$600 Million And A Decade Later, Where Is Star Citizen
Over a decade of development hell, $600 million in funds, and ever-rising expectations, Star Citizen seriously needs a release date now.
I’ve only ever really watched this unfold with a causal interest, so whilst I’d like to know more, that article really said very little aside from a few dates and numbers.
More so, and the reason I’m making this comment, is the whole thing felt 100% like the second output of a GPT print. That format of “why is this the way it is? There at several reasons…” followed by a bunch of points that barely address the question, let alone answer it. That and the random bolder phrases.
Still, maybe is had more work put into it than Star Citizen?
Quite a lot of work has gone into sc (more work then exists in the game, thanks Chris Roberts), the problem is, and I'm saying this as someone who has played it with friends, there isn't a lot of gameplay loop to play. There are gameplay loops, but imo they are kinda... meh?
Which makes me sad. I really want sc to be more than it is.
Ugh, yea, it reads like AI-generated output. Sus site.
Imagine still believing you're going to get a functioning game.
I was an initial Kickstarter who pretty much knew this was going to happen but had $60 to gamble. Fucking lolol the development hell has far exceeded my wildest expectations for Roberts inability to deliver a finished project.
Yep, also a Kickstarter (well, before the Kickstarter actually) and I got my money's worth with the drama and ongoing development comedy.
This article leaves a lot to be desired imo. Some of the stuff in here you can see is incorrect just from launching into the main menu of the game.
Here is my personal take on Star Citizen as someone who's been following the project from the beginning:
If it's something that interests you, you should wait for a free fly weekend and try it out. The game is far from done but it's fleshed out enough now that you can have fun if it's your thing. If you think it's not worth buying, don't buy it. Then you can come back on the next free weekend to check it out again and see the progress.
Everything else is just noise. Yes the game has raised a lot of money, yes there has probably been mismanagement and development has been slow. Yes there's still a ways to go before feature completeness.
TLDR: Who cares. Go play it if it's your thing and have fun, or don't and just forget about it until they hit 1.0 sometime who knows when.
People who paid money expecting the promised timelines instead of useless feature creep, care very much. In fact people cared so much that CIG changed the user agreement to no longer allow refunds.
They took a stupid amount of money from people all while promising timelines that were never kept, and a game that I doubt will ever see completion before bankruptcy.
They need to stop throwing money and precious development time on minuscule features when their alpha can barely run on modern hardware without taking 10min to load and crashing shortly thereafter.
I hope that I am wrong about SC and the game does come out some day, because I will absolutely love the game in stable form; but the last few years have been painting a very grim picture of SC’s future
Fun fact, the user agreement doesn’t mean anything in Australia. Australian’s can get a refund any time they want because legally we cannot sign away our rights.
I got a refund a while back after I discussed this point, and my grievances with their broken promises, delivery failures and increasingly hostile sales tactics with RSIs (at the time) Director of Player Retention, Will Leverett.
This article was the same paragraph over and over. “Lot money, lot time, no game, please say date.” I didn’t really learn anything about the situation or controversies.
Welcome to modern "journalism".
If they give me a refund I will stop caring, until then you don't really get to say 'who cares, forget about it for another decade'. I paid money for a product that still doesn't exist and is more than 8 years overdue, and that's even without getting into the discussion about whether the PU is worth it or not - where is sq42?
People paid money because they were promised a finished game by 2014. It’s still nowhere near finished. It hasn’t had an estimated release date for years.
Sure, if you enjoy the game at its current state, fine. No one should take that joy away from you.
Making $600 million over the course of a decade.
Nowhere
Star Citizen release vs GameStop going to the moon, who will win.
Robert probably thinks he is on the moon, so RSI?
If there's only 1 lesson you take from this, it's that you should never pre-order, never kickstart. Risk should never be offloaded to the consumer
Pillars Of Eternity, Rimworld, FTL, Shovel knight Divinity OS 1 and 2 were all made possible thanks to kickstarter.
Without the success of kickstarter games there would also be a snowball effect. Games like BG3, Outerwilds and Stray would not have been made.
For every success, there's 100s and more failures, scams, and unfulfilled promises. Developers should seek traditional funding if they're so confident in their idea. If I'm taking a financial risk on a developer, I should get a financial return if it succeeds. "Kickstarting" is a fancy way of saying "lets socialize losses and privatize profits".
Who are the people who keep donating? Like, maybe around the Kickstarter era around 2010-2014 where all you needed was a popular name to get a huge donation. But after 2017, when everyone realized this game is going nowhere... why is there still support?
Why are people are still buying digital ships and bankrolling them?
Are they in a abusive relationship? Are they okay?
Because they want to fly the digital ships?
I buy ships sometimes. AMA. I have fun with it too :)
Serves people right for crowdfunding a game let alone one built around some libertarian wet dream where you have to buy your way to success, dropping thousands on content like spaceships.
You realize they're developing two games simultaneously and the star citizen hate is only banked by people who don't realize they've literally told everyone that SC isn't getting content updates until Squadron 42 is done.
Secondly, buying ships for money is advertised as "do this if you want to support our game". The ship cost being relative to a supporter tier if it was Patreon. Every single ship available can be bought and earned in game without spending more than $35 for the game's basic access package.
Serves dumbasses right who expect news cycled to them and can't do basic 5 minutes of critical thinking to eat slop like this article
I mean, it's an obvious scam. Always has been. They only have a few tech demos, and bunch of polished marketing material. There's nothing to actually release.
I do not believe it to be an outright scam. However, it is horribly managed and I do consider the funding model to be predatory.
The whole "pledge" store should not be a thing at this stage IMO. It's just a cash shop they can justify huge prices with. It's actively contributed to the scope creep by introducing new vehicle roles, which they sometimes admit to not having designed gameplay for yet. Nor does it currently tell you if you can actually rent or buy the ship in-game (subject to progress wipes). Heck, the closest thing to a scam they've had recently was a "new starter bundle" of in-game gear that you lose upon your first death / unrecoverable body. This is a game where 80% of your deaths are to bugs or unintuitive behaviour.
They also keep trying to change their standards to match modern games. Ships have gone through multiple reworks which take months for a single ship. A sensible dev would lock that in and commit to releasing under those standards. It's been pointed out that with the current rate of progress, they'll still be releasing currently announced ships into the 2030s.
That's not even mentioning the single player component, Squadron 42, which got indefinitely delayed a few years back before a major demo showcase which never materialised. Supposedly, it's been scrapped and re-done more than once.
Their last big chance to show they've pulled things together is going to be the upcoming CitizenCon (yes, it has one) where they'll supposedly be making a big Squadron 42 announcement. A former customer service employee, who recently criticised the company's spending practices, claimed they'd taken a much more serious approach to the scope creep and that we'd see some results of that towards the end of this year.
I'm not holding my breath though. They've been known to create bullshit for presentations before (e.g the infamous sand worm) and I absolutely would not be surprised if Chris Roberts feels pressured to one-up Starfield.
As a side note, does anyone else get the impression this article was written by an AI? It repeatedly lists of buzzword features, like the Hangar module which hasn't been relevant for years, and barely discusses what the game is actually like.
The fanbois have obviously found this story and voting down the people saying how obvious the grift was/is.
I wonder how many other space sim genre games that conspicuously did not hand out the begging bowl, or squander all their money and were actually delivered have happened in the time that Star Citizen hasn't. Being generous the best that can be said is the project is just badly mismanaged. At worst, and more realistically, much of that money just got siphoned away to fund lifestyles. Maybe the devs know they can run this grift for as long as their people stupid enough to keep funding them, knowing they'll never have to actually deliver on their promises.
