Star Citizen players lash out at cash-only "pay-to-win" item, lack of apology

[jrtt0]

I really disliked their "pay-for-content" approach from the very beginning.
That's why I never ever bought anything related to this game...

 

[EvilRebar]

As far as I can tell, most people buying the large ships are wasting their money, unless they have enough friends to already fill them.

Or it gives them a boost when the game actually releases, so they can much more quickly build a large guild and do some of the end game content quicker.

When the game actually releases, most players will be the normal small ship, grinding to make money, get bigger ships, specialise in something, join a guild etc…

What is the population of people who are willing to put up with the jankiness and dullness of what Star Citizen is going to be when it releases? It's too complex to be smooth software at release and too much of a sim for most people to want to play it.

I feel like the Venn diagram of "current backers" and "total stable players at release" looks almost like a circle.

 

[Burty117]

What is the population of people who are willing to put up with the jankiness and dullness of what Star Citizen is going to be when it releases? It's too complex to be smooth software at release and too much of a sim for most people to want to play it.

I feel like the Venn diagram of "current backers" and "total stable players at release" looks almost like a circle.

They have something like 5.5 million backers, so at least 5.5 million people that understand what they’re getting into.

Look, this is something that isn’t said enough on the internet, there’s a large (mostly adult) crowd of gamers out there that are bored of being treated like a child in most games, we’ve also never had a space sim anywhere close to what SC is delivering, not even remotely close.

If the game isn’t for you, fair enough, it isn’t going to be for everyone, it doesn’t hand hold you, it gives you instant access to a massive universe, you cannot turn off PvP, it’s going to have some pretty complex systems, I know at least half my friends aren’t interested.

But there’s clearly a fairly large player base screaming out for a decent space sim, they didn’t make it to $800 million dollars on just a few thousand backers.

I personally can see a fairly large and dedicated player base appearing after launch, the game features so much stuff, and the fleshed out Guild systems, end game content of building space stations and what not, it’s got legs, CIG just need to hurry up and get SQ42 out the door so they concentrate on SC.

 

[Squid Surprise]

They have something like 5.5 million backers, so at least 5.5 million people that understand what they’re getting into.

Look, this is something that isn’t said enough on the internet, there’s a large (mostly adult) crowd of gamers out there that are bored of being treated like a child in most games, we’ve also never had a space sim anywhere close to what SC is delivering, not even remotely close.

If the game isn’t for you, fair enough, it isn’t going to be for everyone, it doesn’t hand hold you, it gives you instant access to a massive universe, you cannot turn off PvP, it’s going to have some pretty complex systems, I know at least half my friends aren’t interested.

But there’s clearly a fairly large player base screaming out for a decent space sim, they didn’t make it to $800 million dollars on just a few thousand backers.

I personally can see a fairly large and dedicated player base appearing after launch, the game features so much stuff, and the fleshed out Guild systems, end game content of building space stations and what not, it’s got legs, CIG just need to hurry up and get SQ42 out the door so they concentrate on SC.

Unfortunately, while there is a huge demand for a great space sim, Star Citizen isn’t it… Chris Roberts is a really smart guy who saw this demand and instead of treating you all like children, decided to treat you like fools…
He promised you the moon and delivered a meteor - but with the promise of the moon “coming soon”…

 

[Theinsanegamer]

They have something like 5.5 million backers, so at least 5.5 million people that understand what they’re getting into.

Look, this is something that isn’t said enough on the internet, there’s a large (mostly adult) crowd of gamers out there that are bored of being treated like a child in most games, we’ve also never had a space sim anywhere close to what SC is delivering, not even remotely close.

If the game isn’t for you, fair enough, it isn’t going to be for everyone, it doesn’t hand hold you, it gives you instant access to a massive universe, you cannot turn off PvP, it’s going to have some pretty complex systems, I know at least half my friends aren’t interested.

It's actually ironic, hilarious even, that "muh adults" get suckered into a pig butchering scam that most children could point out. Star citizen, at its core, is a janky cross of No Mans Sky and Everspace with giant ships and promises of Anime MMO tier greatness. And when this gets pointed out, those "adults" feel the need to defend their MMO like it's the single greatest video game ever made, when in all honesty, it isnt.

Games like Freespace 2 did the "big universe with lots to do" thing 20 years ago. Everspace 2 has better ship play, without the tedium of MMO mechanics stapled on.

SC sells 6 use weapons for the price of full games, and $20k starship packages. Star Citizen isn't a complicated space game for adults, it's a glorified sandbox that exists to sell NFTs, that was created before NFTs existed.

But there’s clearly a fairly large player base screaming out for a decent space sim, they didn’t make it to $800 million dollars on just a few thousand backers.

It's clear that this game has scammed hundreds of thousands over its full decade of existence out of their cash. They were selling $20k starship packages. They didnt get to $800 million just selling $30 license codes. They found their whales, and have been drilling ever since.

The game's peak player count recently was 28k players. That's on par with games like Dragon Age: Failguard. That's on par with Rocket League, a FTP game from 10 years ago, and is half the player base of Team Fortress 2, a game that is old enough to vote now.

I personally can see a fairly large and dedicated player base appearing after launch, the game features so much stuff, and the fleshed out Guild systems, end game content of building space stations and what not, it’s got legs, CIG just need to hurry up and get SQ42 out the door so they concentrate on SC.

Even more ironic, SQ42 wasnt IN the original star citizen vision and was only tacked on a few years later to squeeze even more money out of "investors". Remember how this game was supposed to launch in 2015? I remember.

And $800 million is just.....to quote myself:

Adjusted for inflation, that's more then two entire HALO trilogies, and taken longer to boot. It's more expensive then 5 "Marvel's Spider Man" titles. That's almost 4x the cost of both development and marketing of GTA V.

Sorry, but this "adult space sim" is so far away from actually being impressive, or finished, for such a bloated dev budget. It doesnt even look any better than Crysis 2 or 3, games that came out 15 years ago, and were built on the same game engine. Even Bethesda managed to dramatically increase the visual quality of games made on Gamebrio over the years, and they didnt need 4/5ths of a BILLION dollars to do so.

 

[Burty117]

Man, you lot really have a stick up your arse about Star Citizen don't you.

You're also seemingly treating me like I've put loads of money into it, I haven't, I've just played the game with a starter ship.

Listen, no other game can even touch Star Citizen, most space games don't even bother doing the interiors of ships, Have you played Starfield? Elite Dangerous? Or No Man's Sky? SC is clearly doing something completely different to anything else out there.

I'm absolutely not saying it's perfect, it couldn't be further from it, all the games listed above are fairly glitch free, released and run well, What I am saying is, nothing else out there is even remotely close to the scope SC is, not even close.

I'm also confused why any of you give a sh*t about player numbers or what it looks like, I'm fairly sure I could find comments from you stating "we don't want graphics or RT, we want gameplay", then the moment it's a game you want to paint in a bad light "look at those terrible graphics".

It's a bug riddled Alpha build of a game, the fact 28k people put themselves through that pain regularly is beyond my understanding, and CIG have done plenty of things that annoy the community, my personal hatred is the fact they market an Alpha game as "now playable" when it should be labelled "try the Alpha now".

The community is a tricky one, whenever I've interacted with an SC fan, they've always been polite, they'll help you in-game, give you free stuff, show you the ropes as it were.
Generally speaking, if I jumped into GTA online, WoW, New World, LoL, something like that as a new player and ask a basic question or for help, you'll get yelled at, team killed, vote kicked etc...

The downside to the community is they seem to all be rich and buy into silly monitising systems from CIG, then complain about it, They're the kind of people that spend £2k on a ship, then complain they can't use all it's features by themselves, these are real people with jobs, but seemingly unable to read anything about the thing they just laid down silly money for.

If the Alpha build didn't have the content it does, I would say it's a scam and will never release, but it really does support hundreds of players, it really does have massive ships with full interiors, it really does have lots of planets with no load screens, it's not like nothing is there, unfortunately, it's just taking a million years for progress to happen due to wasteing the first 7 odd years of it's developement, it deserves criticism for sure, but "scam" is yet to be decided.

Edit: I just realised you guys got offended with the word "Adult" as well, I don't think that translated well in my original comment, what I'm trying to say, 99% of video games today just tell you what to do, how to do it, and make everything super obvious (colours on rock faces for climbing, big arrow on the mini-map, arrow in the sky etc...), although frustating at times, which is something CIG seriously need to work on, it's kinda refreshing to not be so heavily hand held, I think probably because it's quite hard to hand hold in such a massive sandbox, but it's a plus in my book.

 

[Mdgrim]

So on one end of things, I understand they need to make money to pay for development. On the other side, they don't have to take a "you're too poor to game" approach.

There is a tasteful way to do this and a bad way to do it. They keep choosing the bad way, but people keep giving them money so I doubt they'll stop

Except they've made over 800 MILLION dollars off their unfinished game already, they likely haven't even spent 10% of that on development. Just as an example, the development budget for Red Dead Redemption 2 is estimated to somewhere around $170 to $240 million. I can't imagine that these guys have spent more than $100 million on their perpetually unfinished game, unless they make extremely poor financial and/or production decisions.

 

[wiyosaya]

It's actually ironic, hilarious even, that "muh adults" get suckered into a pig butchering scam that most children could point out. Star citizen, at its core, is a janky cross of No Mans Sky and Everspace with giant ships and promises of Anime MMO tier greatness. And when this gets pointed out, those "adults" feel the need to defend their MMO like it's the single greatest video game ever made, when in all honesty, it isnt.

Games like Freespace 2 did the "big universe with lots to do" thing 20 years ago. Everspace 2 has better ship play, without the tedium of MMO mechanics stapled on.

SC sells 6 use weapons for the price of full games, and $20k starship packages. Star Citizen isn't a complicated space game for adults, it's a glorified sandbox that exists to sell NFTs, that was created before NFTs existed.

It's clear that this game has scammed hundreds of thousands over its full decade of existence out of their cash. They were selling $20k starship packages. They didnt get to $800 million just selling $30 license codes. They found their whales, and have been drilling ever since.

The game's peak player count recently was 28k players. That's on par with games like Dragon Age: Failguard. That's on par with Rocket League, a FTP game from 10 years ago, and is half the player base of Team Fortress 2, a game that is old enough to vote now.

Even more ironic, SQ42 wasnt IN the original star citizen vision and was only tacked on a few years later to squeeze even more money out of "investors". Remember how this game was supposed to launch in 2015? I remember.

And $800 million is just.....to quote myself:


Sorry, but this "adult space sim" is so far away from actually being impressive, or finished, for such a bloated dev budget. It doesnt even look any better than Crysis 2 or 3, games that came out 15 years ago, and were built on the same game engine. Even Bethesda managed to dramatically increase the visual quality of games made on Gamebrio over the years, and they didnt need 4/5ths of a BILLION dollars to do so.

Are your comments based on personal experience with Star Citizen? If not, they have not basis in reality.

 

[LimyG]

This is awful. All this time wishing and hoping for the best.

Now my opinion has done a u-turn. This is a scam. Possibly from the start. Could they be that low life.

Whatever, as it stands now it's a flat out con job. I hope they crash and burn.

 

[Squid Surprise]

This is awful. All this time wishing and hoping for the best.

Now my opinion has done a u-turn. This is a scam. Possibly from the start. Could they be that low life.

Whatever, as it stands now it's a flat out con job. I hope they crash and burn.

To be fair, Chris Roberts probably started with the true ambition to make this game... he has a history of making them... unfortunately, he also has a history of dreaming too large for his budget - it got Freelancer taken over by MS...

However it started, the result has clearly turned "scammy".... Roberts might still believe he'll deliver an awesome game "when it's ready" but... there is no incentive to do so. As long as the game is in alpha, he can rake in as much cash as he wants and have no results. As soon as the game is released, however, he'll need to account for every cent he's gained - and that would be impossible...

Even if it's miraculously released in a couple of years (it won't), he would then have to account for why it cost a billion dollars... the resulting lawsuits would bankrupt him - or land him in jail. So... we'll simply see the ongoing alpha until Roberts is ready to retire.