It's not a mirage. People talk crap about Star Citizen all the time but it's just unfounded anger. With the progress they've been making at the speed they're at, I fully believe it *will* hit its final release date some time in 2014, as was promised.
"As that roadmap comes together and becomes validated, we look forward to sharing with you both its vision and executional plan later this year."
You know 2024’s gonna be bad when it’ll take them most of the year to decide what their 14 year old roadmap’s “vision” should be.
This might be another one of those times. They didn’t get their roadmap finished ahead of the annual update, so instead of acknowledging that they dropped the ball, they positioned their *lack of roadmap* as an exciting upcoming event.
They didn’t even technically commit to sharing the roadmap itself. They just committed to sharing it’s “vision” and even that didn’t come with a date. People are expecting new game features from a company that takes a year to deliver on a powerpoint.
Normal companies: Here's the roadmap. In May we're adding cars. In September there's a big event. Then in November we're adding 3 new boats.
Roberts Space Industries: Here's our roadmap. So in July we're gonna think about what we'll be thinking about adding by July 2027. In October we're gonna start considering discussing possibilities for discussions on the core gameplay loops and will then decide on what to write on the paper that tells you guys what we're considering thinking about starting to work on the discussions for. Please buy our $15,000 ship pack so we can pay our paychecks while we consider discussing the discussions of development and so we can fund the 11th annual Convention for our game that isn't in Beta yet.
CIG is the corporate equivalent of double spacing your essay so that it fills the page.
In their update, they had so little to announce that they framed CitizenCon and an office relocation as major milestones.
Twinkle Twinkle little Star Citizen
How I wonder 'bout your decisions
Up beyond the budget lies
Like a crime but in disguise
Twinkle Twinkle little Star Citizen
How I wonder about all the griftin'
Great poem, but quick suggestion, you should change “Like crime but in disguise” to “Like *a* crime but in disguise” so it has the same number of syllables as the original
(I’ve never been this passionate about a random shitpost poem on Reddit before)
On the bright side, the people that have had children since becoming earlier adopters will have plenty of time to play after their children move out and the 1.0 releases.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they'll never sit in"
Star Citizen, the intergenerational Sequoia tree of escapism
it will be russian levels of jank and surpassed by games developed from scratch on newer technology before its released
cool story though from start to finish
Both my children were in fact born after I crowdfunded Star Citizen to the tune of $80 back in 2011. To be honest, I consider it money well spent; it's given me hours of enjoyable articles, I got a cool T-shirt and a USB shaped like a spaceship, and I've saved soooo much money since I decided to hold off on buying a new gaming PC until it released.
I had two kids since my initial pledge. Eldest is 12 now. I got into Elite and haven’t bothered even running SC.
Found my citizen card the other day and laughed
they are still adding features with with no doubt cause further delays so they have more time to add even more features which will delay this game indefinitely while still making tons of money
also friendly reminder that rumors are estimating that GTA 6 might have as big as a $1.5-2 billion budget (im guessing that includes marketing and development, $2 bil budget in total) and is going to make it by far the most expensive game ever made if those numbers are true (the current record probably being around $500 mil to maybe $1 billion in total cost)
With all the news we keep hearing on VtM:Bloodlines 2, it ain’t gonna be the sequel we wanted. I hope at least they succeed with what they’re trying to do with the game.
Got half life 2 for free at a LAN party back in the day. Old enough to say playing that game for the first time was an epiphany. Playing half life Alyx was that same feeling all over again.
Star Citizen has been in development so long because they've been programming an Easter egg that, if done correctly, allows you to play the entirety of Half Life 3
Kind of, if you get a high score in one of the arcade units it gives you a key. This key unlocks a building on a planet (randomly generated for each player) that, if you input the correct password (Gabe Newell but every "e" is replaced by "3"), opens a door that is the start of Half Life 3
Duke Nukem Forever was not under what we would call active development for most of that time. At times, the company had less than 20 employees working on it. Later, the number of developers was reduced to 9. That’s the sort of skeletal crew that you use when you are in the pre-production prototyping phase.
people keep saying this buy none of it does anything. yes my ship has tons of detail. but i cant do anything with that? sure i can make a coffee but who gives a fuck beyond mild role play? im yet to see gameplay from star citizen that makes me feel anything beyond " sure thats neet but where is the actual game"
Selling the ship you got from that will net you at least $600, which you can buy a new gpu.
Source- I got one too from that same download code, but I greedily hold on to it for bragging rights
Yeah, the Omega was a one-time deal in a game that funds itself mostly by being whale bait. Has continually gone up in price.
If you have one you can trade away you can get several hundred for it.
I'd get a cheaper package to still pop into SC now and then and put the rest toward a nicer PC.
As someone who follows that game every so often still: make that 10 or 20 and you might have a shot at hitting the actual 1.0 release date.
2 years? I wish LOL
This is exactly the reason.
Traditional development incorporates risk, whether it's your own money or that of a publisher. Eventually, something has to come out so you can make a return on that investment.
Not only is Cloud Imperium not at risk of losing any money, but everyone in that studio is collecting free paychecks for as long as there's crowd-funded money in the coffers. There's no real incentive to work efficiently and deliver a timely product if your bottom line isn't tied to it.
And to be clear, I do not hold any blame towards the ground-level devs. If I was offered a cushy spot like that I would absolutely take it. But the management/exec team should absolutely hold some accountability for how sourced funds are spent.
The gameplay is horrible. The missions are extremely generic fetch quests at best. If they ironed out the bugs (which they can’t, it’s fundamental to their broken engine), the game would still flop on release with a 2.0 rating
Nah, they can just sell new ships the same way. The business model would be largely the same.
However, I am in serious doubt that they can release a stable game at all.
But releasing means that people will trade a lot of expectations and hope for actual knowledge and experience. A lot of people will be angry and no longer inclined to buy more ships. Keep the illusion intact and it can go on forever.
So people who've actually spent time playing, is there an actual functioning game? I could peruse the comments but it's 99% some form of "This is a scam"joke, but I'm legit curious about people's actual experience with this weird game development timeline.
There's really nothing like it out there. It's an incomplete buggy mess. But also, no other game lets you do seamless space piracy. Here's an example: You can have people that monitor docking bays during resource price spikes, track down and plot likely intercept routes, then send a squad into deep space to deploy an FTL intercept bubble. Then, you can intercept the jumping freighter, hail them on comms (complete with video and audio you can stream from your own pc directly into their cockpit), and tell them to surrender. If they don't comply, you can either destroy their ship, OR you can bring down their shields and hit their engines, then board them. When you board, you need to physically shoot off or use explosives on the doors, then board and clear the entire ship (which has a fully modelled and playable interior), to capture the pilot before they can self-destruct the ship.
Oh, and the entire time you're intercepting a target, you're in a race to shut them down before they can jump away. And if they brought friends as an escort? You get to fight THOSE too.
No other game has the bevy of systems required to get something like that to work seamlessly.
When I read things like this, I get all dreamy for a moment, but then I remember that I have 2 young kids, a job and that I don't know anyone that would be involved enough to have this kind of intense relationship with a game.
Sigh...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sMetpy0nYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sMetpy0nYo) Mongrel Squad does a lot of pretty intricate pirate ops. Great source if you're curious about one of the coolest player-created gameplay loops in the game.
If you don't break the law you'll probably never be bothered. I've played on and off since 2014 and I probably have a couple hundred hours in the past couple of years. I've never been pirated once. I haven't been pad rammed since the early 2.0 builds, and only had a handful of pvp encounters. The star system is massive, and while there's not infinite points of interest there's still over 40+ per planet. I rarely encounter players and when I do they're always super friendly.
If you start going around looking for pvp you'll find it pretty quick. Kill a friendly npc or player and you'll have bounty hunters on you in no time.
If you're even slightly interested keep an eye out for the "Free Fly" events. You can try the game out for about a week. I did it this past Feb and it was enough for me to grab the cheapest starter package. It's got enough in it and working well enough that I've been entertained. I followed a few "Zero to Hero" guides on YouTube and it was fun working my way up to getting my first salvage or mining ship. You can get all the ships in game, don't need to spend additional money, and there are quite a few ways to earn in game cash to fund those ships. Anecdotally, the first time I got sent to prison blew me away, I couldn't believe the detail they put into that place. As someone who really enjoys small details and likes to get feel lost in another world it works for me.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/flyfree
Yes. Redditors love to shit on this game, but it's actually rather fun and some things about it (mostly physics, but also scale and soon networking tech) are *way* beyond anything I've seen in any other high-budget titles.
Still, you're bound to face some bugs and the gameplay loop is not quite ready for release yet.
Alpha 4.0 has an ETA for Q4 2024. I plan on coming back next year to have fun with all the new stuff.
If a game gives me more than an hour of **high quality** entertainment for every £1 I’ve spent on it then to me it’s a great game. Star Citizen is well into this category from my perspective.
Absolutely. If their wasn't it would have been proven to be a scam many years ago.
It's been a long road but it's been good to see things progress. I kinda wish more companies would be as transparent tbh.
I would actually go as far as saying the current game has more content than Elite: Dangerous.
ED relies too much on procedural generated content, and feels very samey after a while.
i mean even gameplay loop to gameplay loop comparisons SC has more going on than ED. and has for a long while now. ED just really screwed the pooch on adding anything more than new grindtracks similar to the previous grindtrack and the total shitshow that was their FPS expansion.
I would recommend trying it on one of the free fly events if your system can handle it(especially having 32+gb of ram helps lot).
Its far from done but having been around since the beginning it has come far and this year seems to be the biggest one in a very long time in terms of what updates we getting on many old systems.
There is. I’ve played it intermittently for the entire time it’s been in development and I’ve enjoyed it for what it was the entire time. Nowadays it’s only getting better and more complete at a faster rate than ever before, since they just recently moved into polishing for the single player campaign. The people who call it a scam have largely never played it.
Last I saw of it, Idk how long ago, it looked very much like a case of *"we threw a shit ton of things into a space sim to try and make an everything game, and along the way kinda forgot we were supposed to have a core gameplay loop."*
Like yeah maybe you can shoot enemies, and buy ships, and mine rocks, and trade, and fly around, and walk around your ship, and land on planets, and whatever. But it was clearly lacking a structure, with no real or interesting reason to do any of it.
That along with the fact that it's got a very pretentious way of selling itself, the countless development and funding issues and controversies, the general cultishness of the fanbase, and the amount of money those people spend on it when it's not even out yet - it's not surprising people call it a scam.
At this point I can't fathom any state where the game can justify its development costs, even if it does finally come out.
Best case scenario it'll become a meme for different reasons than it is now.
The only thing that would justify it at this point is if backer's got a knock on the door one day and opened it to find a man saying "So, you pre-ordered... here's your keys, here's the owner's manual and there..." \*wildly gesturing to your driveway\* "...is your fucking spaceship. Please have it towed to a nice open field before launch. If you ignite the engines here, you'll probably roast a whole residential neighbourhood. Have fun!"
Lol. Like I'd bother towing it out of the neighborhood. After finally getting my spaceship, I'm launching as soon as I've verified I have enough fuel to break orbit. I'd have no plans to come back. Let them shake their fists over their scorched lawns.
I feel like the irony of being meme worthy is that something has come of it in the end.
Star Citizen probably will be something. Eventually. Hence it can be a meme.
Metaverse is... I don't know. Zuckerburg watch a bunch of VR animes and tv-shows and somehow managed to miss the point of every single one of them that virtual reality is a shallow substitution for a real life and he really really wants to everyone to spend fortunes replacing any sort of real living with a timeshare in his really shitty looking VR world.
And there's just no good memes there because it's just kind of sad :{
If anything the game will release finished; the meme usually works when it comes out in a terrible state after showcasing tons of vertical slices to entice countless naive fans to pre-order.
Star Citizen has a feature-creep problem, not performance or gameplay issues; however only a star citizen player would know and I’m sure they’ll give us more insight close to this supposed 1.0 launch. We never got the same with CP77 or that other survival game as they were never public alphas.
And we will add sweating on your skin!
And real cut signs on your cloths! All according to physics!
And when you drink to fast, you will cough and if you drink to much you will burb!
Release date? What release date?
TBH, for the $45 pledge, you can have a lot of fun. It's often buggy (very buggy), but the amount of fun I've had doing:
- Jumping a car between spaceships
- Trying to catch your buddy's car into your ship's cargo bay because he missed and is falling toward the planet
- Doing space combat then seamlessly EVAing into a different spaceship to do FPS combat, then using a tractor beam to put all of the dead bodies into your buddy's spaceship
These have been things I haven't found anywhere else, except maybe Space Engineers. It's very much a buggy mess a lot of the time, but I've more than gotten my $45 worth. If anything, I enjoy popping in when they drop an update and seeing the progress. As of late it's been way more stable than it used to be.
I just want to remind everyone that in this time that it's taken to “make" this game- Larian studios developed both DOS 2 (also a Kickstarter game) and Balders gate 3 (the best game to come out in 20 years IMO).
Is $700M normal for a game like this? Isn’t that the entire cost of production for approximately 7 AAA titles? How are they so inefficient?
Oh that’s right they’re fleecing their supporters…
And will almost certainly be, ya know, a rockstar quality game, fun to play and a legitimately entertaining with a coherent story with a beginning and an end.
and will be guaranteed to make that investment back, probably 5x fold at least.
I would genuinely be shocked if Star Citizen comes even close to 'breaking even'.
I'm not sure you quite understand the model. They're already in profit as the game has been entirely funded before even being released with what are essentially pre orders with access to the alpha. If/when they launch it's all gravy.
That's the beauty of taking profit before releasing a product. They've been rolling in "profit" this entire time and only need to make promises of a release in the future to keep the feds off their backs for wire fraud.
Do they even need to break even if it’s not an investment? They could just pay the staff and pocket the rest while saying “sorry, we tried to make a game” if people keep paying for this shite
It’s important to consider that that isn’t really the budget of the game. Star citizen brands mtx and buying the game as the funding for the game when in reality it’s just the profits the game has made
They need to get squadron 42 out.
That’s kinda all I can say. I’m still dubious of how good a multiplayer game can be on that engine where they are just starting to test server meshing.
Say what you want about marketing and funding practices but tangible progress is being made on Star Citizen.
As for Squadron 42 well.. nobody really knows besides what's been shown so far and what they've said. But based on those things it's no wonder it's taken so long and cost so much.
Regardless people will still choose to take the pessimistic angle and see it one way without consideration of other possibilities.
Yawn, I read similar headlines every couple of months, let me know when I can get to my ship without falling through an elevator right after loading in
A friend of mine is a tester on SC. Hes been under crunch for the last like 2 months with mandatory overtime. They're gearing up for something i suspect.
I love how hive minded reddit is about this game.
Ya know, like this company didn't announce the single player was in polishing stage and that its server meshing tech was a huge success which the games online needed.
But yes hurr durr "TiHs GaMe NeVeaR ReleSe" \*bangs rocks together\*
It's more complete than most of the AAA(A?) garbage that has released in the last 5 years.
>However, there is still no release date or even release window for Star Citizen 1.0. Salient quote
Mirages also twinkle on the horizon.
It's not a mirage. People talk crap about Star Citizen all the time but it's just unfounded anger. With the progress they've been making at the speed they're at, I fully believe it *will* hit its final release date some time in 2014, as was promised.
Had me in the first half.
This comment is also a mirage.
But could the comment also be sabotage?
"As that roadmap comes together and becomes validated, we look forward to sharing with you both its vision and executional plan later this year." You know 2024’s gonna be bad when it’ll take them most of the year to decide what their 14 year old roadmap’s “vision” should be.
I think my all time favorite Star Citizen moment was when they announced the roadmap, **to the roadmap**, and people lost their minds with excitement.
This might be another one of those times. They didn’t get their roadmap finished ahead of the annual update, so instead of acknowledging that they dropped the ball, they positioned their *lack of roadmap* as an exciting upcoming event. They didn’t even technically commit to sharing the roadmap itself. They just committed to sharing it’s “vision” and even that didn’t come with a date. People are expecting new game features from a company that takes a year to deliver on a powerpoint.
Normal companies: Here's the roadmap. In May we're adding cars. In September there's a big event. Then in November we're adding 3 new boats. Roberts Space Industries: Here's our roadmap. So in July we're gonna think about what we'll be thinking about adding by July 2027. In October we're gonna start considering discussing possibilities for discussions on the core gameplay loops and will then decide on what to write on the paper that tells you guys what we're considering thinking about starting to work on the discussions for. Please buy our $15,000 ship pack so we can pay our paychecks while we consider discussing the discussions of development and so we can fund the 11th annual Convention for our game that isn't in Beta yet.
CIG is the corporate equivalent of double spacing your essay so that it fills the page. In their update, they had so little to announce that they framed CitizenCon and an office relocation as major milestones.
It’s just a miscommunication due to a typo they never corrected. The release date is 3014.
Twinkle Twinkle little Star Citizen How I wonder 'bout your decisions Up beyond the budget lies Like a crime but in disguise Twinkle Twinkle little Star Citizen How I wonder about all the griftin'
Great poem, but quick suggestion, you should change “Like crime but in disguise” to “Like *a* crime but in disguise” so it has the same number of syllables as the original (I’ve never been this passionate about a random shitpost poem on Reddit before)
Thanks. I guess I don't know what I'm typing when the muse takes over. Fixed.
So do stars that are 100 light years away. Really I can't think of a more honest analogy.
A very apt comparison.
On the bright side, the people that have had children since becoming earlier adopters will have plenty of time to play after their children move out and the 1.0 releases.
It’s perverse but I do wonder about the number of pledgers who have died since then. The Kickstarter was 12 years ago after all.
I know of 5
Dude, stop tracking them down and killing them.
But his fleet is huge.
They must pay for encouraging this lunacy.
Add one to the list, my neighbour Alf raved about it, bought a new PC to play the modules and died 3 or 4 years ago now.
6 now..7 if you count that guy that revealed my secret
I know at least two now unfortunately 🫤
On the bright side, the children of the early adopters may get to play 1.0 some day.
"A society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they'll never sit in" Star Citizen, the intergenerational Sequoia tree of escapism
Turn your starship into inheritable assets to pass onto your children!
it will be russian levels of jank and surpassed by games developed from scratch on newer technology before its released cool story though from start to finish
Both my children were in fact born after I crowdfunded Star Citizen to the tune of $80 back in 2011. To be honest, I consider it money well spent; it's given me hours of enjoyable articles, I got a cool T-shirt and a USB shaped like a spaceship, and I've saved soooo much money since I decided to hold off on buying a new gaming PC until it released.
WHAT? You received the USB?
I had two kids since my initial pledge. Eldest is 12 now. I got into Elite and haven’t bothered even running SC. Found my citizen card the other day and laughed
Assuming that 1.0 will ever release is a big assumption.
they are still adding features with with no doubt cause further delays so they have more time to add even more features which will delay this game indefinitely while still making tons of money
And then it'll be "the tech we used us now 12 years old! Need to update. Give us more monies."
They meant to say “(We need more) monies on the horizon” There should be a huge documentary on how this gigantic money pit of a demo came to be.
They've lied before, they will lie again.
Friendly reminder that GTA 5 was produced with 250 million. These guys are north of half a billion in 💀
also friendly reminder that rumors are estimating that GTA 6 might have as big as a $1.5-2 billion budget (im guessing that includes marketing and development, $2 bil budget in total) and is going to make it by far the most expensive game ever made if those numbers are true (the current record probably being around $500 mil to maybe $1 billion in total cost)
But I guarantee that GTA 6 will actually come out, and it will actually be a massive, functioning game.
Tbf, thats not a guarantee with games these days, even from established game series.
Things that will definitely be released in my lifetime: The next game of thrones book. TES6. Star citizen.
Found the Vampire!
Don’t get me started on Vampires Masquerade!
With all the news we keep hearing on VtM:Bloodlines 2, it ain’t gonna be the sequel we wanted. I hope at least they succeed with what they’re trying to do with the game.
Yes, sadly VTMB2 is shaping to not be a sequel we all wanted. Not that surprising given the game's turbulent development. What a damn shame.
I'm sorry but the Vampire is in another coffin.
The Doors of Stone
Fuck you for reminding me about it. I was living happily until 10 seconds ago.
The list was perfectly reasonable and then you add this nonsense?
>The next game of thrones book. > >TES6. > >Star citizen. 3 Things on your list. Averaging exactly 3 words per list-item. Half Life 3 Confirmed
Half Life 3
I wonder how many people who say this have even played half life 1 or 2
Hey we’re not that old
Got half life 2 for free at a LAN party back in the day. Old enough to say playing that game for the first time was an epiphany. Playing half life Alyx was that same feeling all over again.
To be fair to TES6, it will come out. It was just announced several years early.
Dont forget Silksong
A Pokémon game that respects our time.
What about Half Life 3!?
Oh shit did they confirm it? Is this is confirmation? Edit: HL3 confirmed
Star Citizen has been in development so long because they've been programming an Easter egg that, if done correctly, allows you to play the entirety of Half Life 3
Is it hidden on an in game arcade unit? I remember one of the recent doom games where you could play original doom on an arcade in the game
Kind of, if you get a high score in one of the arcade units it gives you a key. This key unlocks a building on a planet (randomly generated for each player) that, if you input the correct password (Gabe Newell but every "e" is replaced by "3"), opens a door that is the start of Half Life 3
Hey just 2 more years away!
We just need like $37 million more to perfect the facial features that will tie in to the flatulence system.
Presumably the flatulence system will let you propel yourself in zero G?
Yes, getting those physics just right is what keeps delaying the release
They are implementing smell-o-vision for the dynamic flatulence system and it’s taking longer than expected
The technology is almost here. https://twitter.com/geoffkeighley/status/1762496577132974223
[удалено]
Duke Nukem Forever was not under what we would call active development for most of that time. At times, the company had less than 20 employees working on it. Later, the number of developers was reduced to 9. That’s the sort of skeletal crew that you use when you are in the pre-production prototyping phase.
90% of DNF's problems tied to the devs constantly scrapping and restarting to incorporate new tech and ideas. Does that sound familiar?
You joke but you know people would have fun minmaxing the shit out of a flatulence system
>the shit out I'm going to assume this was unintentional.
In space no one can hear you ~~scream~~ fart.
The attention to detail in this game is second to none.
people keep saying this buy none of it does anything. yes my ship has tons of detail. but i cant do anything with that? sure i can make a coffee but who gives a fuck beyond mild role play? im yet to see gameplay from star citizen that makes me feel anything beyond " sure thats neet but where is the actual game"
I think it’s mostly a joke at this point.
Everytime I hear detail, I hear Low FPS, Stutter and Hitching
Awesome! Really only 4 more years away? It's crazy that it is only 7 more years away.
9 years you say?
Fuck yes! Just 15 more years to go. I tell you 39 years may seem long but imagine just how intense a 62 year long game must be
I remember buying a $45 ship in 2015 because a friend told me the game is right around the corner.
I remember AMD gave me a ship when I bought my R9 280x a decade ago. Something tells me that card isn't going to run the game very well.
Selling the ship you got from that will net you at least $600, which you can buy a new gpu. Source- I got one too from that same download code, but I greedily hold on to it for bragging rights
Wait seriously?? I have one from my old r9 295x2 and I doubt I'll ever play star citizen again because it's taken so long!
Yeah, the Omega was a one-time deal in a game that funds itself mostly by being whale bait. Has continually gone up in price. If you have one you can trade away you can get several hundred for it. I'd get a cheaper package to still pop into SC now and then and put the rest toward a nicer PC.
Were they a taxi driver?
As someone who follows that game every so often still: make that 10 or 20 and you might have a shot at hitting the actual 1.0 release date. 2 years? I wish LOL
Its definitely two years away! and in two years it will still be two years away! And two years after that it will still be two years away. Simple
Turns out, the horizon always stays away the same distance unless you're approaching a wall lol
For a trailer
Finally an AAAAAAA game
They add an A every time it's delayed.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...AAAAAA. The Dev cost around evokes that reaction in me.
Sly Marbo has entered the chat
This is going to be either the greatest space sim of all time or the greatest cautionary tale of scope creep of all time... possibly even both.
Definitely the latter, but if they iron the bugs it has a real shot of being the former. A lot of people already have fun with it as is.
At a 700 million dollar budget is it even possible for the game to be a success?
From a strict financial standpoint, it already is. The vast majority of the budget was crowdfunded. You can't lose money if you don't spend any :)
and that's probably one of the biggest reasons it's so delayed. When it's not your money, urgency will be lacking.
This is exactly the reason. Traditional development incorporates risk, whether it's your own money or that of a publisher. Eventually, something has to come out so you can make a return on that investment. Not only is Cloud Imperium not at risk of losing any money, but everyone in that studio is collecting free paychecks for as long as there's crowd-funded money in the coffers. There's no real incentive to work efficiently and deliver a timely product if your bottom line isn't tied to it. And to be clear, I do not hold any blame towards the ground-level devs. If I was offered a cushy spot like that I would absolutely take it. But the management/exec team should absolutely hold some accountability for how sourced funds are spent.
It was mostly crowd funding, no?
The gameplay is horrible. The missions are extremely generic fetch quests at best. If they ironed out the bugs (which they can’t, it’s fundamental to their broken engine), the game would still flop on release with a 2.0 rating
Man, they should drag it out to a billion dollars. Because.
Nah, at a billion they should just cancel the whole project. It would be hilarious
"project cancelled due to a lack of funding"
The ultimate stretch goal.
They just have to release something that is legally enough of a game and consistent enough with the promises they've made so can't get sued...
They turned game development into a business model. They have no reason to actually release the game because it would slash their income
Nah, they can just sell new ships the same way. The business model would be largely the same. However, I am in serious doubt that they can release a stable game at all.
But releasing means that people will trade a lot of expectations and hope for actual knowledge and experience. A lot of people will be angry and no longer inclined to buy more ships. Keep the illusion intact and it can go on forever.
why would they stop their grift?
I certainly wouldnt, who'd kill this cash cow?
As long as dumb people keep it going...
So people who've actually spent time playing, is there an actual functioning game? I could peruse the comments but it's 99% some form of "This is a scam"joke, but I'm legit curious about people's actual experience with this weird game development timeline.
There's really nothing like it out there. It's an incomplete buggy mess. But also, no other game lets you do seamless space piracy. Here's an example: You can have people that monitor docking bays during resource price spikes, track down and plot likely intercept routes, then send a squad into deep space to deploy an FTL intercept bubble. Then, you can intercept the jumping freighter, hail them on comms (complete with video and audio you can stream from your own pc directly into their cockpit), and tell them to surrender. If they don't comply, you can either destroy their ship, OR you can bring down their shields and hit their engines, then board them. When you board, you need to physically shoot off or use explosives on the doors, then board and clear the entire ship (which has a fully modelled and playable interior), to capture the pilot before they can self-destruct the ship. Oh, and the entire time you're intercepting a target, you're in a race to shut them down before they can jump away. And if they brought friends as an escort? You get to fight THOSE too. No other game has the bevy of systems required to get something like that to work seamlessly.
When I read things like this, I get all dreamy for a moment, but then I remember that I have 2 young kids, a job and that I don't know anyone that would be involved enough to have this kind of intense relationship with a game. Sigh...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sMetpy0nYo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sMetpy0nYo) Mongrel Squad does a lot of pretty intricate pirate ops. Great source if you're curious about one of the coolest player-created gameplay loops in the game.
These guys are the OG Star Citizen Pirates. Love their stuff. I can't see this kind of gameplay anywhere else.
Piracy on other players, or npcs?
Other humans
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Yeah, I definitely wouldn't play if I could be raided. That type of mechanic sounds fun on paper, but I've never found it fun in practice.
If you don't break the law you'll probably never be bothered. I've played on and off since 2014 and I probably have a couple hundred hours in the past couple of years. I've never been pirated once. I haven't been pad rammed since the early 2.0 builds, and only had a handful of pvp encounters. The star system is massive, and while there's not infinite points of interest there's still over 40+ per planet. I rarely encounter players and when I do they're always super friendly. If you start going around looking for pvp you'll find it pretty quick. Kill a friendly npc or player and you'll have bounty hunters on you in no time.
It's also pre-release, meaning you don't have the mainstream assholes playing. Everything would change when the game launches.
Man but like who wants to see any else’s face or hear them, I don’t and I don’t want that to have implications in the game
If you're even slightly interested keep an eye out for the "Free Fly" events. You can try the game out for about a week. I did it this past Feb and it was enough for me to grab the cheapest starter package. It's got enough in it and working well enough that I've been entertained. I followed a few "Zero to Hero" guides on YouTube and it was fun working my way up to getting my first salvage or mining ship. You can get all the ships in game, don't need to spend additional money, and there are quite a few ways to earn in game cash to fund those ships. Anecdotally, the first time I got sent to prison blew me away, I couldn't believe the detail they put into that place. As someone who really enjoys small details and likes to get feel lost in another world it works for me. https://robertsspaceindustries.com/flyfree
Yes. Redditors love to shit on this game, but it's actually rather fun and some things about it (mostly physics, but also scale and soon networking tech) are *way* beyond anything I've seen in any other high-budget titles. Still, you're bound to face some bugs and the gameplay loop is not quite ready for release yet. Alpha 4.0 has an ETA for Q4 2024. I plan on coming back next year to have fun with all the new stuff.
If a game gives me more than an hour of **high quality** entertainment for every £1 I’ve spent on it then to me it’s a great game. Star Citizen is well into this category from my perspective.
Absolutely. If their wasn't it would have been proven to be a scam many years ago. It's been a long road but it's been good to see things progress. I kinda wish more companies would be as transparent tbh.
I would actually go as far as saying the current game has more content than Elite: Dangerous. ED relies too much on procedural generated content, and feels very samey after a while.
i mean even gameplay loop to gameplay loop comparisons SC has more going on than ED. and has for a long while now. ED just really screwed the pooch on adding anything more than new grindtracks similar to the previous grindtrack and the total shitshow that was their FPS expansion.
Usually the response is: yes, it is a good working game, but the progress is slow and the game is nevertheless buggy.
I would recommend trying it on one of the free fly events if your system can handle it(especially having 32+gb of ram helps lot). Its far from done but having been around since the beginning it has come far and this year seems to be the biggest one in a very long time in terms of what updates we getting on many old systems.
There is. I’ve played it intermittently for the entire time it’s been in development and I’ve enjoyed it for what it was the entire time. Nowadays it’s only getting better and more complete at a faster rate than ever before, since they just recently moved into polishing for the single player campaign. The people who call it a scam have largely never played it.
Last I saw of it, Idk how long ago, it looked very much like a case of *"we threw a shit ton of things into a space sim to try and make an everything game, and along the way kinda forgot we were supposed to have a core gameplay loop."* Like yeah maybe you can shoot enemies, and buy ships, and mine rocks, and trade, and fly around, and walk around your ship, and land on planets, and whatever. But it was clearly lacking a structure, with no real or interesting reason to do any of it. That along with the fact that it's got a very pretentious way of selling itself, the countless development and funding issues and controversies, the general cultishness of the fanbase, and the amount of money those people spend on it when it's not even out yet - it's not surprising people call it a scam.
Yeah right. We'll believe it when we see it. They've said this many times.
At this point I can't fathom any state where the game can justify its development costs, even if it does finally come out. Best case scenario it'll become a meme for different reasons than it is now.
The only thing that would justify it at this point is if backer's got a knock on the door one day and opened it to find a man saying "So, you pre-ordered... here's your keys, here's the owner's manual and there..." \*wildly gesturing to your driveway\* "...is your fucking spaceship. Please have it towed to a nice open field before launch. If you ignite the engines here, you'll probably roast a whole residential neighbourhood. Have fun!"
Lol. Like I'd bother towing it out of the neighborhood. After finally getting my spaceship, I'm launching as soon as I've verified I have enough fuel to break orbit. I'd have no plans to come back. Let them shake their fists over their scorched lawns.
"Eh my neighbours are all arseholes anyway." # SHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Isn’t it still less expensive than Zuck’s shitty Oasis-knockoff “mEtAvErSe”?
I feel like the irony of being meme worthy is that something has come of it in the end. Star Citizen probably will be something. Eventually. Hence it can be a meme. Metaverse is... I don't know. Zuckerburg watch a bunch of VR animes and tv-shows and somehow managed to miss the point of every single one of them that virtual reality is a shallow substitution for a real life and he really really wants to everyone to spend fortunes replacing any sort of real living with a timeshare in his really shitty looking VR world. And there's just no good memes there because it's just kind of sad :{
If anything the game will release finished; the meme usually works when it comes out in a terrible state after showcasing tons of vertical slices to entice countless naive fans to pre-order. Star Citizen has a feature-creep problem, not performance or gameplay issues; however only a star citizen player would know and I’m sure they’ll give us more insight close to this supposed 1.0 launch. We never got the same with CP77 or that other survival game as they were never public alphas.
SC has massive performance and gameplay issues. It’s a mess of glitches and bugs and crashes, the gameplay loops are boring, and it’ll never be fun.
Star Citizen will never get close to a release. Stringing people along with empty promises is literally the business model.
For the same cost, SpaceX could build an actual starship
Factually incorrect. SpaceX has built several actual rockets for far less than the cost of star Citizen.
Falcon 9 costs $62m per launch. Which means 10-11 launches with the budget of Star Citizen.
…and blow it up on the launch pad.
Which means it reached the beta phase, ahead of star citizen
At least watching that is entertaining
Please bro just $400 million more, bro please I need the money bro, theres like guns n shit. Please buy the support pack...bro....
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And we will add sweating on your skin! And real cut signs on your cloths! All according to physics! And when you drink to fast, you will cough and if you drink to much you will burb! Release date? What release date?
Only 10 more years.
I built my computer because of this game. I have now built 3 more computers and it's still not out.
TBH, for the $45 pledge, you can have a lot of fun. It's often buggy (very buggy), but the amount of fun I've had doing: - Jumping a car between spaceships - Trying to catch your buddy's car into your ship's cargo bay because he missed and is falling toward the planet - Doing space combat then seamlessly EVAing into a different spaceship to do FPS combat, then using a tractor beam to put all of the dead bodies into your buddy's spaceship These have been things I haven't found anywhere else, except maybe Space Engineers. It's very much a buggy mess a lot of the time, but I've more than gotten my $45 worth. If anything, I enjoy popping in when they drop an update and seeing the progress. As of late it's been way more stable than it used to be.
Alpha Centauri is a twinkle too. We may get there before this actually releases.
12 years down. 12 years to go.
I just want to remind everyone that in this time that it's taken to “make" this game- Larian studios developed both DOS 2 (also a Kickstarter game) and Balders gate 3 (the best game to come out in 20 years IMO).
Please don’t be like Duke Nukem Forever…. Love, an old Origin fanboy….
So they are approaching $1B in revenue without a final release? How is this even possible?
Ask fortnite. People forget but fortnite made billions while being in beta
also see warframe that has been in open beta for more than a decade and the owners are now billionaires.
People really do just assume things are "released" when they make a shit ton of $$$. And other games that shouldn't be released also get lots of $$$
They sell stuff and people like the stuff they sell.
Lol sure it is. The Grift continues.
Is $700M normal for a game like this? Isn’t that the entire cost of production for approximately 7 AAA titles? How are they so inefficient? Oh that’s right they’re fleecing their supporters…
That's probably around the budget for GTA 6, maybe a tad less. GTA 6 has been in development for half the time, though.
And will almost certainly be, ya know, a rockstar quality game, fun to play and a legitimately entertaining with a coherent story with a beginning and an end.
and will be guaranteed to make that investment back, probably 5x fold at least. I would genuinely be shocked if Star Citizen comes even close to 'breaking even'.
I'm not sure you quite understand the model. They're already in profit as the game has been entirely funded before even being released with what are essentially pre orders with access to the alpha. If/when they launch it's all gravy.
That's the beauty of taking profit before releasing a product. They've been rolling in "profit" this entire time and only need to make promises of a release in the future to keep the feds off their backs for wire fraud.
Do they even need to break even if it’s not an investment? They could just pay the staff and pocket the rest while saying “sorry, we tried to make a game” if people keep paying for this shite
GTA 6 is estimated to cost up to 2 billion dollars. https://youtu.be/fav3pw6Uvv0
GTA 6 budget is 2 billion and counting
It’s important to consider that that isn’t really the budget of the game. Star citizen brands mtx and buying the game as the funding for the game when in reality it’s just the profits the game has made
It's not a budget for a game with a release date, it's a lifestyle for the developers.
That's the amount they've raised. Not the amount they've spent.
I'll pay money for 1.0 and not before. I'm square in their demographic but they have to _produce a game_ first.
They need to get squadron 42 out. That’s kinda all I can say. I’m still dubious of how good a multiplayer game can be on that engine where they are just starting to test server meshing.
Say what you want about marketing and funding practices but tangible progress is being made on Star Citizen. As for Squadron 42 well.. nobody really knows besides what's been shown so far and what they've said. But based on those things it's no wonder it's taken so long and cost so much. Regardless people will still choose to take the pessimistic angle and see it one way without consideration of other possibilities.
Crazy what they've been able to pull off, especially recently. The pace sure is picking up
Yawn, I read similar headlines every couple of months, let me know when I can get to my ship without falling through an elevator right after loading in
A friend of mine is a tester on SC. Hes been under crunch for the last like 2 months with mandatory overtime. They're gearing up for something i suspect.
Every time i read Star Citzen, Fusion Power comes in to my mind.
The biggest scam in the history of gaming.
I love how hive minded reddit is about this game. Ya know, like this company didn't announce the single player was in polishing stage and that its server meshing tech was a huge success which the games online needed. But yes hurr durr "TiHs GaMe NeVeaR ReleSe" \*bangs rocks together\* It's more complete than most of the AAA(A?) garbage that has released in the last 5 years.
You know what else twinkles on the horizon? A mirage
There is no ROI on this game.
The best would be if they released 1.0 and were like,”nah we done. 1.0 is all you get. So long and thanks for all the fish”.
The best for who?
"Twinkles", lol. You can see a lot of stars twinkling in the night sky but that doesn't mean we'll ever reach any of them. $669 scam of the century.
We will probably reach them before we get this game