It’s that that decade long grift disguised as a game?
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
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I used to work with a guy who had thrown away upwards of $10,000 at this game. The last time it came up, he told me he had spent over $8,000, and that was several years ago and he didn't seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. When I asked him what he got for that money, he showed me the one ship he has. He had one ship. The rest were still in development and wouldn't even be released for years.
He spent more than some cars cost, for a handful of digital space ships, 90% of which aren't even finished. I have no idea how to reason with people who do this sort of thing.
People like this get to piss away money while millions go homeless without a meal today.
I don't understand some people.
These people have a mental illness. They’re being taken advantage of by unscrupulous companies. They’re in exactly the same boat as people with gambling addictions. We should feel bad for them, but not (always*) as bad as homeless folks, who are still worse off.
*One of my elementary school teachers was married to a gambling addict. The guy was secretly hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of heavy construction equipment to pay off some of his loans. The guy ended up in a police chase and took his own life before he could be arrested. His wife, the teacher, was left massively in debt (he had secretly remortgaged the family house to pay for gambling debts) and grieving the loss of her husband but also in shock at discovering the extent of his crimes and debts. Really awful situation and nothing but profits for the casinos!
I don't know.
Some people are defending things tooth and nail when trying to reason. Not only things like this either, might be something purchased or some ideology.
I have a really hard time emphasizing.
Did you mean "empathizing"? I'm having difficulty empathizing with cases like that too. I mean, ugh, it's mind-boggling, $10k is a life-changing amount of money for most people and this guy threw it away on a video game that's not even out yet. Still, people like him are being exploited for personal gain, and that is also wrong.
Yes, I meant that, sorry and thanks (if nobody says anything it has the tendency to stick) . Typo and not native.
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Bloody hell, I spent a little over two dollars buying Elite: Dangerous (a similar space game) when it was on sale about five years ago and haven't spent any more money on it since. I can't even comprehend spending 10,000 dollars on an incomplete game.
And even if the game released and was great, what would you do if you already had everything in the game?
that should be just the start, there should be something else to do beyond gathering everything you can. I hope they will add something like that.
I have a bunch of ships in the game. The most fun I've ever had in the game was after a reset I ignored all of the other ships I had and just focused on starting with the cheapest ship in the game and earning my way up. I had a blast.
I haven't touched the game in probably 3 years, basically just waiting for more things to get finished before jumping back in. But it is hard to get excited for the game with how long it has been and how... not good things have been in the company.
Star Citizen
"drying funds"
Have we checked to make sure they don't have a banana stand nearby? Specifically looked at the walls?
What could a Star Citizen cost? Eight hundred million dollars?
This game should be one of the most prominent examples of sunk cost fallacy
Marketing and sales strategies are excellent for this game. It unifies in game purchases focused on whales like with mobile games and selling early access to an alpha. There’s also an aspect of collectibles and exclusivity like with NFTs. It‘s also cult like in many aspects. An utopian perfectionist vision evangelized by a prophet.
Everyone who bought in defending the practices is a perfect example of cultish behaviour and copium.
Heck, I bought in, but I only paid $20. And I never played a minute.
Seven hundred million dollars
More like 850 at this point
Jesus christ. People need to realize that this is a scam. No video game is worth thousands of your dollars, especially a decade old game still in alpha.
It isn't a scam, just incredibly mismanaged. Chris Robert's has a very hard time saying "this is good enough" and that makes the company bleed money as they repeatedly remake things. People then don't tell Chris no. They weren't making a good space Sim, they were making the best darn space Sim evah! Their wages aren't great and now they are trying to push illegal levels of crunch time till they got caught.
They've completely redone the flight model several times to various levels of success. Time frames get so damm long that they have to go back and remake huge chunks of the game in order to keep things up to snuff graphically.
I get the feeling that they never felt the need to stress out about timelines as the funding kept rolling in, in fact the funding accelerated over time! The game has 183 different ships all designed down to the tiniest detail in the game right now. That's a fuck ton of work hours, but ship sales gets the funding rolling so they have to keep cranking out new ships.
I do really like playing the game, but it is really a shitshow for management. There was one point where they had to throw away a massive amount of work because one studio was making things that didn't fit the metrics for scale and animation of the rest of the game.
Edit: and ships are a dumb thing to buy anyway! You can earn them in game anyway for really not all that much work. It's the most cost inefficient grind skip I've ever seen in a game.
this is just a long winded way of saying it's a scam. if you ask for money promising something and you have no plan of delivering, it's a scam.
they have to keep developing and redeveloping because they have a bunch of idiots with more money than sense pumping money to them. if they actually finish the game and release it chances are revenue will come crashing down. selling a promise is much better than selling a finished product because people like to wishcast and throw money at their own hopes and imagination. anything missing they fill in the blanks. surely the game will deliver eventually.
It's a scam.
Where does he say "have no plan of delivering", out of interest? I've re read it a few times and can't find that.
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We need to start using this game as a unit to measure mismanagement.
"In total, the project cost us approximately .51 Star Citizens."
Concord cost approximately .29 Star Citizens.
The episodic rollout of SQ42 is presumed to be a way to inject new cash into the studio alongside reported plans to release higher priced ships and the rumored third game.
What?... Higher priced ships? You've got to be joking...
One of my favorite ships in the game, the Drake Corsair, is already $250. It's a great all-rounder, but it's not even a large ship comparitively! And they're going to start charging more for the newer ships?!
They just released a new ship as well, the RSI Zeus MKII, which is yet another $175. And that doesn't even mention some of the larger ships like the Anvil Carrack, sitting at an insane $600, and the Origin 890 Jump at $950...
And if that's not bad enough, they've had concept ships for years available for purchase in the $1,500-$2,000 range. How can these ships get more expensive?
Your numbers have a zero too much.
I think I'd like a game with those exact prices... In in-game currency
real dollars!??
They could’ve invested half of the funds in something else and never had to ask for another dime while keeping the game in perpetual development
I got the game and some small ship bundle a year or two ago for like $20. It was a pretty fun game for the cost, but I honestly wouldn't pay more than $30 for it. It's buggy, runs like hot garbage even on my 3080 ti, and it's very much a mile wide inch deep content wise from what I remember
Any day now.
The good old Scam Citizen!
Squadron “Feature Complete” 42
The amount of popcorn I ate because of this saga probably gained me a fair few pounds already.
Sometimes I wish No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous would combine their talents into one game just to get Star Citizen to shut up permanently.
Each one could use features from the other. Add in a dynamic user controlled economy, and suddenly everything SC has been promising after wasting hundreds millions of dollars would be right there.
As much crap Frontier gets, they made a killer custom game engine which perfectly makes it hugely immersive from day one, which shouldn't be surprising considering the original Elite was the first proper wireframe 3D graphics game.
Hello Games got a proper roasting for releasing a shell game, but they actually bounced back. Their planet generation and surface gameplay is unmatched, and their updates outshine Frontier's.
ED started out as a crowdfund too, and No Man's Sky as essentially a startup. Both of these game's received their fair share of criticism, but ultimately they produced a solid 4/5 game. Meanwhile Scam Citizen has been bankrolling for 12 years now, yet they hardly seem to receive the same level of criticism as ED ans NMS got for comparatively much much smaller issues.
It is noted for being one of the highest-funded crowdfunding projects, having raised over US$700 million as of May 2024
wth
So basically if Elite and NMS had EVE's player economy...
Yes I want this so bad lol
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Same news all the time.
drying funds? how? they must have spent more money than the united states government did fucking up Iraq for fun. a competent company with their funding could have probably started actually colonizing space by now. Jesus.
Maybe they can get Elon Musk to take over the company and maximize the grift with an immersive VR promise.
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