r/gaming • u/BurstYourBubbles • 2d ago
Star Citizen and the Billion-Dollar Problem of Never Finishing
https://nolatency.co/why-star-citizen-has-taken-so-long/182
u/Loose-Internal-1956 2d ago
“Players have financed the company like investors while retaining only the limited influence of customers.”
This is an important point. A lot of ethical issues with this could be alleviated if backers got a dividend on future sales.
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u/Lawd_Fawkwad 1d ago
That will never happen exactly because people are willing to give a billion dollars to a development team with "early backer" bonuses as their rewards.
If you sell shares of your company you have a fiduciary duty to manage the company in a manner that is beneficial to the shareholders, if you offer those shares publicly the scrutiny is increased.
So in the case of Starfield and similar white elephants, there is zero incentive to seek investment from institutional investors or sell public stakes when they are aware that they can make all the money they need with almost no real responsibility.
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u/LivingLab12 2d ago edited 1d ago
The gameplay and ships are good but the mission systems, actual content, traversal systems that waste your time, logistics, and deep technical issues caused by 15 year old legacy code are unfixable.
It's been 15 years and they still can't fix elevators and people falling through the floor.
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u/nailbunny2000 1d ago
Yeah, this is the main problem. It's so old they are now in an impossible game of catch-up and patching. The more they finish the more they break and the more work is required. They've managed to turn development into the rocket problem.
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u/CommercialHour6660 1d ago
How is the gameplay good?
NPCs can't even walk around. In combat they stand there and glitch out. NPC ships are no better. Their AI just doesn't work. Most of the missions are broken.
The only thing that somewhat works is PVP. And netcode is fucked so it's a glide fest worse than dial up Internet days.
The only real gameplay is flying around and taking screenshots.
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u/pelado06 1d ago
that has to be bad practice. I am not a developer but how do you keep coding new stuff without fixing major bugs? Has to be priority.
I would think for them to be better to keep delivering new broken stuff than fixing bugs, so they can atract more investors
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u/-s-u-n-s-e-t- 1d ago
The "investors" are regular gamers, mostly whales, throwing money at a kickstarter.
"Hey we removed some bugs" does not attract whales, if anything it sends the message your game has a lot of bugs.
"Hey, we added a bunch of cool features and made an awesome shiny ship you could buy" is how you hook people.
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u/zoobrix 2d ago
I paid $40 years ago and between playing the dogfighting mode the "universe" I've gotten quite a few hours of entertainment out of it. Not the best entertainment value ever, but I've spent far more for less enjoyment for sure.
But I can't imagine still giving them money at this point. The unfortunate part is as a tech demo it's actually really cool and if they could just get something semi polished out the door I think it would be pretty cool.
But it's so late and bloated at this point I just don't see it happening, I don't think it started out as a scam but at this point I assume it's never coming out. Assuming the people in charge know that at some point it started being a scam.
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u/lkl34 2d ago
That live stream few weeks back were the game broke so much the creators had 2 quit revealed alot.
The sp mode is also once again delayed.
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u/Mousetrap94 2d ago
And after that stream didn’t the game make $500k in one day? I might be misremembering.
I just can’t imagine these figures are real. I refuse to believe there’s that many fish in their pond.
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u/WRSA 2d ago
there are i believe some 10 million backers; i genuinely don’t know how they make so much money, but equally i’ve put a small amount in and have played for probably close to 800 hours (using log analysis software so likely +~200 hours from switching pc’s and reformatting drives).
the game is one of those things where if you have the money to spend, its funding a dream. because the game is phenomenal conceptually and technologically, but it just has awful management and even worse PR..
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u/StuartGT Joystick 2d ago
there are i believe some 10 million backers
A third of that. There are 6.5m accounts registered on Star Citizen's RSI website, and as per CIG half of those are paying accounts with the rest being free signups.
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u/Mousetrap94 2d ago
I mean sure but who’s to say those numbers aren’t made up too? They’ve proven to be nothing but charlatans for over ten years who’ve mastered the art of selling promises they do not intent to keep.
The only time I see Star Citizen mentioned outside of its own bubble it’s nearly always in mockery of it and never to any significant degree beyond waving it away.
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u/IBarricadeI 2d ago
I don’t think they’re making up funding numbers, their subreddit is quite active and if you’re making up numbers you wouldn’t make them this high.
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u/STRYKER3008 2d ago
Imo you would to get even more people to join. Like hop on the space hype train, everyone's doing it!
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u/LizzieMiles 2d ago
That’s just asking to get audited for taxes if you aren’t paying for what you’re claiming to make
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u/SillyMikey 2d ago
How people are still giving these guys money at this point is absolutely mind boggling to me
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u/Immediate-Cress-206 2d ago
Because most people only ever spend $45 on the game. It's a small population of whales that keep buying ships
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u/raralala1 2d ago
There is actually reddit story talking about this, the guys literally spent 5k on ship because he believe it was investment and the value gonna go up, I think he finally divorced but still delulu, tbh I don't know it is true story or not, but at this point I believe him.
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u/MetalBawx 2d ago
The game currently has 3 playable star systems out of the hundred+ it was supposed to release with back in 2016.
Optimization is horrendus and bugs are rampant while everything CIG's promised has been delayed again and again and again. The fact that a cash shop is functioning in something that is very clearly still an early alpha build is beyond disgusting.
I'm honestly surprised they haven't been hit with a lawsuit over false advertizing.
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u/etheran123 2d ago
The playable section is also aging as it's still in development, which is too bad. I remember playing it back in ~2021ish and being pretty blown away at times, it was absolutely the best looking game I had ever played, which helped a ton with giving the game the benefit of the doubt and overlooking errors. I was willing to overlook errors because it was so crazy at times.
It doesn't look bad these days but it hasn't improved a ton IMO while other games have gotten closer to what star citizen does, while actually working. I won't be surprised if there are a couple star citizen inspired games that release soon because devs saw how much money they rake in while not being capable of actually delivering. And genAI has lowered the barrier to entry so much especially with coding that the head start CIG had might not be worth so much these days.
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u/Smaynard6000 2d ago
I don't think it started out as a scam but at this point I assume it's never coming out.
If you could sum up Chris Roberts' life with one sentence, this would be a good way to do it
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u/MetalBawx 1d ago
Childhood is hating Microsoft for pushing out Freelancer while it was unfinished,
Adulthood is realizing Freelancer would be still in development hell or abandoned if Microsoft hadn't forced Chris Roberts aside and gotten it over the finish line.
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u/rshoel 2d ago
I think Star Citizen can give you some great unique experiences, but is a bad / mid game at best.
CIG has no incentive to finish the game as they're already making plenty of money by keeping it in perpetual development. Hopefully one day that's not the case anymore and they'll actually manage to put out a great game, unless they screw it up first ofc.
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u/Ak_Lonewolf 2d ago
Thatd how I feel. I got my kickstarter investment out of it. Anything more is not my problem.
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u/lkl34 2d ago
squadron 42 is still a thing do not forget it too has been delayed again
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u/horridbloke 2d ago
Squadron 42, aka Wing Commander 2015. Are they waiting for EA to offload the WC rights?
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u/Devatator_ PC 2d ago
Nope. Delay was because of GTA6. Tho considering the new date it definitely is because they want even more time. I'm really hoping they get something out because otherwise they're cooked. They did show the prologue live a year or two ago (with 3 crashes but still) so they definitely at least have some kind of game there. Even if it's unstable they can't mess that date up
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u/lkl34 2d ago
7 years ago they had a trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VppjX4to9s4
So there should have been 0 crashes
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u/mynameisjebediah 2d ago
Reading the comments from 7 years ago saying they're in the polishing phase before racing to release is so funny
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u/adflet 1d ago
And then they had to capture the actors again because they've all aged considerably since the first go round.
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u/Silver-Article9183 1d ago
That's actually a really stupid thing to do. Why bother recapturing the performance if you're happy with it? It's not like people playing a game about space dogfighting are going to be broken out of their immersion by Gary Oldman looking younger than he currently does.
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u/Bluenosedcoop 1d ago
Nope. Delay was because of GTA6.
Do you actually believe this? I'm really interested to know if you do and why considering the previous history of repeated delays.
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u/CommercialHour6660 16h ago
Hahaha GTA isn't even on PC keep huffing the copium.
Remember when they cancelled Citizencon because SQ404 was releasing this year?
Shits 10 years late. The prologue they showed was 2 hours of boring cutscenes and that's probably the best they got
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u/Telesto1087 1d ago
I think the fact that people fund the project by buying ships for the "mmo" side and that a huge part of their money goes to fund the single player game is the real problem with their funding model. It's like paying for a sports car and getting a basic hatchback that breaks down every few kilometres while the rest of your money goes to fund an F1 team.
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u/Bluenosedcoop 1d ago
Don't forget that it was originally planned as one game and somewhere along the line the justified splitting it into 3 installments.
The assumption is that the mocap done by actors like John Rhys-Davies, Gary Oldman, Mark Hamill and Liam Cunningham only covers the 1st installment of SQ42 so there's a mightily high chance some of those actors will have passed before we ever see the 2nd installment.
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u/ElonsMuskyFeet 2d ago edited 2d ago
Quick Edit: CIG permits the grey market. Much like CSGO Skin trading. This is not illicit RMT like a friendly commenter pointed out.
They just made changes to their gifting system. Which prevents players like me buying a small ship, upgrading it to a bigger ship with store credit. Then selling that store credit for 50% value.
Why 50% value? Because "old" money cant be used to buy ships with Lifetime insurance, a term CIG doesnt even have a solid concept of its meaning. The only ships with LTI are day one ships and you cannot use store credit to buy them.
----- TLDR; They are working to prevent people from cashing out of the project
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u/Lannar 2d ago
I mean, grey market is kind of prohibited or at least heavily regulated in every game out there. That's not a bad thing
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u/ElonsMuskyFeet 2d ago
CIGs official stance is. Youre on your own. They allow it. Many websites like Star Hangar and the Impound come with money back guarantees and are a middle man. Its how I cashed out!
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u/Hansi_Olbrich 2d ago
Anyone over the age of 35 could have told you that Chris Roberts is never on time, always over-budget, micro-manages departments of which he has little to no experience, and is obsessed with Hollyweird.
Chris Roberts comes from Origins, a place in the 1990's that was filled to the brim with the most eccentric and bombastic primadonna's in gaming history: John Romero, Warren Spector, Richard 'Lord British' Garriott, Ralph Koster, etc.. You could not have built a warehouse large enough to house the ego's of these guys. Out of all of them, Roberts has the worst track record of releasing titles and has far and away the worst management style out of them all.
This is a man who fired a senior designer for having a single green pixel out of place when Chris Roberts wanted blue pixels. It was a prototype beta design, no where near the stages of implementation. Chris Roberts is the manager that asks for every single story-point in your weekly design meetings to be personally vetted by him. Zero work can occur in Chris Roberts' company without Roberts' express approval and oversight. Of course, this grounds down innovation and improvisation to a complete stand-still. It also leaves every project at his casual emotional whim- what he approved and endorsed last week is now, after a week in Italy on his yacht, no longer kosher and needs to go.
Anyone with even a casual interest in history would have been able to take half an hour out of the day looking into this 'Chris Roberts' guy and find that he's the reason video game to film adaptations were given shoestring budgets and Hollyweird executive meddling for nearly twenty years. They handed him the keys to the studio and actually gave the designer of the video game the ability to direct the film adaptation. Somehow, the creator of Wing Commander directed a film so terrible that even hard-core Wing Commander fans had no idea what was going on in the film. It was a complete stinker, one that he allegedly took funds from Origins Video-Game development to help fund- essentially committing fraud.
This is a man who spent ten years selling used luxury cars right outside of Hollywood in the slim hopes he runs into a person of some consequence that could get him a job back in the Hollyweird industry. And people have trusted him with one billion dollars.
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u/Poiuytrewq0987650987 2d ago
With his extreme micromanagement and the alleged turnover at the company, I imagine in my limited understanding of developing a game that there's nobody there who actually understands how the game is coded.
I think they call that "technical debt" or whatever. Bugs built upon bugs built upon bugs built upon systems nobody left knows how to make function.
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u/IndividualStress 1d ago
That isn't tech debt.
Tech debt is when you implement something in an non optimal way either to meet a fast approaching deadline or because you just weren't thinking about the future.
Tech debt doesn't necessarily mean bugs, it just means that there's stuff that should be reworked.
For example, the place where I used to work had a piece of software we sold to clients. It had some custom config for each client. For one clients build decades ago, someone fat fingered gome" instead of "home" for a bit of their config. They didn't notice, committed it and carried on. The next few geniuses that arrived and needed to use that field didn't go and fix it, oh no. They just continued to use the misspelled word. Eventually that misspelling became so prevalent throughout their system that fixing the original mistake would cause all those other bits and pieces to break. So it's just easier to leave the misspelling in.
Another example, we had a little function that did some small things in the system. Originally it worked great. But as the system grew and grew and more stuff was added for this function to support it stopped being as useful and eventually became a headache to use as people were adding in undocumented and uncommented esoteric work arounds in it. Eventually we just replaced the entire function with a brand new one.
Now Star Citizen definitely has Tech Debt, any tech company will have some tech debt. What I think you're describing is Knowledge Loss. Which can cause tech debt.
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u/Poiuytrewq0987650987 1d ago
See? I figured folks would get what I was trying to say but knew I was probably using the terms incorrectly or describing things wrong.
I'd be interested in a post-mortem inside story someday in the future.
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u/angryslothbear 2d ago
Amen. As a veteran of the Austin game developer community spot on.
When I moved to Austin one of the first things I was told was “don’t work for Robert’s”
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u/Nodelphi 2d ago
It’s been so long, I think it’s time to start funding Star Citizen 2!
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u/Immediate-Cress-206 2d ago
Aa soon as Blizzard announces World if Warcraft 2.
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u/reallygoodbee 2d ago
IIRC, Project Titan was supposed to be the successor to WoW, before Project Titan evolved into Overwatch.
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u/A_N_T 2d ago
I have a question for backers of Star Citizen: can I borrow $500? I promise I'll pay you back.
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u/SmugCapybara 2d ago
Only if you can also give them a drawing of a boring-looking blocky spaceship as a bonus.
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u/OldEcho 1d ago
Nah the Star Citizen spaceships honestly do look cool as hell. I honestly think that's why it gets so much money. Dudes have always been obsessed with their rides, especially as status symbols. Alexander the Great named a city after his horse. (Certain) people are pretty much the same about their cars. How many new military recruits drop their entire 10k sign on bonus on a sports car?
They're cool as hell space cars.
But if you told guys they were spending thousands of dollars on Space Car Dressup Barbie they'd lose their shit. But you can do it and just NEVER MENTION IT and it's great lmao.
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u/hitgo1 2d ago
Theres people that preorder, and then theres star citizen people 😅
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u/ChiggaOG 1d ago
Those are the people who keep the funding going until the studio completes or bankrupts. The problem with space games in general. It's too large. It will never be completed.
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u/clckwrks 2d ago
Seeing the twats in Manchester that develop it(the ones bullying that streamer) turned me off star citizen totally
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u/UpsetKoalaBear 1d ago
Exactly the same thing happened to me.
I swear they must force the employees to wear the company merch. The number of them on Quay Street is crazy.
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u/Economy_MuIberry_901 1d ago
Just saw a ship for 25k, What the actual fuck?
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u/solo_shot1st 1d ago
Whales that spend money on .jpgs of ships like that are the reason the game will never finish being made
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u/MattTreck 2d ago edited 2d ago
This isn’t a dollar problem it’s a management problem. At some point they have a failure in leadership. It’s probably Roberts.
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u/kingbetadad 2d ago
Oh my God. I feel like bots pick up someone mentioning star citizen or something and then a bunch of bullshit posts get made about it. Stop bringing it up. The horse has been beaten to a pulp.
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u/eeke1 1d ago
Seems to me never finishing is beneficial to Chris Robert's.
He gets money in perpetuity from his supporters. Yeah they grumble from time to time but enough wallets open for every new ship it doesn't matter.
The moment the game is declared "finished" people will actually be evaluating him on his promises, and there's far too many to come out of that with a good evaluation.
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u/CommercialHour6660 16h ago
The energy from SC whale wallets opening and closing could power all of civilization
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u/wht-rbbt 1d ago
If I don't finish I get told to go to the doctor. If star citizen don't finish, they get more money smh
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u/Boomblapzippityzap 2d ago
Nice to see a relatively balanced take between "SC is a scam" and "any criticism is bad faith"
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u/naveganteperdido 12h ago
If you are making that much money when making it, why in the world would you want to finish it?
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u/hymen_destroyer 2d ago
The people still supporting this game are thralls
I got banned from the star citizen subreddit for pointing this out
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u/NoName-Cheval03 2d ago
Of course you got banned, you told the crazy people that they were crazy what did you expect.
People still supporting this game are deep in the sunk cost fallacy (people with +1000$ fleets are not rare at all) + have no idea of the current state of the video game world and can't even realize why SC is already outdated. They genuinely think it is still the beacon of game development.
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u/hymen_destroyer 2d ago
The Star Citizen community almost definitionally typifies the phenomenon of identity fusion
At this point it's just an amusing sideshow for me, it's a low-stakes version of something happening in politics right now so I think we can learn from it
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u/SpeculativeFiction 2d ago
You got banned in a subreddit for fans a game because you called fans of the game slaves?
What were you expecting to happen?
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u/50greenmachine 2d ago
I have not played it, but it seems to me like a playable game with a pretty darn good amount of content. Is it not?
I totally get they’re not reaching the end state they promised but separating from that it seems decent?
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u/Apocalypse_Knight 2d ago
Idk how long I played but prob over 100 hours at least. It has pretty cool game play loops that is fun for a while. For 45 bucks you get a really unique experience. There are the glitches and some other bugs but when the game works it’s spectacular
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u/AHailofDrams 2d ago
It is, but a lot of people on reddit (just the gaming space in general, really) act like the game has a subscription and costs an insane amount to play.
This is because Star Citizen also has some of the biggest and most desperate whales in gaming willing to pay literal thousands of dollars for a "preorder" of in-game ships "concepts" that aren't and won't be out for literal years.
Reality is, you can get it for 45 USD at its cheapest and it has several free weekend events every year to try it out for yourself (although their already shitty servers get even shittier during said events).
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u/hymen_destroyer 2d ago
Is it not?
It is not.
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u/imhereforsiegememes 2d ago
It is, but its cooler to say its not I guess. People play, and people pay. Its not some big mystery. There is something there to continue to attract new and returning customers.
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u/hymen_destroyer 2d ago
The project has failed. Past tense. Yes there's still a company called CIG and they still claim to be developing a game, but even if it does come out someday, it will never justify the resources that were supposedly spent on its development, and will never achieve even half of the what it promised to be in scope.
The only thing CIG has done competently (albeit disingenuously) is market their product
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u/imhereforsiegememes 2d ago
It hasn't? We are literally in a post talking about how much money they are making? Massive updates coming out every other month. Tons of people playing and buying shit. How do you consider that a failure?
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u/hymen_destroyer 2d ago
Because it's in year 14 and it's still alpha. It's not a game, it's a pastiche of half-baked gameplay mechanic demonstrations that don't interact with each other in any meaningful way. They can provide just enough activities and enough FOMO to keep a small subset of their fans hooked, but can only be considered "successful" because almost all of their money has been no-strings-attached donations from backers. A traditional funding arrangement would have been considered a failure years ago. The community refusing to hold them accountable is the only reason they are where they are.
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u/imhereforsiegememes 2d ago
You've just described how its actually quite succesful.
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u/hymen_destroyer 2d ago
Successful as a means of extracting wealth, sure...and in 2026 I guess that's all that matters.
They've succeeded in creating a live-service game development experience. They have not succeeded in making a video game
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u/imhereforsiegememes 2d ago
I mean thats entirely subjective, as you can see a ton of people enjoy where the game is at so far. It genuinely has more features / content than any other singular game I can think of. Its really not different from any other live service game.
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u/itsRobbie_ 2d ago
I’m sure you “pointed it out” very respectfully and with facts and arguments and totally not just spewing hate and misinformation
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u/hymen_destroyer 2d ago
Facts and logic are considered hate and misinformation by those people.
And yes, I did start out trying to gently steer people towards the truth but over the years grew increasingly exasperated as the community pushed back with vitriol, as CIG continued to fail to produce anything, until I finally did lash out, which was all the excuse they needed. Notably, I was called much worse things in response but none of those users faced any consequences.
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u/itsRobbie_ 2d ago
Yeah man I’m sure “hymen destroyer” with a bike seat pfp was totally using facts and “logic”
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u/crackednutz 2d ago
Since putting $20 towards it at the beginning I no longer have a PC that can run it lol.
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u/Zeta_Crossfire 2d ago edited 2d ago
I play it daily and whenever we have a bug we say that's the way Chris Roberts intended it to be /s
But seriously it's a fun game but buggy as hell. If you're interested just buy the 45 dollar starter and then don't buy any ships. Most ships are available to buy with in game currency a few months after they hit the paid store. Don't fall for any fomo. It's buggy and frustrating at times but theres a lot of game there, and it's been a fun time especially with friends. I wish someone else made a game with this scope.
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u/imhereforsiegememes 2d ago
Downvoted for having a completely benign take lol.
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u/Zeta_Crossfire 2d ago
The game has issues I'm not going to stand here and deny that. I'm just saying for 45 bucks I've had a lot of fun and it might be for others as well.
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u/SupposingForASecond 2d ago
Anyone interested in Star Citizen should observe from a distance until 1.0
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u/Zeta_Crossfire 2d ago
And that's totally fair. For 45 bucks I've had a blast but it's not for everyone. This game really is like a steam greenlight game.
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u/PileOGunz 1d ago
The thing with Star Citizen is that it’s the best unfinished buggy mess of a game I’ve ever played there’s nothing like it.
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u/NubEnt 2d ago
Ok, let’s say that you “bought” the game 10 years ago for $40.
If it finally releases, do you get the game for “free,” as you’ve already paid for it, or do you have to “buy” it again to get a copy?
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u/Foxintoxx 2d ago
No you already paid for it and already own it . You can currently play it even though it's in alpha
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u/NubEnt 2d ago
Isn’t this kind of like a Ponzi scheme, where new “investors” are required to fulfill the obligations to past “investors?”
If they fail at raising enough new funds they won’t be able to deliver on promises to investors?
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u/LordAzuren 2d ago
Isn’t this kind of like a Ponzi scheme, where new “investors” are required to fulfill the obligations to past “investors?”
Any multiplayer game is like that, server have a cost and aren't cheap so this kind of games have to keep making money. Devs have two options to do that: keep making new games (like CoD with a new game every year) or make the game a GAAS (like Fortnite). SC is the latter, the game is already out and is quite playable at least since 2020, even if it's not "feature complete" and having awful patches every once a while but it's fun, have plenty of content and is something that has no comparable alternative on the market.
If money stop flowing the development won't last long but isn't true for any other GAAS? If people stop purchasing Fornite/League of Legends/Apex/Marvel Rivals/whatever skins the game would be able to stay alive? No, but that doesn't make those games "a scam".
Ofc the fact that SC is labeled as "alpha" doesn't help for general consensus but that's how things work. We will get 1.0 sometime in the future but the game won't magically be drastically different than the month before, SC will constantly get improved and will get more content, it's the nature of an MMO. When the development of these games ends it dies soon after.
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u/NotYetForsaken 2d ago
This is how almost all game pre orders work, yes. Except most of the time a publisher fronts the bill in return for the cash promised by the customers.
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u/boxing-boxing 1d ago
I threw $40 at the original campaign in 2014. Eleven years later my hangar has three ships and the elevators still kill people. Zero regrets though. Best reality TV money I ever spent.
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u/PhotonWolfsky 1d ago
At this point it's just a crowd funded playable demo for gaming tech.
I mean, can't really say they haven't done anything special with it, because they absolutely have. It's just much easier to allow it to exist if you mentally change what you classify it as.
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u/Swagalyst 14h ago edited 14h ago
What problem? It's one of the most profitable computer games never made. It's kept the studio afloat for 14 years.
The only thing which slightly annoy me is that Star Citizen by being the infinite whale of inflated hype is using up all the air for other space sims. Elite Dangerous exists and is fully operational, but was never as hyped as Star Citizen.
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u/New_Ad3443 1d ago
Maybe SC started out as a valid but misguided development effort but now its a scam to pay Chris Roberts bills at this point.
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u/VisceralMonkey 1d ago
Nothing is going wrong. It's doing exactly what they want it to, a nice source of income.
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u/Valyris 2d ago
Any backers of Star Citizen, can you send me $50,000 monthly and I promise ill have something for you after a 10 year period
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u/OttersWithPens 2d ago
I was surprised at how much content, and how cool that content was, when I finally played star citizen. The shit is pretty cool. $1 billion cool? I’m not sure, I only paid $60 and got more out of it than any COD per year which cost how much to make?
The whales in SC are insane they will spend so much money on stuff. One guy had a ship that you can literally fly into the hangar, while the ship is in motion, land the vehicle, run up to a turret, shoot an attacking a ship while exiting planetary atmosphere and coordinating with other players all in live time, with no load screens. Get boarded, have a fun gunfight in the ship, loot the bodies, and go about your night.
When it works. (Which is more than given credit for)
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u/_Ross- PC 2d ago
I'm one of those dumbass whales with that exact ship you're describing. Luckily I quit spending money on the game ages ago.
The game is undoubtedly a scam, if not grossly mismanaged. It's fun when it works, but it only works 5% of the time. It is bugs 95% of the time, doesn't respect your time, has zero social features in an MMO...I could go on forever.
Luckily, if people look at the SC subreddit, you can see that public opinion towards CIG even amongst SC players is extremely poor. CIG has even been near-radio silent for over a month now.
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u/OttersWithPens 2d ago
I will tell you that the above scenario I mentioned is a top 10 experience for me and a sci-fi gaming dream come true. 10/10 so thanks for supporting
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u/TiberiusZahn 1d ago
ITT: People who have never played the game giving ad dollars to controversy signal boosters.
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u/EmberQuill 1d ago
They raised a billion and keep making money. They don't have to finish the game. In fact, if they do, they'll start losing money because people will forgive a lot more problems for alpha versions (or early access in general) that they won't accept in a fully released game.
That said, I think the article is correct and I don't think it's a grift or a scam. I'm pretty sure they do intend to release a finished 1.0 some day. It's just that Chris Roberts is the king of scope creep and is incapable of meeting deadlines without someone forcing him to (like Microsoft cracking the whip to get Freelancer out the door all those years ago, which I wish I'd already known before I backed Star Citizen 13 years ago or I might have chosen to wait and see).
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u/what_could_gowrong 1d ago
As a player with a good amount of sunken cost, at this point I'm treating the game like a rotating set of mini games depends on what works and what's broken each update. And also as a social bar because playing solo with bugs is frustrating but with a group of friends, smooth gameplay is less important when people laughing at someone getting stuck in a bug. Also sometimes I just put on my Quest 3 headset and make this a VR chat in space. Sitting by my Polaris cargo bay door and enjoy the view of Nyx asteroid belt
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u/Razzilith 2d ago
a game that cost over a billion dollars, is incomplete, AND isn't even good lol jesus fucking christ dude
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u/SpectacleObserver25 2d ago edited 2d ago
This really needs to be investigated. I doubt Chris Roberts can pay off cops or Feds.
Edit: The amount of people okay with CIG's practices in the replies absolutely sickens me. I knew hyperconsumerism was a thing but didn’t know it got this bad with gamers. Ya'll would rather have companies rail you even if it meant you get to consume more slop.
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u/Greaterdivinity 2d ago
why? blowing money on spinning up studios in expensive development markets, 100-300+ salaries to pay annual with a high burn-rate, a decade+ of development including acquiring other studios and doing a ton of work on their forked cryengine that they've customized...the money is being spent, yo.
it's being wasted chasing chris roberts impossible dreams (SERVER MESHING NEXT YEAR), but it's being spent
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u/listen3times PC 2d ago
I believe the problem is CR changing his mind all the time and moving the goalposts.
If RSI were beholden to publisher deadlines, or an Indie with limited budgets, with the content already created there'd be a game in 18 months.
At this point the best thing for the game would be for CR to step back and appoint somebody else to run the studio with the objective of getting a release.
The magic money whales are just allowing him to prorogue any deliverable product.
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u/Greaterdivinity 2d ago
yep
chris roberts was always going to be the problem and has a documented history of not being able to manage projects on budget
but they can't get rid of chris because not only does he run the show, but i don't think they have anyone that could replace him as the figurehead/face of the company when it comes to pitching the vision. for all his faults, and he has a lot, he can be compelling to listen to when he talks about the game he wants to build and shit. like, it's never going to actually get built, especially with him running the show, but it's compelling to listen to, at least.
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u/listen3times PC 2d ago
He just needs someone about who can say "no" to him.
Like the vision is grand, but the game I backed in 2015 has evolved significantly from what I thought I was getting into.
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u/SpectacleObserver25 2d ago
Yeah, money spent on scams and vaporware and thousand dollar spaceships, and a game that barely runs and crashes on official livestreams.
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u/TheCleaverguy 2d ago
Calling it a scam or vaporware is disingenuous.
Absolutely fine to say it's crap game because of it's glaring technical problems and it will likely never reach a 1.0 release.
The game exists, it's "playable", and that's a huge step up over some other kickstarter projects that I would classify as a scam.
Star Citizen only gets this level of hate because there's a sensational amount of money involved and it's popular to rag on it.
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u/Enchelion 2d ago
Them being shit at making the game doesn't mean it's automatically a scam. I agree their funding model is predatory, but unless they made tangible legal promises that have been broken it's hard to actually pin anything criminal on them.
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u/Ode1st 2d ago
I don’t think they’re scamming in a legal sense. They’re just a bad company making a dumb product people are buying. Normally that’s self-regulating, and a bad company with a dumb product goes out of business, but in some cases, people just don’t think the bad product is bad and keep buying it.
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u/zoobrix 2d ago
The project rhas been totally mismanaged and at some point turns into a scam if they know they can't deliver, but they do have a massive headcount with almost 1,000 employees at times.
Now of course that they actually have so many staff makes it even more mind boggling they can't get a game out the door but with so much money actually being spent on work for the game I think it's going to be next to impossible for a court to conclude outright fraud. No doubt Roberts himself isn't hurting for cash but as long as he's kept his compensation vaguely in line with CEO's at companies that size it's going to be real tough to find anything to prosecute criminally.
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u/Dave_FIX 1d ago
Thing is lets say the game releases today, what is it? Its just an MMO in space, that's it.
Don't get me wrong I understand the scope of the game is unique and the scale, if ever finished, is huge. But, the game needs something no one can guarantee, not least the people that have invested time and money into it, huge numbers of players on the scale of peak WoW. This game is never getting there.
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u/goody_fyre11 1d ago
I wonder if this game could've gotten finished in time with its original scope if it had started a decade later than it did.
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u/HolidayNick 1d ago
I tried playing this with above average specs and thought my computer was going to blow up.
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u/hyperion_99 1d ago
I first played this game maybe 8 years ago and I had a bug where when I went to climb the ladder to get into my ship I got launched into space. Gave up after a week or 2 of similar bugs. Went back to try it last year and I shit you not that same ladder launch glitch happened and I immediately uninstalled.
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u/ProtectAllTheThings 1d ago
I thought it was too ambitious when it was on kickstarter and never backed it. And here we are
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u/RugbyEdd PC 17h ago
Going to be interesting to see how the squadron 42 previews go. I admit I've not got particularly high hopes, but it'll be a pretty big breaking point for a lot of people.
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u/TheGravespawn 2d ago
It's not a problem if the grift keeps working.