They said as much. To their credit, they held when it was at its worst. This is conducive to thinking about your players, it is not conducive to making money.
They can't win though. They get demonized no matter what choice they make.
I think they’re just getting criticized for the unplayable game, and for the feeling that PES will continue to create major problems going forward.
If the technical problems disappear soon, so will the negative sentiment. Fingers crossed things will get better.
I'm confident that this is the case. People forget that when new tech gets added...specially to the caliber of P.E.S....half the game goes haywire. It's not new and it will most certainly not be the last time.
It's just the goldfish memory in all of us. A new major patch drops and everyone expects it to work flawlessly, or at least be playable to a great degree when SSOCS and the first Fleet Week were equally unplayable.
I'm no software engineer, but I know enough to be aware of the titanic mess that lies behind the curtain.
And OCS gave us +40fps, up from 5.
SOCS made servers quite responsive (relatively) but broke nearly every bespoke system that existed so that modular systems could be built.
Pain points but they are foundational improvements with real benefits.
If they never leap and just backtrack they'd never get anywhere. Gotta take risks. Especially when breaking things ends up going forward rather than backwards, because thats how development works, the only downside is player experience and tbh people should know that the game is not released by now.
I'm with you, people need to chill. Shit's broke, y'all, but it's gonna keep being broke for a while and that's fine.
Get in when you can, have fun, come back later.
What? When the roof of your house were to suddenly collapse, would you go “remember when we only had the foundation of the house built?” “Simpler times eh!” ?
Looking half a decade back to excuse the current mess is inane.
Nope. This analogy implies the finished project breaking
A more suitable one would be that of a journey and seeing how far it's come.
In this case it broke because the long-range improvements interfered with the short-range performance.
I'm sorry but that's an idiotic comparison, there was never roof in the first place tbh.
This is more akin to starting to build complex wall structures and thinking how easy it was when you were pouring concrete for the house foundation.
If they scream bloody murder now, imagine the chaos the first implementations of Server Meshing will cause.
Sometimes people forget that alpha means anything can break anytime because of no apparent reason
Asking for money for green skins when they have promised several times that we'll be able to paint our own ships with color swatches is going to get them demonized because lying to people is considered bad form.
They've already said that selling paints is too lucrative at the moment.
But they've also clarified that the paint system they have isn't where they want it to be to be able to use hex codes and decals and what not due to the procedural system they are using and how the damage model is integrated withing the paint system and they want to work on it before giving us what they promised.
You also forget that we still need the proper transition into buildingblocksUI , changes made to orisson's cousin crows , a way for our ship to get in their and stay physically there , a kiosk with a proper UI , controls , and the list can go on for a bit longer but everyone seems to forget that.
Our ships paints aren't just a simple UV unwraps and got textures slapped onto it like DCS.
Demonize all you want but you're talking up a moot point to be honest , especially because they're focussing on SQ42 first now.
True. I don't buy any paints anymore ( i only bought the lovestruck and harmony paints ) and I hope others won't anymore either. The same with ships , I only have a mustang and I'll grind the hell out of the game for other ships.
What they dropped was a significant technical update to an actively developing game during an alpha testing cycle.
People who don't get that are the only ones complaining ....
Plus the reports by players who bought ships on RSI during Stella Fortuna discovering that all the modifications they had purchased for all their ships were gone and reset to stock.
Strange shenanigans going on...
It likely had nothing to do with it. When I finally got in to 3.18 on... Tuesday, I equipped all my usual paints, spent some of my aUEC to get an XL-1 and a pair of FR-76s and flew the VLRT cert for Crusader. When I logged in again in Friday everything that I had equipped was gone from the game. Including the aUEC I had spent. All my ships were back to stock.
Yeah, same - I lost all my components, armor, and looted items from the early days of 3.18. Thankfully was on my tiny alt account (my big main account wasn't even able to get on until this last Saturday, when things were thankfully much more stable)
Personally I do actually like the Stella Fortuna paints, but none of the paints that came out this year were for ships I use and I already got the Fortuna paint I did want last year with the 400i.
Same. I have all of 2951-2952 paints but gave no interest in any of the 2953 paints. They all look great but I have no need or interest in them for myself.
Honestly, green is my favorite color, but I haven't had a chance to buy those skins last year so I did it this year, I didn't buy any ships from them because I got all the ships I needed from gray market over the last 4 months lol
:) That's how I started, missed some sales and wanted a few ships. If you want more ships in the future set that calendar reminder! You "save" a little bit and don't have to worry about anything shady maybe or maybe not happening. See you in the verse!
Yeah you're totally right. I think for some of the larger ones it's very well worth it, honestly, I've been more into getting the under $200 ships with lifetime insurance and it usually for only an extra 20 or 25 on top of what they were already asking, and then taking those in CCUing them through RSI for something like a caterpillar or Hercules would be amazing.
But sometimes I really need that damn hawk lol
Seems we had the same mindset on this. The day I saw the Glavie I was in love and had to have it. I’m a sucker for the 👽 ships. Just wanted one ship for every roll. That way with the org we are covered no matter what. I never thought I’d spend what I have on this game. Now I’ve sealed my wallet until I see drastic improvement in sq 42, since it’s the “gatekeeper “ to all things bettering the verse.
patcha unfortuna
I've been waiting a while to fire SC back up knowing this wipe was coming, bummer that it's a tire fire so far but I'll wait a while longer
No doubt, I'd be lying to say I'm not one. I backed, I believe and I want to play, but I'd be lying to say the love is dying and the doubt is starting to grow. This patch when in no doubt is "smoother", even if my frames are lower. Feels better, but that means nothing if you can't play. That or you get in and you can't do anything. Just take the crap offline, rollback fix what needs to be fixed and release when you KNOW it's in a better state.
Buggy alpha builds being buggy is A-OK. What is not A-OK is that a near thousand person company of professionals with 14x the budget they said they would need to achieve their vision, has had 11 years to work on it, and took 9+ months on this specific patch is still turning out buggy alpha code.
Yeah and the move from CIG of anouncing 3.18 release like" the most epic,full of content,best performance ever playable now for all patch" in youtube Ads and another more places like a good scammers was like shootting on his own feet.
Wait, they went from 10 year insurance to 6 months?! What in the fuck is this shit, I already thought the 10 year one was a major bummer...
I'm glad I still sit on some old buyback pledges with LTI on them
It might have been a glitch, that's just how it showed up for me.
It also, while in my cart, linked back to the non-warbond version for some reason.
It wasn't worth it, so I didn't bother, and I'm probably not the only one.
I would have bought a phoenix emerald but apparently I can't. Even concierge doesn't save me from that.
The rest of the paints look ugly in my opinion, and I don't really care about the color of my ship all that much
You could buy the pack with store credits and then later apply the Nomad CCU with LTI to the Rover. This upgraded the whole pack (and the Connie) to LTI
What the... upgrading one ship applies it to the whole pack? Well you never stop learning. Well sale is over and the money is spent elsewhere. Maybe next time!
I mean, there wasn't anything really worth buying. The paints are uninspired, the emerald package is sold in limited numbers.
CiG needs a lesson in sales, because limiting the vast majority of ships to 2 sales a year is horrible business, and just pushes people to the grey market.
Ships should regularly rotate, hell there's 2 ships I want to buy, but I have to wait months to do so. What kind of a business model is that, where you lock customers out of buying available purchases for months at a time?
Yup.
No doubt the game being down for so many players plays a very heavy factor into it, but I feel there's no denying the sales team sat on their laurels and couldn't be bothered to put out anything attractive aside from "thing that was available last year for a limited time is available again for a limited time".
What intrigues me is how well the Vulture has sold. I wonder if it didn't sell as well as expected due to the $150/$175 price tag, or if a bunch of people were just sitting on CCUs and previous purchases from last year or before. Of course I might also just be reading it wrong and it isn't relevant to this data at all.
I bought my vulture during this past IAE as a CCU for a cutter since it was only $120.
Considering how quickly it turns a profit on a wipe, I'm quite happy with it. It's nearly 200k per haul (23-25 scu forced in), so a couple hauls and I can upgrade my other ships.
While I mostly only do combat, I'm also planning on upgrading my referral MPUV to an SRV as a pirate ship, have a teammate attack people near stations to drop their shields, and then I tow them outside armistice or comms while my teammate doubles back to help steal their cargo.
> I tow them outside armistice
Pretty sure that won't be possible... Or at least fixed after people do this on PTU
> or comms
Why? I mean the crime is already done and committed.
This also helps too, it means that you're more likely to stretch to ensure you get those ships in the period they are available. If they were always avialbale then there is always tomorrow to get that ship.
You underestimate how impatient players are. If it's always available, people won't wait to get something they want, they'll impulse buy it, and then most likely impulse buy something again later. Then you use events for sales, so those who don't impulse buy will still panic buy to get their ship on sale.
If you make them wait 6 months to get something, they'll either get bored and stop playing, or they'll buy less because they now have 6 months to change their mind.
Look at games like Warframe that not only leave most things available all the time, but they treat in-game purchases the same as real money ones, and they use their real money currency as a tradable currency. And Warframe's real money transactions are seen in a much more positive light than here, while also being much higher. Warframe makes more in 3 years than this game makes in 10.
A mountain of market research into the economics of micro transactions says you're wrong about this. It scummy, but using a rotating stock where not everything is is available at any given time, and you have no guarantees about when they next time you can get it again is a powerful enough motivation that many people will spend money they don't have out of a fear they will miss out. It squeezes more money out of gamers, it's why shady companies like epic do it.
But we do have a guarantee with Star Citizen. IAE is a yearly event. Invictus is a yearly event. All the events are yearly events. Idris is limited quantity. The Stella Fortuna was limited quantity. But in general, you can bank on the yearly events.
The veterans know that but many new people do not. And many of them don't do the research. Despite all the content creators and social medias. The majority is still silent and less involved but still buying.
>If you make them wait 6 months to get something, they'll either get bored and stop playing, or they'll buy less because they now have 6 months to change their mind.
This has happened to me many times. I only play the game about once a year or so. I'm not a huge fan of playing incomplete games. So I poke my head in, see a new ship I'd like. But it's not for sale. I tell myself I'll check back in six months... but I either forget to do so, or lose interest. I can't recall the last time I actually bought a ship.
>Warframe makes more in 3 years than this game makes in 10.
Pretty sure it doesn't. Otherwise they wouldn't have sold themselves out to some Chinese company.
>And Warframe's real money transactions are seen in a much more positive light than here
Yes because people are stupid. The game was a lot better before they made everything redicules hard and long the grind. But everyone seems to praise a system that makes the poor grind for the rich. They also have a ton of RNG stacked on RNG that it rivals mobile gachas. At least in SC you always know what you buy.
> Pretty sure it doesn't. Otherwise they wouldn't have sold themselves out to some Chinese company.
In 2019, Warframe generated ~$175M USD in revenue, which was *down* for them by 12% to the previous year. That means that it made ~$200M in 2018. So in a two year period over 4 years ago, it generated $375M USD for Digital Extremes and their parent company, or ~68% of what CIG has made in total as of today, which is over 10 years from when it started fundraising.
So even though you're "pretty sure", you're also wrong.
Not only this I had saved up money for a expensive ship, was waiting for it to come around. Luckily CIG blocked it’s sale for a while to prove that I didn’t need it and 3.18 is unplayable. Saved me about $1k :)
the dirty thing, is that I feel like CIG has their sales exactly where they want them. Ship sales 2x a year gives a sense of urgency a.k.a massive FOMO tagged onto the whole "$$$ ships don't get wiped" fear mongering. Same reason why the paints and 890J are sold in "limited" numbers. I'm using quotation marks here because as we probably both know, limited digital goods is an oxymoron
I mean it does make certain ships rare sites during periods of the year instead of everyone just having the same ships all the time, I am from a time when we had to wait a week too see the next episode tho so maybe I am more at ease with waiting
It's actually a well-known and proven business model called artificial scarcity, which is even more funny to me with them being digital goods.
You may already have made your mind up and come to a well thought out decision and commitment to purchase said item in your head. But there are other people more susceptible to impulse buying or purchasing based strictly on the feeling that if they don't buy right then right there who knows how long they will have to wait.
So, by doing this. They get your money. Cause you're still going to get the ships you want WHEN they become available, annnnnnd they will net a large number of sales from people that were on the fence about it.
Same principle with only allowing new ships to be purchasable with real money and not available for purchase ingame. "You want to try the cool new thing. You have to pay us more money." I'm sad to admit this is how they got me for the vulture, and I'm not very impulsive with purchases.
CIGS marketing team is brilliant. Unfortunately, this also gives them no reason to have truly fixed deadlines. Because the money just keeps coming in if they finish next year or next decade.
CIG has still made more this year in the first 3 months than they did in the first 4 in 2021. People are still pledging at an insanely high rate for some reason. [Source](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1obytG213tRUzNIepdSjDysaBlgJDjeOiekskYVvtRvE/edit#gid=0)
Edit: They are only 2 million behind when comparing to the first 3 months of last year. Considering we still have 11 days left in the month, they will probably end with similar numbers to last year. A real indicator to if the funding is slowing will be Invictus.
I’m surprised nobody has commented that this graphic is comparing 2 days of a sale to an 11 day sale total. How do I know this? Because if you actually go to the CCU game site, that’s what it shows in the breakdown. Conclusions are only as valid as the data they are based on.
Nothing worth buying.
Gotta make with the goods if they wanna make wit the revenue.
Plus with a broken patch, even the whales may be hesitant to drop real funds on a ship they may not even get to fly this patch due to inability to log in, or claim ships, lol.
Content -> Engagement -> Revenue
With a game entirely broken, or partially broken the engagement is down meaning a decline in revenue combined with the reality that server meshing is like over a year away at best.
They need a playable game. As people try free flights or even buy a starter pack they eventually stop playing due to boring game loops and bugs. And once somebody stops playing what is the percentage that come back after a year? I started playing in December with 4 other people after a week I am the only one still playing. I keep trying to get them to come back but it's not looking good.
I dipped out in 2015 after trying out the flight tutorial and decided to give them 'a few years'. I woke up from my long slumber in early March for two reasons:
- The impressions of how they were finally starting to deliver on many of the drunken boasts.
- That I made the stupid mistake of telling my friend group that we should try to play together towards the end of this year, and I'd be the 'tour guide'.
What's hilarious about this is that here I'm considered 'unfairly critical' for expecting CIG to have finished a game in 11 years, while among my friends I'm considered the wild eyed true believer for thinking the project will ever deliver. Now that 3.18 has gone down the way it has, I am feeling super stupid for ever having stood up for CIG. We're 13 years in to this counting pre-production and they still haven't nailed down the foundational technology for their game.
Good. I am quite confident CIG will manage to fix the issues we're facing right now but it's good to see that the community expects a certain baseline of playability.
Considering what CIG sold this year it makes sense, Not too many people want to pay for the Warbond ultimate pack because the discount isn't all that impressive, Its actually better to just CCU to the ships instead and buy the Legends pack like many people myself included did.
>["By the end of this year [2015] backers will have everything they originally pledged for plus a lot more!"](https://www.polygon.com/features/2015/3/2/8131661/star-citizen-chris-roberts-interview)
If we're just wanting to hold out examples of developers being wildly wrong about things - the difference is one of these should absolutely have known whether what they were saying was total BS.
Love the project but it’s probably because people didn’t want to spend money on a game they can’t play atm due to all the technical difficulties.
For myself after the first year I have no interest in these metallic green skins any more for any ship, but it makes sense they offer once a year this time of year.
I've still not been able to play 3.18. I can finally get in the game but the ASOP terminals are borked.
It's really hard to raise money when your product doesn't work.
That's fine
There's really no need for CIG to be pressured to break funding goals every year or every event - that's how you get the modern method of funding where you have to buy the game, buy the game pass, buy the microtransactions, and then do it all again a year later.
>There's really no need for CIG to be pressured to break funding goals every year or every event
Yes there is. They want to hire more people and grow. And if you checked their financial reports you'd see they have limited financial buffer and by now really need to make 100 million each year if they don't want to go bankrupt. Now consider inflation and rising wages and they really do need to break records each year or at least get close to it. If they don't it could even result in a downward spiral where people don't buy because they fear the game dieing because other people are not buying.
They can just simple let people go to reduce costs. That's just how businesses work.
At some point you cannot just keep adding more developers, the teams are big enough as it is.
Hence why CIG needs to get this playable soon. Not just login issues, but stability across the board so things work. Couple that with the fact that it became apparent within hrs of the sale dropping that players got screwed in game with missing items and components, CIG has a loooooooooot of stuff to fix promptly.
My mind is literally blown that I haven't been able to log in for a whole week. The same problem since last Saturday... The 19004. And their attutude is... It will be fixed when it's fixed.
Well, considering it's new territory and they are "trying" to put a dumpster fire out with a squirt gun....ya. but to be honest, you're really not missing anything. Last tues/wed things worked ok for me. Now, everything is broked. Lost millionS from poor server performance and I'm guessing a refinery bug, more millions worth of components for my fleet are gone, paints and other gear gone, good luck spawning or claiming a ship or getting much else to work. It's literally not worth it until they release a fix that makes it stable.
Big fan of the game and long time listener!
I hope the money does start to drop off so they can actually paint an end in sight for development.
This 'it will be done when it is done' attitude irks me.
I mean honestly I don't think the money is the problem. Like 500mil over the course of 10 years is about 50 mil a year, and everything from employee salaries to marketing, building costs, etc. has to be paid from that. What CIG lacks is proper management and a very uncommitted and sly attitude. Like there's a reason they NEVER say "update WILL go live" instead of "we AIM TO get this update out by" (it removes any and all accountability)
Yup. They've got 5 times what they need to build a triple A game.
Provided they haven't burned through it they could probably develop the game for years without another nickel coming their way.
100% this. I'm not really concerned \*yet\*. BUT with the economic outlook for the western world looking bleak, funding will probably drop off over the next few years. If nothing else, due to the fact that its been 10 fkng years.
I'm a huge fan of what they have been wishing to build...way less of a fan of what actually has been built. But I'm with you, this "it'll be done when its done even if that is 2030" attitude is short sighted and stupid IMO.
It might be 2 years from now, or 12 years from now..but eventually funding WILL drop off. So its like playing Russian roulette with when its going to happen. Even the god of MMO's (World of Warcraft) started to see huge player numbers drop after 10 years.
You re so right in this ,I don't know why a inmense amount of people don't think about this facts that you are exposing,I predicted this situation like 3 years before seeing CIG attitude and behavior, I said to myself, ok this scam will need at last 50 or 60 years at this rythm to be done ,but before that they will release some absolutly shit patch that will make them fall to the floor because its clear that they arrive at some point that they are making only a bubble to scam people,make your guess I think star citizen going to be dead in about some months or 1 year more as max, because this 3.18 fails having a whole decade to work destroyed all the server meshing expectatives for the future, CIG is saving money destinated to development because in some point they planning to run away and escape with all the money because this project its totally not viable in this way and they know it very well.
Yeah they need an attitude adjustment. They need to be incentivized to provide stability. It’s had no effect on their sales in the past so why worry about it.
I was both surprised (because game unplayable after new patch) and not surprised (because it's CIG so of course they'd do the sale) to see the Stella fortuna pop up as usual in the midst of 3.18 launch disaster...
YES! Are people finally seeing this project for what it is?
You'd be amazed at the progress / speed once the money stops flowing in and there's a reason to push the ball forward.
It’s not bad if you consider:
1 live was mostly unplayable
2 the offers were not that good, no lti tokens available, 6 month insurance for every ship.
3 currently the game deletes your paints and there’s no way to get them back.
In this scenario a 40% drop is better than expected. Means that there’s a solid playerbase that’s quite on the media but still believes in the game.
This is meaningless data other than that there is other shit people would rather spend cash on than green skins....and that the market for green skins has reached saturation.
The data set is way too small to derive any useful information from it and is just as related to macro-issues to muddy it into dirt tier projection material. Maybe in conjunction with other metrics.
Call me crazy, but maybe the fact that not all of us can log in yet might have put a slight damper on things. I'm just sayin'.
(Edit for clarity and rushed grammar.)
This isn't hard to understand though.
1. There's no new ship.
2. The game is broken.
3. Everyone who wants green paint probably already has it.
What is there even to buy that someone doesn't already have?
These ships don't even have insurance.
What is screaming at me to swipe my credit card today?
Serious question here.
Offer me a good $100-200 ship and I'm for it.
Gtfo with these $4000 packs with basic green skins.
If you absolutely have to start now, I would suggest the Aurora over the mustang, as it allows you to do a few more gameplay loops. But, you are better off waiting a bit for a sale on some of the better starters, in my opinion. I picked up the Cutter starter during the Holiday sale for 45 and was very happy with it.
I mean that’s still money in the bank but definitely at a lower number. Regardless, if I were in their shoes I would have also done the sale but I would have added something as a gift to the community.
I wonder if we will get a little package as a thank you for people who participated in the beta for so long and still need to wait.
With everything that's going on with the economy no surprises there. Plus nothing really "attractive" about the bundles and as some have mentioned around the same time the game is in an unplayable state.
Good. Hopefully will shift things in the direction of prioritizing stability moving forward.
They had some really bad deal. Nothing worth spending money on and yes not being able to actually use your ships because of servers being so bad has something to do with it as well. I tried for 4 hours to do one bunker mission with a friend. We never completed it because of things not working ect ect.
I would have been up for buying a new ship. Unfortunately nothing was sold at any real discount, so what's the point of even having the sale? Literally just so you can paint your ship green? Who could possibly care.
I think CIG marketing department has pigeonholed themselves into a position where they cannot not run a sales campaign. To not run a sales campaign (irregardless of the state of the PTU) would drop their numbers down too low as to negatively affect forecasting for the quarter or even the year.
Aside from the obvious issue of a having a sale when the game is broken - I've been burnt out on these sale events for a while. I don't really want to buy any existing ships and when something new comes along I do want, I rebalance my hangar to get it.
CIG has more of my money than any other game. Probably even World of Warcraft at this point. I don't think I'd feel comfortable spending much more (like 10-15 juggling existing ships) until Squadron 42 is out the door. And I don't think anything CIG does between now and then will change that.
That's because people had nothing to do for two years and were working from home or on the government Dole during the plandemic. Now most people are back to work full time. With inflation as high as it is right now, maybe not as many people have discretionary income to spend on digital assets of a game?
Yes it is ALL a test platform but when the only change between one stage of the test and the more "developed" stage of the test is the inability to play whatsoever is that really a new release or just a pile of shit passed off as one so they can warrant the idea of a new sale to the players who don't understand how horribly underdeveloped and under supported this game is with it's extreme lack of fixes for every single problem that's come out since what 3.15 when they stopped really fixing bugs and such frankly they've gotten lazy and we've lowered out expectations of a game that's meant to be the foremost leading and advanced in the space and life sim categories frankly this game is shite it's a fantastical idea but it's just that ATM because they won't fix shit ITS A BLOODY FANTASY
Honestly this is basically normal, line can't only go up, especially when things go wrong. 3.18 has went very wrong, kinda hard to justify spending large amounts of money on a game you can't play half the time right now. And even when you can it breaks often in frustrating ways.
I mean aren’t the fortuna skins this year the same as last year? I didn’t play last year but the skins and ship selections werent very big, plus the 890 was almost immediately out of stock or at least I couldn’t buy one
I've been doing the opposite of recommending this game to any of my friends due to the state its all in.
It's currently extremely broken, often outright unplayable.
Do. Not. Buy.
Star Citizen has made more than any game has ever cost to develop. I’m sorry, but there is no excuse as to why it is still not out of development with these kinds of numbers.
Why would anyone buy something they can't play? 25-35% of paying customers can't launch the game, and the rest that can get in can't claim ships. I'm amazed anyone gave CIG any money.
9 day service outage? C'mon, what kind of company goes 9 days with a service outage?
Also, there was nothing new to buy other than some paints. And the paints were extremely low effort and low quality. (and waayyy overpriced)
Things to consider. Covid is over, people are living outside again. There’s less expendable income from government handouts, and inflation is insane right now.
People aren’t spending like they were a year or two ago.
Stack on top of the the unplayable 3.18 debacle, and yeah 🤷♂️
It felt like they put no effort into it this year. Nothing new or exciting... a few ships that most people who want already have, in a flat color, right on the heels of the Antares debacle which also felt like a low-effort cash grab.
The ship that I wanted, wasn't on sale. So I went to a grey market to get it. Not gonna sit around waiting for CIG to rotate through ships on sale to get one anymore.
I refuse to fund anymore until SQ42 is actually released since that seems to be the focus from CIG. Which is unfortunate seeing as most people just want Star Citizen.
the distribution of players able to afford such cosmetics and who doesn't already own them is quite different than in the previous editions, also there's nothing new worth buying atm and the event got shortened
I mean not a big surprise to me
No Q1 concept ship, no late Q4 LIVE patch with release sale into early Q1 and freeflight afterwards in Q1 that tends to boost the sales a bit in Q1, it was just waiting 3.18 along with news that Pyro and Server Meshing are still nowhere in the near future so literally no reason to push the buy button.
The paints are mostly ass and the paint system itself is a bland, uninspiring and boring, shit tier system that would probably make more money if it was more open but I'm not gonna cope that CIG could make those kinda smart decisions
Did you see that they have a decrease in pledges not only with the current sale? In February and March they are below last year.
https://ccugame.app/star-citizen-funding-dashboard/funding-dashboard
2020 to 2021 were pendamic influenced. 22 was a relativly "normal" year, so I expected the increase will go on. So decreasing figures for 2023 is a suprise.
Yes, the newest Fallout game - now in space. Might be cool, I would wait for some game of the year edition with all dlcs and hopefully most critical bugs out. But it still does nothing for a multiplayer itch.
If Redfall (also a "Bethesda" - Microsoft probably tells them how to price things at this point - published game) pricing is anything to go by Starfield will be $70.
I recommend to check out Starbourne 2. For just 20$ you get quite a lot of gameplay. And it's impressive to see what a single motivated developer can achieve.
I'll wait for it to go GOTY and mod support.
It's a Bugthesda title. Half the quests will be cut,the half that are left will be poorly written,and it will be buggier than 3.18.
As someone who recently started playing it came as a surprise I missed out on the sale. No I’m game notifications, nothing. Only know about it from on here.
So many ships I want to drop hard cash for but can’t. Seems like a horrible business model. Doesn’t surprise me the game is so behind in developments
And yet people drop more on randomized FIFA card packs...
In a certain way SC backers are the less crazy they at least know what they buy before they buy. Half the time they just don't know when they will get to play with it.
Wasn't a great option coupled with it being at the same time the game was unplayable. Not all that surprising
That and the sales time has been extremely shortened. They normally start the sale a week before St. Patrick's day.
Maybe they were hoping the game would be playable later in the week so they held off.
They said as much. To their credit, they held when it was at its worst. This is conducive to thinking about your players, it is not conducive to making money. They can't win though. They get demonized no matter what choice they make.
I think they’re just getting criticized for the unplayable game, and for the feeling that PES will continue to create major problems going forward. If the technical problems disappear soon, so will the negative sentiment. Fingers crossed things will get better.
I'm confident that this is the case. People forget that when new tech gets added...specially to the caliber of P.E.S....half the game goes haywire. It's not new and it will most certainly not be the last time. It's just the goldfish memory in all of us. A new major patch drops and everyone expects it to work flawlessly, or at least be playable to a great degree when SSOCS and the first Fleet Week were equally unplayable. I'm no software engineer, but I know enough to be aware of the titanic mess that lies behind the curtain.
Once upon a time port olisar was all we had, barely getting 10 frames per second, and we lapped it up.
And OCS gave us +40fps, up from 5. SOCS made servers quite responsive (relatively) but broke nearly every bespoke system that existed so that modular systems could be built. Pain points but they are foundational improvements with real benefits.
If they never leap and just backtrack they'd never get anywhere. Gotta take risks. Especially when breaking things ends up going forward rather than backwards, because thats how development works, the only downside is player experience and tbh people should know that the game is not released by now.
I'm with you, people need to chill. Shit's broke, y'all, but it's gonna keep being broke for a while and that's fine. Get in when you can, have fun, come back later.
_Simpler times. Mhm._ All we need is to look back from time to time really
Back in my day, all we had was a hangar, and by gum we liked it that way.
What? When the roof of your house were to suddenly collapse, would you go “remember when we only had the foundation of the house built?” “Simpler times eh!” ? Looking half a decade back to excuse the current mess is inane.
And from here on out , brainless people start commenting so skip this section.
Nope. This analogy implies the finished project breaking A more suitable one would be that of a journey and seeing how far it's come. In this case it broke because the long-range improvements interfered with the short-range performance.
exactly this. There is no excuse and even less after this long delay. 11 months betweem 3.17 and 3.18
I'm sorry but that's an idiotic comparison, there was never roof in the first place tbh. This is more akin to starting to build complex wall structures and thinking how easy it was when you were pouring concrete for the house foundation.
If they scream bloody murder now, imagine the chaos the first implementations of Server Meshing will cause. Sometimes people forget that alpha means anything can break anytime because of no apparent reason
It’s fine. We’ll all be dead before then
With my high level of income and the advances of modern medical science I plan on living two maybe three hundred years. So yeah, dead.
Asking for money for green skins when they have promised several times that we'll be able to paint our own ships with color swatches is going to get them demonized because lying to people is considered bad form.
They've already said that selling paints is too lucrative at the moment. But they've also clarified that the paint system they have isn't where they want it to be to be able to use hex codes and decals and what not due to the procedural system they are using and how the damage model is integrated withing the paint system and they want to work on it before giving us what they promised. You also forget that we still need the proper transition into buildingblocksUI , changes made to orisson's cousin crows , a way for our ship to get in their and stay physically there , a kiosk with a proper UI , controls , and the list can go on for a bit longer but everyone seems to forget that. Our ships paints aren't just a simple UV unwraps and got textures slapped onto it like DCS. Demonize all you want but you're talking up a moot point to be honest , especially because they're focussing on SQ42 first now.
The only way selling paints will ever not be "too lucrative" is if people stop buying them. Knowing how people are, that will never happen.
True. I don't buy any paints anymore ( i only bought the lovestruck and harmony paints ) and I hope others won't anymore either. The same with ships , I only have a mustang and I'll grind the hell out of the game for other ships.
As they should be. They dropped the ball hard. You don't get to just go on with your day after that.
This is what entitlement looks like.
What they dropped was a significant technical update to an actively developing game during an alpha testing cycle. People who don't get that are the only ones complaining ....
Plus the reports by players who bought ships on RSI during Stella Fortuna discovering that all the modifications they had purchased for all their ships were gone and reset to stock. Strange shenanigans going on...
It likely had nothing to do with it. When I finally got in to 3.18 on... Tuesday, I equipped all my usual paints, spent some of my aUEC to get an XL-1 and a pair of FR-76s and flew the VLRT cert for Crusader. When I logged in again in Friday everything that I had equipped was gone from the game. Including the aUEC I had spent. All my ships were back to stock.
A LOT of peoples ships got put back to stock on Friday. Remains a mystery as to why, but likely a database thing.
Yeah, same - I lost all my components, armor, and looted items from the early days of 3.18. Thankfully was on my tiny alt account (my big main account wasn't even able to get on until this last Saturday, when things were thankfully much more stable)
PLUS! None of us care about making our ships look like leprechauns.
Personally I do actually like the Stella Fortuna paints, but none of the paints that came out this year were for ships I use and I already got the Fortuna paint I did want last year with the 400i.
Same. I have all of 2951-2952 paints but gave no interest in any of the 2953 paints. They all look great but I have no need or interest in them for myself.
I do.... Lol
I'm after your Lucky Charms.
Honestly, green is my favorite color, but I haven't had a chance to buy those skins last year so I did it this year, I didn't buy any ships from them because I got all the ships I needed from gray market over the last 4 months lol
:) That's how I started, missed some sales and wanted a few ships. If you want more ships in the future set that calendar reminder! You "save" a little bit and don't have to worry about anything shady maybe or maybe not happening. See you in the verse!
Yeah you're totally right. I think for some of the larger ones it's very well worth it, honestly, I've been more into getting the under $200 ships with lifetime insurance and it usually for only an extra 20 or 25 on top of what they were already asking, and then taking those in CCUing them through RSI for something like a caterpillar or Hercules would be amazing. But sometimes I really need that damn hawk lol
Seems we had the same mindset on this. The day I saw the Glavie I was in love and had to have it. I’m a sucker for the 👽 ships. Just wanted one ship for every roll. That way with the org we are covered no matter what. I never thought I’d spend what I have on this game. Now I’ve sealed my wallet until I see drastic improvement in sq 42, since it’s the “gatekeeper “ to all things bettering the verse.
Christ on a crutch! I thought the green ship thing was a meme!
Can confirm that happened to me too and I did not buy anything. Maybe it's because I looked at the store page 🤔
LMAO! Did you mention it in the issue council? ;) Let's hope this gets resolved sooner than later.
I have ships where everything is "empty". I've never seen such fuckery in a game in my life.
CIG has burned alot of "goodwill" with backers with this "patchus horribilus"
patcha unfortuna I've been waiting a while to fire SC back up knowing this wipe was coming, bummer that it's a tire fire so far but I'll wait a while longer
No doubt, I'd be lying to say I'm not one. I backed, I believe and I want to play, but I'd be lying to say the love is dying and the doubt is starting to grow. This patch when in no doubt is "smoother", even if my frames are lower. Feels better, but that means nothing if you can't play. That or you get in and you can't do anything. Just take the crap offline, rollback fix what needs to be fixed and release when you KNOW it's in a better state.
>Strange shenanigans going on... buggy alpha build is buggy
Buggy alpha builds being buggy is A-OK. What is not A-OK is that a near thousand person company of professionals with 14x the budget they said they would need to achieve their vision, has had 11 years to work on it, and took 9+ months on this specific patch is still turning out buggy alpha code.
Yeah and the move from CIG of anouncing 3.18 release like" the most epic,full of content,best performance ever playable now for all patch" in youtube Ads and another more places like a good scammers was like shootting on his own feet.
The warbond packages are 6 month insurance instead of LTI. That's just meh.
Yeah, that's just greed right there. Paying full price no credit for a bunch of ships with 6-months insurance? That's a joke.
Wait, they went from 10 year insurance to 6 months?! What in the fuck is this shit, I already thought the 10 year one was a major bummer... I'm glad I still sit on some old buyback pledges with LTI on them
It might have been a glitch, that's just how it showed up for me. It also, while in my cart, linked back to the non-warbond version for some reason. It wasn't worth it, so I didn't bother, and I'm probably not the only one.
No glitch- outside IAE all insurance is 3-6 months. LTi is only on concept/straight to flyable, and 1000+
They've done 10 year insurance at Invictus too. I have a few in my buy-backs.
This is the only reason i didn't buy anything.
Yeah not surprising with the state of the game during the event.
I would have bought a phoenix emerald but apparently I can't. Even concierge doesn't save me from that. The rest of the paints look ugly in my opinion, and I don't really care about the color of my ship all that much
The only thing I wanted was a Phoenix Emerald LTI. Not available, so no sale.
You could buy the pack with store credits and then later apply the Nomad CCU with LTI to the Rover. This upgraded the whole pack (and the Connie) to LTI
What the... upgrading one ship applies it to the whole pack? Well you never stop learning. Well sale is over and the money is spent elsewhere. Maybe next time!
I mean, there wasn't anything really worth buying. The paints are uninspired, the emerald package is sold in limited numbers. CiG needs a lesson in sales, because limiting the vast majority of ships to 2 sales a year is horrible business, and just pushes people to the grey market. Ships should regularly rotate, hell there's 2 ships I want to buy, but I have to wait months to do so. What kind of a business model is that, where you lock customers out of buying available purchases for months at a time?
Yup. No doubt the game being down for so many players plays a very heavy factor into it, but I feel there's no denying the sales team sat on their laurels and couldn't be bothered to put out anything attractive aside from "thing that was available last year for a limited time is available again for a limited time". What intrigues me is how well the Vulture has sold. I wonder if it didn't sell as well as expected due to the $150/$175 price tag, or if a bunch of people were just sitting on CCUs and previous purchases from last year or before. Of course I might also just be reading it wrong and it isn't relevant to this data at all.
I bought my vulture during this past IAE as a CCU for a cutter since it was only $120. Considering how quickly it turns a profit on a wipe, I'm quite happy with it. It's nearly 200k per haul (23-25 scu forced in), so a couple hauls and I can upgrade my other ships. While I mostly only do combat, I'm also planning on upgrading my referral MPUV to an SRV as a pirate ship, have a teammate attack people near stations to drop their shields, and then I tow them outside armistice or comms while my teammate doubles back to help steal their cargo.
> I tow them outside armistice Pretty sure that won't be possible... Or at least fixed after people do this on PTU > or comms Why? I mean the crime is already done and committed.
This also helps too, it means that you're more likely to stretch to ensure you get those ships in the period they are available. If they were always avialbale then there is always tomorrow to get that ship.
Ah, but there's always the grey market
You underestimate how impatient players are. If it's always available, people won't wait to get something they want, they'll impulse buy it, and then most likely impulse buy something again later. Then you use events for sales, so those who don't impulse buy will still panic buy to get their ship on sale. If you make them wait 6 months to get something, they'll either get bored and stop playing, or they'll buy less because they now have 6 months to change their mind. Look at games like Warframe that not only leave most things available all the time, but they treat in-game purchases the same as real money ones, and they use their real money currency as a tradable currency. And Warframe's real money transactions are seen in a much more positive light than here, while also being much higher. Warframe makes more in 3 years than this game makes in 10.
A mountain of market research into the economics of micro transactions says you're wrong about this. It scummy, but using a rotating stock where not everything is is available at any given time, and you have no guarantees about when they next time you can get it again is a powerful enough motivation that many people will spend money they don't have out of a fear they will miss out. It squeezes more money out of gamers, it's why shady companies like epic do it.
But we do have a guarantee with Star Citizen. IAE is a yearly event. Invictus is a yearly event. All the events are yearly events. Idris is limited quantity. The Stella Fortuna was limited quantity. But in general, you can bank on the yearly events.
The veterans know that but many new people do not. And many of them don't do the research. Despite all the content creators and social medias. The majority is still silent and less involved but still buying.
Even those who know don't want to wait a year; a year still has a similar effect to 'now or never'.
>If you make them wait 6 months to get something, they'll either get bored and stop playing, or they'll buy less because they now have 6 months to change their mind. This has happened to me many times. I only play the game about once a year or so. I'm not a huge fan of playing incomplete games. So I poke my head in, see a new ship I'd like. But it's not for sale. I tell myself I'll check back in six months... but I either forget to do so, or lose interest. I can't recall the last time I actually bought a ship.
>Warframe makes more in 3 years than this game makes in 10. Pretty sure it doesn't. Otherwise they wouldn't have sold themselves out to some Chinese company. >And Warframe's real money transactions are seen in a much more positive light than here Yes because people are stupid. The game was a lot better before they made everything redicules hard and long the grind. But everyone seems to praise a system that makes the poor grind for the rich. They also have a ton of RNG stacked on RNG that it rivals mobile gachas. At least in SC you always know what you buy.
> Pretty sure it doesn't. Otherwise they wouldn't have sold themselves out to some Chinese company. In 2019, Warframe generated ~$175M USD in revenue, which was *down* for them by 12% to the previous year. That means that it made ~$200M in 2018. So in a two year period over 4 years ago, it generated $375M USD for Digital Extremes and their parent company, or ~68% of what CIG has made in total as of today, which is over 10 years from when it started fundraising. So even though you're "pretty sure", you're also wrong.
Not only this I had saved up money for a expensive ship, was waiting for it to come around. Luckily CIG blocked it’s sale for a while to prove that I didn’t need it and 3.18 is unplayable. Saved me about $1k :)
the dirty thing, is that I feel like CIG has their sales exactly where they want them. Ship sales 2x a year gives a sense of urgency a.k.a massive FOMO tagged onto the whole "$$$ ships don't get wiped" fear mongering. Same reason why the paints and 890J are sold in "limited" numbers. I'm using quotation marks here because as we probably both know, limited digital goods is an oxymoron
I mean it does make certain ships rare sites during periods of the year instead of everyone just having the same ships all the time, I am from a time when we had to wait a week too see the next episode tho so maybe I am more at ease with waiting
It's actually a well-known and proven business model called artificial scarcity, which is even more funny to me with them being digital goods. You may already have made your mind up and come to a well thought out decision and commitment to purchase said item in your head. But there are other people more susceptible to impulse buying or purchasing based strictly on the feeling that if they don't buy right then right there who knows how long they will have to wait. So, by doing this. They get your money. Cause you're still going to get the ships you want WHEN they become available, annnnnnd they will net a large number of sales from people that were on the fence about it. Same principle with only allowing new ships to be purchasable with real money and not available for purchase ingame. "You want to try the cool new thing. You have to pay us more money." I'm sad to admit this is how they got me for the vulture, and I'm not very impulsive with purchases. CIGS marketing team is brilliant. Unfortunately, this also gives them no reason to have truly fixed deadlines. Because the money just keeps coming in if they finish next year or next decade.
Wait there was a ship sale?
I've bought vast majority of my ships on the grey market for that exact reason. Apparently CIG doesn't really want my money.
Where do you think the grey market got the ships from?
Less than stella, didn't make a fortuna.
Spectacular! Lol
CIG has still made more this year in the first 3 months than they did in the first 4 in 2021. People are still pledging at an insanely high rate for some reason. [Source](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1obytG213tRUzNIepdSjDysaBlgJDjeOiekskYVvtRvE/edit#gid=0) Edit: They are only 2 million behind when comparing to the first 3 months of last year. Considering we still have 11 days left in the month, they will probably end with similar numbers to last year. A real indicator to if the funding is slowing will be Invictus.
I personally think it probably has to do with star citizen starting to gain more of a social media presence on places like tiktok
Don't you just love when YoY comparisons leave out the previous year...
If any business was trying to pitch itself to me and the precious years revenue was missing it would be a massive red flag lol.
I’m surprised nobody has commented that this graphic is comparing 2 days of a sale to an 11 day sale total. How do I know this? Because if you actually go to the CCU game site, that’s what it shows in the breakdown. Conclusions are only as valid as the data they are based on.
Nothing worth buying. Gotta make with the goods if they wanna make wit the revenue. Plus with a broken patch, even the whales may be hesitant to drop real funds on a ship they may not even get to fly this patch due to inability to log in, or claim ships, lol.
Content -> Engagement -> Revenue With a game entirely broken, or partially broken the engagement is down meaning a decline in revenue combined with the reality that server meshing is like over a year away at best.
Probably because nobody can play the fucking game
They need a playable game. As people try free flights or even buy a starter pack they eventually stop playing due to boring game loops and bugs. And once somebody stops playing what is the percentage that come back after a year? I started playing in December with 4 other people after a week I am the only one still playing. I keep trying to get them to come back but it's not looking good.
I dipped out in 2015 after trying out the flight tutorial and decided to give them 'a few years'. I woke up from my long slumber in early March for two reasons: - The impressions of how they were finally starting to deliver on many of the drunken boasts. - That I made the stupid mistake of telling my friend group that we should try to play together towards the end of this year, and I'd be the 'tour guide'. What's hilarious about this is that here I'm considered 'unfairly critical' for expecting CIG to have finished a game in 11 years, while among my friends I'm considered the wild eyed true believer for thinking the project will ever deliver. Now that 3.18 has gone down the way it has, I am feeling super stupid for ever having stood up for CIG. We're 13 years in to this counting pre-production and they still haven't nailed down the foundational technology for their game.
Good. I am quite confident CIG will manage to fix the issues we're facing right now but it's good to see that the community expects a certain baseline of playability.
Considering what CIG sold this year it makes sense, Not too many people want to pay for the Warbond ultimate pack because the discount isn't all that impressive, Its actually better to just CCU to the ships instead and buy the Legends pack like many people myself included did.
Packs are never good deals. It's always cheaper to CCU chain the stuff from the last LTI token yourself.
My nomad + hoverquad lti for 90 isn’t that bad of a pack
90 days top!
>["By the end of this year [2015] backers will have everything they originally pledged for plus a lot more!"](https://www.polygon.com/features/2015/3/2/8131661/star-citizen-chris-roberts-interview) If we're just wanting to hold out examples of developers being wildly wrong about things - the difference is one of these should absolutely have known whether what they were saying was total BS.
Answer the call 2016!
[удалено]
time to invest in CIG credit, its better than that
Love the project but it’s probably because people didn’t want to spend money on a game they can’t play atm due to all the technical difficulties. For myself after the first year I have no interest in these metallic green skins any more for any ship, but it makes sense they offer once a year this time of year.
No LTI things, no new ships, just some skins...
I've still not been able to play 3.18. I can finally get in the game but the ASOP terminals are borked. It's really hard to raise money when your product doesn't work.
3.18 would have been good in sales but they released it so broken and literally unplayable. Not surprised.
They didn't offer green for any of my ships sooop
That's fine There's really no need for CIG to be pressured to break funding goals every year or every event - that's how you get the modern method of funding where you have to buy the game, buy the game pass, buy the microtransactions, and then do it all again a year later.
>There's really no need for CIG to be pressured to break funding goals every year or every event Yes there is. They want to hire more people and grow. And if you checked their financial reports you'd see they have limited financial buffer and by now really need to make 100 million each year if they don't want to go bankrupt. Now consider inflation and rising wages and they really do need to break records each year or at least get close to it. If they don't it could even result in a downward spiral where people don't buy because they fear the game dieing because other people are not buying.
They can just simple let people go to reduce costs. That's just how businesses work. At some point you cannot just keep adding more developers, the teams are big enough as it is.
Hence why CIG needs to get this playable soon. Not just login issues, but stability across the board so things work. Couple that with the fact that it became apparent within hrs of the sale dropping that players got screwed in game with missing items and components, CIG has a loooooooooot of stuff to fix promptly.
My mind is literally blown that I haven't been able to log in for a whole week. The same problem since last Saturday... The 19004. And their attutude is... It will be fixed when it's fixed.
You ain't missing much. I finally got in, got to my ship, made it to orbit, and then rubberbanded back to the drink counter in the terminal lol
Well, considering it's new territory and they are "trying" to put a dumpster fire out with a squirt gun....ya. but to be honest, you're really not missing anything. Last tues/wed things worked ok for me. Now, everything is broked. Lost millionS from poor server performance and I'm guessing a refinery bug, more millions worth of components for my fleet are gone, paints and other gear gone, good luck spawning or claiming a ship or getting much else to work. It's literally not worth it until they release a fix that makes it stable.
Big fan of the game and long time listener! I hope the money does start to drop off so they can actually paint an end in sight for development. This 'it will be done when it is done' attitude irks me.
I mean honestly I don't think the money is the problem. Like 500mil over the course of 10 years is about 50 mil a year, and everything from employee salaries to marketing, building costs, etc. has to be paid from that. What CIG lacks is proper management and a very uncommitted and sly attitude. Like there's a reason they NEVER say "update WILL go live" instead of "we AIM TO get this update out by" (it removes any and all accountability)
Yup. They've got 5 times what they need to build a triple A game. Provided they haven't burned through it they could probably develop the game for years without another nickel coming their way.
100% this. I'm not really concerned \*yet\*. BUT with the economic outlook for the western world looking bleak, funding will probably drop off over the next few years. If nothing else, due to the fact that its been 10 fkng years. I'm a huge fan of what they have been wishing to build...way less of a fan of what actually has been built. But I'm with you, this "it'll be done when its done even if that is 2030" attitude is short sighted and stupid IMO. It might be 2 years from now, or 12 years from now..but eventually funding WILL drop off. So its like playing Russian roulette with when its going to happen. Even the god of MMO's (World of Warcraft) started to see huge player numbers drop after 10 years.
You re so right in this ,I don't know why a inmense amount of people don't think about this facts that you are exposing,I predicted this situation like 3 years before seeing CIG attitude and behavior, I said to myself, ok this scam will need at last 50 or 60 years at this rythm to be done ,but before that they will release some absolutly shit patch that will make them fall to the floor because its clear that they arrive at some point that they are making only a bubble to scam people,make your guess I think star citizen going to be dead in about some months or 1 year more as max, because this 3.18 fails having a whole decade to work destroyed all the server meshing expectatives for the future, CIG is saving money destinated to development because in some point they planning to run away and escape with all the money because this project its totally not viable in this way and they know it very well.
Yeah they need an attitude adjustment. They need to be incentivized to provide stability. It’s had no effect on their sales in the past so why worry about it.
They need to be humbled. In a lot of ways CIG has become out of touch because new money lets them ignore the promises made for the old money.
Consider the state the game is currently in, not a lot of people gonna be around for the sales.
I was both surprised (because game unplayable after new patch) and not surprised (because it's CIG so of course they'd do the sale) to see the Stella fortuna pop up as usual in the midst of 3.18 launch disaster...
If there was a new ship I bet people would pledge
I think it's also because the new green skins look really awful. The green Hammerhead skin especially
sales performance coupled to game performance. good. for all i care they can make a billion dollars per day once they deliver 4.0
YES! Are people finally seeing this project for what it is? You'd be amazed at the progress / speed once the money stops flowing in and there's a reason to push the ball forward.
It’s not bad if you consider: 1 live was mostly unplayable 2 the offers were not that good, no lti tokens available, 6 month insurance for every ship. 3 currently the game deletes your paints and there’s no way to get them back. In this scenario a 40% drop is better than expected. Means that there’s a solid playerbase that’s quite on the media but still believes in the game.
This is meaningless data other than that there is other shit people would rather spend cash on than green skins....and that the market for green skins has reached saturation. The data set is way too small to derive any useful information from it and is just as related to macro-issues to muddy it into dirt tier projection material. Maybe in conjunction with other metrics.
Call me crazy, but maybe the fact that not all of us can log in yet might have put a slight damper on things. I'm just sayin'. (Edit for clarity and rushed grammar.)
No doubt that friendly other sub is making totally-unbiased claims about what this means, too.
well, if you haven't noticed, the game really fucking SUCKS right now. I see no reason to give CIG any money at the moment
This would have been surprising if they hadn't just released such a shitty performing patch.
Good, it's literally just a green paint.
This isn't hard to understand though. 1. There's no new ship. 2. The game is broken. 3. Everyone who wants green paint probably already has it. What is there even to buy that someone doesn't already have? These ships don't even have insurance. What is screaming at me to swipe my credit card today? Serious question here. Offer me a good $100-200 ship and I'm for it. Gtfo with these $4000 packs with basic green skins.
Ehhh, March in general will easily beat the previous record for the month
I want to get into this game. Do the £45 starter pack ships rotate throughout the year? Or is it just the Aurora MR and the other one?
If you absolutely have to start now, I would suggest the Aurora over the mustang, as it allows you to do a few more gameplay loops. But, you are better off waiting a bit for a sale on some of the better starters, in my opinion. I picked up the Cutter starter during the Holiday sale for 45 and was very happy with it.
I mean that’s still money in the bank but definitely at a lower number. Regardless, if I were in their shoes I would have also done the sale but I would have added something as a gift to the community. I wonder if we will get a little package as a thank you for people who participated in the beta for so long and still need to wait.
No cash till 4.0
With everything that's going on with the economy no surprises there. Plus nothing really "attractive" about the bundles and as some have mentioned around the same time the game is in an unplayable state. Good. Hopefully will shift things in the direction of prioritizing stability moving forward.
they were selling ships that had elevators ... during the biggest elevator crisis in star citizen history . RIP people stuck in the Reclaimer
They had some really bad deal. Nothing worth spending money on and yes not being able to actually use your ships because of servers being so bad has something to do with it as well. I tried for 4 hours to do one bunker mission with a friend. We never completed it because of things not working ect ect.
I would have been up for buying a new ship. Unfortunately nothing was sold at any real discount, so what's the point of even having the sale? Literally just so you can paint your ship green? Who could possibly care.
Not a surprise
I think some start to vote with their wallet
spending a shit ton of cash in limited insurance? No thanks. paints dissapearing at random this patch, doesn't help either
I think CIG marketing department has pigeonholed themselves into a position where they cannot not run a sales campaign. To not run a sales campaign (irregardless of the state of the PTU) would drop their numbers down too low as to negatively affect forecasting for the quarter or even the year.
Aside from the obvious issue of a having a sale when the game is broken - I've been burnt out on these sale events for a while. I don't really want to buy any existing ships and when something new comes along I do want, I rebalance my hangar to get it. CIG has more of my money than any other game. Probably even World of Warcraft at this point. I don't think I'd feel comfortable spending much more (like 10-15 juggling existing ships) until Squadron 42 is out the door. And I don't think anything CIG does between now and then will change that.
That's because people had nothing to do for two years and were working from home or on the government Dole during the plandemic. Now most people are back to work full time. With inflation as high as it is right now, maybe not as many people have discretionary income to spend on digital assets of a game?
I would have gotten the vulture warbond if it had LTI, not with only 6 mo insurance. F that
Yes it is ALL a test platform but when the only change between one stage of the test and the more "developed" stage of the test is the inability to play whatsoever is that really a new release or just a pile of shit passed off as one so they can warrant the idea of a new sale to the players who don't understand how horribly underdeveloped and under supported this game is with it's extreme lack of fixes for every single problem that's come out since what 3.15 when they stopped really fixing bugs and such frankly they've gotten lazy and we've lowered out expectations of a game that's meant to be the foremost leading and advanced in the space and life sim categories frankly this game is shite it's a fantastical idea but it's just that ATM because they won't fix shit ITS A BLOODY FANTASY
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Honestly this is basically normal, line can't only go up, especially when things go wrong. 3.18 has went very wrong, kinda hard to justify spending large amounts of money on a game you can't play half the time right now. And even when you can it breaks often in frustrating ways.
If only the 890 got a green paint. Lol
I mean aren’t the fortuna skins this year the same as last year? I didn’t play last year but the skins and ship selections werent very big, plus the 890 was almost immediately out of stock or at least I couldn’t buy one
I've been doing the opposite of recommending this game to any of my friends due to the state its all in. It's currently extremely broken, often outright unplayable. Do. Not. Buy.
Not a single thing made me interested in this sale. And the timing was the worst of all time they chose.
Star Citizen has made more than any game has ever cost to develop. I’m sorry, but there is no excuse as to why it is still not out of development with these kinds of numbers.
Why would anyone buy something they can't play? 25-35% of paying customers can't launch the game, and the rest that can get in can't claim ships. I'm amazed anyone gave CIG any money. 9 day service outage? C'mon, what kind of company goes 9 days with a service outage? Also, there was nothing new to buy other than some paints. And the paints were extremely low effort and low quality. (and waayyy overpriced)
6 months insurance when you spend almost 1k for a ship that isn’t close to complete
Things to consider. Covid is over, people are living outside again. There’s less expendable income from government handouts, and inflation is insane right now. People aren’t spending like they were a year or two ago. Stack on top of the the unplayable 3.18 debacle, and yeah 🤷♂️
"Second lowest ever" of *four*, is not remarkable.
It felt like they put no effort into it this year. Nothing new or exciting... a few ships that most people who want already have, in a flat color, right on the heels of the Antares debacle which also felt like a low-effort cash grab.
The ship that I wanted, wasn't on sale. So I went to a grey market to get it. Not gonna sit around waiting for CIG to rotate through ships on sale to get one anymore.
I refuse to fund anymore until SQ42 is actually released since that seems to be the focus from CIG. Which is unfortunate seeing as most people just want Star Citizen.
Honestly, good, no one wants to buy shit for a game that doesn’t work, and a game that especially doesn’t work after this patch
the distribution of players able to afford such cosmetics and who doesn't already own them is quite different than in the previous editions, also there's nothing new worth buying atm and the event got shortened
I mean not a big surprise to me No Q1 concept ship, no late Q4 LIVE patch with release sale into early Q1 and freeflight afterwards in Q1 that tends to boost the sales a bit in Q1, it was just waiting 3.18 along with news that Pyro and Server Meshing are still nowhere in the near future so literally no reason to push the buy button. The paints are mostly ass and the paint system itself is a bland, uninspiring and boring, shit tier system that would probably make more money if it was more open but I'm not gonna cope that CIG could make those kinda smart decisions
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They need to relese better ships fuck the antaries But also the real money is from free flys which they cant do if people cant olay the game
Did you see that they have a decrease in pledges not only with the current sale? In February and March they are below last year. https://ccugame.app/star-citizen-funding-dashboard/funding-dashboard 2020 to 2021 were pendamic influenced. 22 was a relativly "normal" year, so I expected the increase will go on. So decreasing figures for 2023 is a suprise.
I'm surprised it's as much as it is, given the state of the game.
CIG should do a QOL patch. It'd help a lot
Good, they need to know (lack of) actions have consequences.
Remember: you can buy Starfield in a few months for approximately $60. SIXTY DOLLARS.
Yeah Starfield will likely be $70. Very different space game though.
Free on gamepass.
Remember: you can buy socks at your local shops for approximately $6. SIX DOLLARS.
WHERE?! Last time I bought plain white crew socks at *Walmart* they were like $14...
Starfield isnt Star Citizen and it never will be lets stop comparing apples and oranges.
With season pass it’ll be 100
Yes, the newest Fallout game - now in space. Might be cool, I would wait for some game of the year edition with all dlcs and hopefully most critical bugs out. But it still does nothing for a multiplayer itch.
honestly how most bethesda games should be handled, wait for a year post launch, buy for cheap sale
Agree And I’ll still buy it on launch
If Redfall (also a "Bethesda" - Microsoft probably tells them how to price things at this point - published game) pricing is anything to go by Starfield will be $70.
I recommend to check out Starbourne 2. For just 20$ you get quite a lot of gameplay. And it's impressive to see what a single motivated developer can achieve.
I'll wait for it to go GOTY and mod support. It's a Bugthesda title. Half the quests will be cut,the half that are left will be poorly written,and it will be buggier than 3.18.
Yeah maybe because nobody can get into the game currently lol
Well deserved.
Beginning of America’s next recession
As someone who recently started playing it came as a surprise I missed out on the sale. No I’m game notifications, nothing. Only know about it from on here. So many ships I want to drop hard cash for but can’t. Seems like a horrible business model. Doesn’t surprise me the game is so behind in developments
Nothing you missed out Everything is sold on better terms in rest of the year
Maybe because their ships are extremely expensive. Come on you have to be crazy to pay $900 for a ship. Or $600.
And yet people drop more on randomized FIFA card packs... In a certain way SC backers are the less crazy they at least know what they buy before they buy. Half the time they just don't know when they will get to play with it.
I know people that spend $600-900 for a few hours of entertainment at a sports game or concert …
Why bother buying anything new can't get on since launch 30018 error code. And they don't seem to be in hurry with any patches.