The one thing we should have learned by now is that time and Star Citizen makes fools of us all. The SC faithful have been so sure that total success is just around the corner for so long. And the SC skeptics have been so sure that total collapse has been just around the corner for so long. And everyone has been wrong.
Star Citizen continues to defy expectations in all directions. It lumbers along blatantly defying the laws of physics, finances, and project management and it just can’t die. But it can’t live either. And everyone involved, with each passing month, finds themselves thinking “surely it can’t continue”. Surely they have to release something. Surely there has to be progress. Surely they’ll have to come clean. Surely it can’t go on like this. But it goes on.
This is purgatory. We are caught in purgatory–in the limbo between dreams and disaster. The people who have forgotten Star Citizen are the only ones who are free. We who choose to watch this slow collapse are just as trapped as those who hope they are watching a slow assembly. Time has no meaning here for us. We repeat actions and complaints and sick burns and pizza fights endlessly. We will do this for eternity. All of us, together, in these grey stimperial wastes.
Beer4theBeerGod
If backers had put as much effort towards keeping CIG and Chris accountable as they do towards mocking Derek the game would have been out years ago. At this stage it doesn’t matter. There is no game. There never will be a game. There will only be a continuation of CIG’s failures, incompetence, and pathetic mismanagement until the money runs out. The story of Star Citizen is not about how one man managed to scam millions out of eager supporters. It’s about how the unbridled enthusiasm of crowdfunding enabled a man to scam himself into believing he could do whatever he wanted. And there is no better conman than one who believes his own con.
Beer4theBeerGod
There’s no way I could have guessed the year, but I did expect Chris to do whatever it took to maintain the illusion that he wasn’t the biggest failure in the history of game development. Before he lies to anyone else he lies to himself. He lies about how he’s competent, he lies about how he’s successful, he lies about how his magnum opus is going to revolutionize gaming, he lies about everything. His only talent is self-delusion, of being so convinced by his own bullshit that he comes off as genuine to anyone he needs something from. Those who have already served their purpose are immediately disregarded for the next source of income. Original backers got screwed so that new backers could have previously limited features, older ships were abandoned for new concept sales, and now every backer left is screwed so CIG can enjoy a little more time on life support.
Beer4theBeerGod
One of the nice things about Star Citizen at this point is that things have pretty much calcified into their existing properties. Nobody here is magically going to be impressed and decide that, indeed, Star Citizen is good and will impress the world. Similarly nobody on the other side is going to see that and magically go “wow, they didn’t show any gameplay” and decide to get a refund. People will see what they want to see, especially given how good Chris is at providing just enough rope for people to hang themselves on their own dreams. What I saw was a lot of really impressive work for a game that nobody actually paid for. I see planets that would look fantastic as flyovers during a cutscene, art assets that would be really great in localized encounters, and plenty of generic (but still nice) content. If CIG had maintained the original concept of instances linked by cutscenes, or if it was for a single player Squadron 42, then I’d be pretty impressed. But since the content they revealed has minimal impact on the expected gameplay, they steadfastly failed to show any kind of multiplayer interaction (or any real gameplay to speak of), and since Star Citizen is supposed to be a MMO and not a single player game there isn’t much to be excited about.
What I saw was basically yet another indication of the things that actually matter to Chris Roberts; grandeur, scale, and derivative content. Look at how many times he talked about things that sound impressive like all those NPCs, the size of various buildings, provided a reference to a superior work of fiction like Blade Runner or Star Wars. Look at how little he talked about gameplay loops, or introduced mechanics that players have been waiting years for, or addressed core issues like networking, performance, or the flight model. Look at how a game that was meant to be a space simulation barely even touched space; indeed the only relevant discussion regarding actual space travel was how Chris apparently thinks that waiting eight minutes to travel between planets is somehow good game design. Look at how he thinks that showing hundreds of “procedurally generated” city blocks will somehow enhance the player experience, or how having millions of square kilometers of empty territory will lead to a better experience than what you can already get with Elite.
Star Citizen is not a scam, it’s an ego trip. It’s hundreds of people working on something, and doing what looks to be some good work doing it, to stoke the narcissism of a failed developer who is more interested in maintaining the appearances of producing a AAA title than actually delivering it. What we saw today was absolutely an indication that they are burning millions and using up a lot of personnel, and they are delivering on things. The problem is that what they’re delivering has no bearing on what people are paying for.
Beer4theBeerGod
Their MMO, which has been in development since 2011 (fuck you Chris and your “full production” bullshit), can’t handle the pilot of a multicrew vessel disconnecting from the rest of the party. Their MMO doesn’t have AI, and required a full crew of people to fake a mission experience. Their MMO couldn’t handle a rover driving on to a ramp without exploding, or feature two large ships fighting without turning into a slide show. Their MMO is so poorly programmed that they had to script a ship exploding when it got shot. Their MMO is shit.
Their MMO is being designed by a “visionary” who, given a year to develop a vignette to show off his dream for gameplay, could only come up with a shitty fetch quest. A visionary who is more concerned about marketing VOIP and some shitty webcam over producing any kind of gameplay. A visionary who believes things done a decade ago are somehow novel or interesting. Their MMO is being designed by an idiot.
Their MMO isn’t a MMO. It’s a case study in poor design practices, the perils of shitty oversight, the gullibility of gamer, and the myth of the “Great Man” game developer. It’s a condemnation of Chris Roberts and irrefutable proof that he is a fraud who is better at spending money than designing games.
But there’s a very specific reason for the project being about keeping up appearances while raking in crowdfunding and pre-orders: The product they’re claiming to make cannot be made. Even if the funding had been given to the best developers in the world with the best leadership at the helm, it could not be made. If they’d sold a project with a smaller, more feasible, scope, they would not have reached the current level of funding.
I think that’s a very important lesson from this whole debacle, and a recurring theme with many crowdfunded projects: They’re built on the deception that progress has already been made and they’re promising something that cannot be made. This gives them access to the market for this speculative product, and right from the start sets the project up to dissapointment and anger the backers (when the real product inevitably differs from what was promised) - or to simply drag along as a masquerade until a plausible collapse can be fabricated (or an actual one happens).
It is also worth noticing that simulation, procedural content and/or AI are usually cornerstones of these fabricated games. All are easy to fake as in-development, all promise a paradigm-shift in gameplay experience, and present difficult promises to see through for many gamers. They’re all noticably absent from the AAA titles with their high production values but shallow technology - thus creating a perfect opportunity to exploit the disillusion which is strong among some gamers.
Star Citizen and its ilk appeals to gamers who are like the Man in Black from West World - addicted to gaming and virtual worlds, but craving a deeper experience than what’s being offered. They want a game with moving parts inside the space ships - not just fake polygon ships, they want NPCs who aren’t just scripted to tell a story but with actual agency and existence, they want multi-player experiences with consequence and forced realism - fellow players need to be part of the game, not just fellow visitors to the theme park. But the irony is that many of these gamers are flawed and broken individuals, who would probably not capable of functioning in, or even enjoying, an actual virtual world.
This is not the last time we’ll see a crowdfunded game promising ground-breaking technology and “real” games. There’s a huge demand for these games - a demand strong enough to make many gamers forget how Radiant AI, Black & White, No Man’s Sky, Horizons - to name just a few - turned out as parodies what was promised.
Some Star Citizen backers just wanted an iterative improvement on the sci-fi sandbox and/or spaceship-pew-pew genres. But this group alone doesn’t have the spending power that the crowdfunding opportunists need - so they turn to the Men in Black. The original crowdfunding pitch for Star Citizen was full of signs that this was the case. Anyone claiming the pitch was ok, and it was the scope creep and mismanagement which have led to the current fiasco, needs to go read the pitch again. The drama and failure was inevitable.
I called this when I read the pitch for the first time. Derek Smart is on record as claiming it could be done. Those who kept clear of backing this outcalled the Warlord. I have no doubt this knowledge haunts him. He was once a backer. He fell for the scam. Out-witted by a Crobear, he thirst for revenge and is forever doomed to tweet his rage into the virtual void. Drawn to such a powerful source of nerd-rage, the virtual Cacodemons, hiding their true names behind monikers such as “Maht Daymun” and “minus 5 IQ Derek”, grow ever stronger - tainted heralds of the end times, where the lost souls of gamers languish in unfidelitious console gaming hell. Will the Eudaemonic goons be able to save the day through lols and revealing the sickening truths? I hope so, the doggos and cattes deserve a better internet tomorrow.
G0RF
Here’s a crap thing I just made. I don’t assume any precision in these, just am throwing them out there to model how I think Chris and Sandi look at things.
I suspect Chris and Sandi (and many others) do find themselves wondering on occasion, “Has Star Citizen peaked yet?” If they aren’t asking it, they should be. I know the big publishers are. I know gaming journalists are. I know their critics and competitors are.
The truth is, we don’t know. Last year was their best ever. Yet January is down by 20%, and the upcoming split of Squadron 42 and Star Citizen into products which must be purchased separately is an especially risky strategic decision. Profoundly so. CIG is no doubt calculating that splitting them up might make it even easier to keep the organization in “The Dream Zone”.
“Now we’ll have revenues coming from two separate games! We might even DOUBLE our monthly revenues going forward!”
Splitting the IP is going to finally give CIG a measure of the market viability of Squadron 42 as a standalone property.
If Chris isn’t terrified about the possibilities, I think he should be. That project is his Dream Baby, so near and dear to his director’s heart and his gaming legacy. He’s thrown everything he’s got at it.
– A buttload of recognizable, expensive Hollywood actors
– Phonebook-sized bloody scripts
– Craploads of motion capture for different studios (x4)
– Tens of millions of dollars
– Endless hyperbole like “If I was doing a AAA Wing Commander for EA, Squadron 42 is going to be that and then some.”
Expectations are sky high thanks to CIG hype and Gaming Mag amplification of it. Yet they have precious little to show for Squadron 42– conspicuously little– beyond uncanny valley cornball tripe uttered by A List actors who surely assumed at the time they signed on that being in this game was a great career move. It might end up that they’ve lent their talents to an absolute mega-turkey that ends up solely redeemed by the embarrassment of riches it provides in animated gifs. (I know we’re excited by that possibility- but I doubt Gary Oldman and Co will be.)
–- “PAAAARRP!”
What if - after the split - new backers just choose Star Citizen? The project they’ve heard so much about.
– The one they can play with lots of friends. (theoretically)
– The one with VR coming. (theoretically)
– The one with procedural generation of planets. (theoretically)
– The one with ship-to-ship combat between dozens of players (theoretically)that allows one party to storm the other and engage in satisfying FPS combat (theoretically) to secure the other party’s ship and (theoretically) cargo?
I mean, I know Ben Lesnick is seeing his dream come true with this, but what if Chris learns that Ben and the Wing Commander diehards really are just an endangered species? I mean, if you spend hours with Ben a week, and all he does is prattle on-and-on about Wing Commander, it just might create false impressions about the worldwide demand for said game? What if most everyone who actually wants a spiritual successor to Wing Commander (nerds!) already backed Star Citizen to get it?
Does anyone else think this is a real possibility?
I mean I love me some space games, and have since before SF2: Trade Routes. As it stands, I could not give a rats ass about Squadron 42. Even if I knew NOTHING about it, and then saw the Bishop speech and the Mark Hamill trailer and read gaming magazine hype pieces, I still would not give one crap for the game. It would take Metacritic scores of 90+ to get me to give it a second look. There is nothing I’ve seen that would appeal to me.
I don’t know if I’m an anomaly in feeling this way. I’d hope for Chris’ sake I am, yet knowing what I know about him, I can’t.
I was thinking about that reddit thread where Star Citizen members were defined as being part of a cult, and thought it would be an interesting exercise to match with an accepted list. So here is:
The TL;DR for impatient readers: there is a core group of Star Citizen players and contributors who exhibit signs of several of the defining characteristics of a cult according to this list.
Cults are generally very controlling organizations, often the higher level members are responsible for policing the group, giving the leadership a level of deniablity for some practices. To the extent of the belief of some Citizens, these cult characteristics do apply. However, the Citizen community can’t be said to be a true cult because it is not a physically applicable organization, where all aspects of its members life are controlled. It only displays the superficial aspects of a cult due to the overzealous belief systems of its members.
Aspects which do not fit are generally ones where physical contact would be required. However, should one define “members” as being company employees, there may be cause to revisit some of these points in the future when it is safer for ex-employees to go public.
I am aware of the effect this list would have on certain sensitive citizens, and so would welcome explicit examples for and against each point to add to this document for future reference.
The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law.
Clearly some members display these attitudes, or believe in a version they have fantasised for themselves.
Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.
Not simply on the RSI forums, they are known to keep records on dissenters and even non-members. For instance, the customer services forum tagging, the following of backers on other forums and sites, and moving any dangerous discussion to a bitbucket known as the “concern” forum.
Mind-altering practices (such as meditation, chanting, speaking in tongues, denunciation sessions, and debilitating work routines) are used in excess and serve to suppress doubts about the group and its leader(s).
This degree of control is impossible for an online connection. However, there is a level of doubt-suppression involved in the fantasty-world of many Citizens that is encouraged by the marketing tactics of RSI/CIG.
The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel (for example, members must get permission to date, change jobs, marry—or leaders prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, whether or not to have children, how to discipline children, and so forth).
This degree of control is impossible for an online connection. However, within the bounds of acceptable use policy, there is control, and the degree of control of discussion of the game is strict.
The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and its members (for example, the leader is considered the Messiah, a special being, an avatar—or the group and/or the leader is on a special mission to save humanity).
Clearly there are aspects of this involved in the Star Citizen community. Despite known facts to the contrary, Roberts is held to be a blameless visionary and his defects are ignored or explained away. Similarly, Citizens tell each other how special they are, and believe they will be rewarded for their loyalty and contributions.
The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society.
This is very clear, given their attempts to victimize dissenters, and all sorts of threats against dissenters have been made. The siege mentality of Citizens is also much in evidence.
The leader is not accountable to any authorities (unlike, for example, teachers, military commanders or ministers, priests, monks, and rabbis of mainstream religious denominations).
Not tested, certainly members do not accept any suggested wrongdoing.
The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members’ participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before they joined the group (for example, lying to family or friends, or collecting money for bogus charities).
Some members obviously believe any action against a dissenter or critic is justified and this behaviour is implied as justifiable by the actions of the company against dissenters and critics. This is not a minor point: actions do speak louder than words.
The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion.
No overt methods from the company here, but it has been seen between Citizens.
Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and to radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before they joined the group.
Again, impossible without physical contact. There may well be Citizens who have done this, but as we only have self-reporting to go on, it’s a doubtful point.
The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.
Yes, Citizens are always prosetylising. There are numerous examples.
The group is preoccupied with making money.
This rather depends on whether you see cult-like characteristics or long con scam characteristics. But money is the prequisite to joining the “higher” levels.
Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities.
No, but many do online.
Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.
No, but again many do online.
The most loyal members (the “true believers”) feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.
I’ve no doubt some Citizens feel this way, they are the most vulnerable.
Beer4theBeerGod
Years ago we had a lot of fun theory-crafting how CIG was going to handle instances and players. This was before they went fully open and demonstrated that they could barely handle 20 people in an entire solar system, and instead every encounter would be an instance like a match in Arena Commander. Was an instance going to be player-limited or ship-limited? If it was ship limited, did a player going EVA “count” as a ship? What about NPCs? How would CIG balance the load inside an instance so that one team didn’t simply fill it up and the other side would be outnumbered? Unfortunately none of these questions were ever answered, and given CIG’s inability to deliver netcode I suspect they never will. The difference between a ship and player-limited instance was pretty critical. If the instance was player limited then it made sense to have everyone be in small ships to maximize individual firepower. On the other hand if the instance was ship limited then throwing a large number of bigger ships with more players made sense. My favorite bit of theory crafting was that, if CIG limited instances by the number of ships, then the easiest way to crash the server would be to take a transport ship full of players and dump them into space.
I miss those days.
Beer4theBeerGod
A lot of what we’re seeing in terms of “progress” is easily produced fluff. It’s easy to hire an artist to make a picture, have an amateur bang out a piece of terrible fiction, or to have two people sit in front of a camera and awkwardly talk about nothing. CIG does these things because they can occur in a vacuum and deliver a lot of “content” for little in the way of time or talent. It’s all a giant farce while the actual developers struggle to produce anything while drowning in over half a decade of shitty code and half-assed implementation all while dealing with Chris constantly changing direction and demanding they drop everything to produce a demo. The actual hard stuff like networking, gameplay, optimization, and physics are constantly pushed back or hacked together so that the backers have something to play with. In the context of developing an actual product it seems insane, but in the context of trying to keep a struggling project afloat while hiding the truth from the backers it makes perfect sense.
Don’t look at the terrible videos, shitty writing, or constant deluge of new ship sales and concept art in the context of game development. Look at it in the context of a company desperate to present the image of success while dealing with the reality of failure.
Beet Wagon
The posters that come in here and mock Star Citizen or poke fun at the biggest rubes among the backer base are doing it because they think it’s funny, or because they’re fed up with the project. Nobody - not even me, the ‘refunds guy’ - cares even the slightest bit about turning people off of the game, or converting backers into doubters. I’ll say it again for good measure: nobody cares what anyone here does with their money or whether or not they support the game. The so-called ‘refund cascade,’ the ‘FUD,’ the whole lot of all that nonsense is wholly and completely the creation of the paranoid minds of /r/starcitizen.
that in itself doesn’t automatically make the code simple. See folks, the hard part of programming isn’t writing code that does a thing, it’s the code that glues them all together, sends messages between all the different systems, and generally makes them work in concert to form a cohesive system, so that every function knows what to do, when to do it, and has the information it needs when they get called on.
It doesn’t take programming experience to know that SC’s code is a colossal goat-fuck in this regard. You can feel it. Your intuition knows something is wrong down in the guts. Overall low framerates, massive game locks on the order of seconds, ridiculous collision/clipping issues, unresponsive UI, unresponsive actions (ahem doors, ramps), poor maintenance of state (doors and ramps again), etc. The engine is choking and sputtering like an old lawnmower that sat out in the yard naked all winter, because the information is poorly manicured, and the inter-system messaging is fucked.
If you’re interacting with a system in SC, chances are 1 of 2 things are true:
1. That system doesn’t have the info it needs and locks up waiting for someone to kindly send it along
2. The opposite; That system gets fucking HADOKEN’d with a shit-heap of data, most of it totally superfluous, and has to dig through it with a fine-toothed comb to pull out a couple params
In my experience writing game code, this is much harder to get right than most other types of applications, for two reasons, which form a deadly binity:
1. Game code is inherently stateful
2. That state needs to be analyzed, compared with player input, altered, and bundled up into a frame that the video card won’t choke on, as fast as fucking possible.
You can’t wait. If you do, you block the main update loop and boom, the game locks up, chugs, and the hapless player thinks “the fuck is this shit?” Every compute cycle is precious.
A good SC example is when a ship spawns on the pad I’m standing on. Literal megabytes of unfathomably complex data structures describing every nuance of every component of the overdesigned fidelity chariot blast into your game client like the fucking Kool-Aid Man, sending waves of panic and abject terror through every corner of your operating system.
Now, let’s think about what happens here. This is massively over-simplified, and I added some details to help explain how this data is used, but when some asshole spawns an Idris, the server will send you a hulking data structure that looks something like this:
Every one of those “components” are separate entities with their own 3d model. Each one has to be unraveled and loaded into objects (unmarshalled), their 3d model information retrieved from disk and loaded into ram/videoram, assembled according to their relative position, and plonked down into the game world at so-and-so position. As you can imagine, the more shit you have to unravel and load, the longer it takes. This is what pisses me off so much about Chris Roberts and his “FIDELETY” obsession. There is a very clear point where there’s just too much information to process and your game locks up, the servers shit themselves, and the whole thing collapses under its own weight.
So what do you do? Well, you can make the ships simpler, which ain’t gonna happen in a million hand-waving lifetimes, or you can defer the processing in order to unblock the main update loop. But that adds complexity, and now you have a state problem. Is the ship there or isn’t it? Do I load each entity in its own thread? Well, how do I know when the ship is “assembled?” Surely some will load faster than others which means each ship component will “pop in” when it’s good and god damn ready. And do you really think that’ll fly in The Chris Robert Fidelity Funhouse? OK, so do I wait for every component’s model to load in memory before it’s allowed to visually spawn? Well if so, now every component has to report its state to some main-brain statekeeper who stands there with a clipboard checking boxes, then says yep, everyone is present and accounted for, let’s glue all these 3d models together and start rendering it. What if we need to add a Hairy Roberts Drinkblaster 8000 to the bridge? How many lines of code will that touch?
This is why SC is getting worse, not better. They barely know what each system will do, and they’ haven’t even considered how they will communicate. Chris and his ramshackle crew of “game designers” are jamming panicky, poorly-conceived features down the devs’ throats, who are forced to plop brittle, rushed //TODO: Fix This code into this witch’s steaming shit cauldron. And man, I don’t need to tell you, it’s boiling over.
And so Star Citizen the computer program is just getting worse, and worse, and slower, and buggier, and choppier, and crashier as the bloated, abominable kludge slowly grinds to a halt and eats itself like Pizza the Hut.
This all happened because CIG did it full-on fuck backwards. Your game designers need to have a really solid idea of not only what the systems are, but how the systems logically interact in order to build a gamified, cohesive logical flow that results in a fluid, contiguous causal map that resembles a game. You need to strip your features of all fluff, avoid details like the plague, keeping them simple, stark, and easy to understand. You need to build and assemble them as quickly as possible so you can prove your concept, and adjust the design when your assumptions don’t all come true. Then you iterate, redesign, re-write, and hopefully, if you kept things simple, this isn’t a massive undertaking. Code has to be designed to be flexible, but only flexible in the right ways. Too much flexibility kills your code because it’s easier/cleaner to write something concrete. Death by a thousand ifs. And it really, really helps when you can do this without having to waste time on premature minutiae, trillions of polygons, sizzle-reel polish, drink machines, jacket layering, fucking ARGON, etc.
Now the final coup-de-grace, which brings it home to my original point: Even if you do all this right and keep it simple, things that look simple on paper often blow up when you start coding. Simple components (in this case, “game systems”) can fall apart at the seams when they have to start playing with others. But CIG doesn’t have this problem, because they’ve never done anything simple. They still don’t even know what their game systems are supposed to do, let alone how to code them individually, let alone how to assemble them into a working game, let alone how to make that game fun.
In closing, Star Citizen is not good, it’s not bad. It’s nothing. A huge. Fucking. Nothingburger.
Star Citizen Defense Playbook:
Timeline Criticisms:
CIG had to build a company from scratch, including hiring, building studios around the globe, etc.
R&D doesn’t count.
All those games had engines already made. CIG is building their engine from scratch. It is called “Star Engine.”
Those other games actually started development and R&D way before those dates, don’t you know anything?
Star Citizen already has way more content than any of those games.
Star Citizen is doing something that literally no one has ever attempted before. Ground-breaking innovations take time.
Those games are bad because money-grubbing publishers forced them out the door before devs could make them into something good. Star Citizen doesn’t have publishers, and no deadlines, so this means Star Citizen will be better.
This new era of gamers are impatient little bitches. I don’t mind the wait, I have patience. I keep pledging so Chris Roberts will have as much time as he needs to recognize his vision.
Bugs, Lack of Content Criticisms
Star Citizen is more transparent than any other company, ever. You’re seeing how the sausage is made.
There is way more content than they are showing us because they don’t want to spoil it.
What are you talking about? I just spent hours playing the game it’s great/runs great/no bugs/perfectly smooth/amazing.
You obviously don’t understand game development. Bugs like this are totally normal for a game in this stage of development. Have you ever heard of Alpha??
Don’t be a part of early access if you can’t handle some bugs.
All of those things you just listed are on the schedule, they will be delivered in
They are doing a lot of the ground-work tech / pipelines that will pave the way for faster content creation later.
Oh, they already have the tech for , it’s not much effort to add.
Funding Model, Sales, Marketing Criticisms
Star Citizen is doing something different. They are bypassing the greedy publisher model only cares about profit and kills innovation.
Nobody is forcing you to pledge.
I backed the game because I believe in Chris Roberts’s vision, it’s the game I’ve always dreamed of playing.
All the ships that can be bought can be acquired in-game, therefore not pay-to-win.
The game does not have subscriptions. You can subscribe to help pay for weekly content which gives us insights into game development never before seen.
You’re not buying land! You’re buying the ability to claim land. Huge difference.
It’s not a scam. They have offices all over the world and the game is playable right now.
CIG is not in any kind of financial trouble, just look at the funding tracker.
General Rebuttals
Why are you even commenting if you hate the game so much? What kind of sad person just goes around tearing things down?
Oh look, another Derek Smart alt trying to spread lies and mis-information about Star Citizen because he’s jealous.
Known troll/goon. Downvote and move on.
How many AAA games have YOU released?
You are entitled to NOTHING.
Even if the game never comes out, I’m proud to be a part of it, at least Chris is trying.
G0RF
Star Citizen is good and the thread is proof.
Lol as a person that has paid $0 for star citizen and also never played it, its one of my favorite games
–- “PAAAARRP!”
