spend thousands on virtual ships tho
