• Miles O'Brien@startrek.website
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    2 months ago

    Star Citizen

    “drying funds”

    Have we checked to make sure they don’t have a banana stand nearby? Specifically looked at the walls?

    • bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • magikmw@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • absquatulate@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Evrala@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      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!

      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.

      • pyre@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

        • jeeva@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          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.

          • pyre@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            what’s the plan? when is it coming out? no one has to say it; there’s no plan.

              • pyre@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                it’s out? I can finally buy the finished product? awesome! I couldn’t find it on steam though. surely it must have come out on steam, such a big release.

                maybe I’m typing “star citizen” wrong. could you link me to the store page? thank you for informing me, I’m so ready to take back everything I said once I start playing.

                • orrk@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  considering the amount of people already playing SC, I wouldn’t expect it to be on steam, but that’s also not what they said, is it?

                  must be the world’s worst scam if they are actually spending money to make something.

            • jeeva@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              Are you asking this about any other games? GTA6 doesn’t have a release date yet, do you have the same worry?

              … Genuinely, I do see the difference between the two, but it’s weird to me that people are calling it out for things that aren’t said. They say enough; if you can’t make complaints based on reality, that’s a bit lazy.

              Edit: for what it’s worth, I’ll “move the goalposts” on this one if you come back with some nonsense around how they haven’t delivered anything yet. I’ve played a fair few hours on my ship (probably a few hundred over the last decade), despite not having invested millions of pounds.

              • pyre@lemmy.world
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                2 months ago

                if you ask for money promising something and you have no plan of delivering, it’s a scam.

                I don’t know how gta6 fits here. if they did the same thing yes I would absolutely call it a scam.

                • jeeva@lemmy.world
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                  2 months ago

                  Sorry, I’m confusing a conversation I saw the other day that said we’d have had two GTAs in the same time star citizen had been in development for. Weird comparison.

                  Do you think they don’t intend to deliver? If so, we fundamentally disagree.

                  Mismanagement or bad planning is not a scam.

                  Why is this a scam?

  • Justin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 months ago

    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?

  • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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

  • mlg@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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

    • orrk@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      but that’s not how it works is it, you can’t just super Sayan fusion two games now can you?

      PS: about the criticism, this is literally the annual “SC bad” post from these publications, generally complete with random ass unnamed sources and others (when the guy lying to you based off conformable fake shit like a “work ID” as proof of employment is the better source, eg. Derek Smart)

  • finestnothing@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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

  • pyre@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.