- cross-posted to:
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Anybody still putting money into this is a sucker. For 50mil they should have had some game out and ready
Fuck, the entire time SC was worked on we had Elite Dangerous get funded, released expanded and crash and burned. No man’s sky launched from being “Sean Lied People Died” to the biggest redemption story in gaming and Starfield went from a twinkle in Todd Howards eye to complete. Two Everspace games. Rebel Galaxy 1&2. X4!! Fuck me.
Exactly. Star Citizen has been in development so long that not only have other developers already had the chance to jump in ahead of them, the genre’s brimming with games now!
They had such an advantage going into this, how do you fuck up a golden ticket so badly??They’ve made $600M. How is that fucking up a golden ticket? They’ve all been getting paid well for years. The people who spent money are the ones who don’t have a finished game. That probably doesn’t matter to the people who’ve paid off a large chunk of their mortgages in the meantime.
Sure, they’ve got money from all the good will they’re soaking up, but at some point that good will and money will dry up…
If/when they finally do release a game, it’s now got to not just compare to a whole full genre of games, it’s got to be better than them in order to get that good will back.
It’s been this long and people are still donating, they have no reason to change course.
Who cares about good will? If they release and people get pissed at the finished product then “shutter” the studio, take everyone to a “new” studio and work on another game with the experience and cash you got from SC
By singing and dancing with grandpa for 12 years and never actually cashing in the ticket?
Since backing SC I’ve met my wife, got married and had three children. Two of which are already going to school. It’s crazy how much you can accomplish in 13 years. I wonder if the game will be done before my oldest turns 18.
Your grandchildren will appreciate when the game finally hits 1.0.
Wasn’t dwarf fortress developed for 20 years before seeing steam release? Maybe SC could top it.
The difference is that Dwarf Fortress only released on Steam because they had financial worries due to some health scares. They decided to release it on steam and charge for it but they wanted to deliver a major overhaul of the UI to justify selling it, even though people wanted to pay them for years.
DF has been in development for 20 years but it’s essentially a full game that they’ve been making better. Yeah it’s buggy (they simulate so goddamn much of course it’ll have bugs), but it’s at least a full experience that you can replay many times and never have the same experience.
Star Citizen does not deliver a full game, it’s just a glorified tech demo. It’s cool tech, but it’s not worth playing in my opinion.
Dwarf fortress was released and being distributed and successful before steam existed, the recent release was to attain more financial security as the devs age and have to deal with medical bills related to aging, failing bodies
What happened to Elite Dangerous? I used to play quite a bit before I had to move and ended up on horrible internet. I’ve finally got good internet but haven’t gotten back into it yet.
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Wait… They actually made logging out something you need to do in order to complete objectives?
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Wow… it really got even worse than when I played…
Ngl tho VR space combat is pretty fun. But i dumped money on VR and a HOTAS.
Money spent on hot ass is money well spent
It’s my point of view that they created so much friction in the gameplay loop that players generally prefer logging to get their materials or whatever they need, and FDev’s policy is “sure, whatever,” because then they don’t have to improve the gameplay.
Wow… I played just long enough to buy a Dolphin, never got out of the first few systems, it was before Beyond’s release and I found the loop to be boring after about 15h…
One thing the others didn’t mention: They released a multilayer expansion, if you try to play in co-op the game crashes, they announced they wouldn’t fix the issue so they basically wasted resources on developing a game mode that doesn’t work and still made it a selling point.
Fuck em.
Last I played, the arc was humans attempted firing a weapon targeting Thargoids and it failed. Thargoids got mad and attacked human systems in the bubble.
There was also some unhappiness around their spacelegs expansion and the subsequent end of development for console versions. I stopped playing since then not because of any problems but because I got into other games.
I was on Xbox (where my friends were). Once Odyssey flopped they cancelled any new updates to the console versions and after a couple of years haven’t No Man Sky’d Odyssey yet.
A shit update, bad handling by the devs and complete refusal to listen to the player base. So, the things that usually plague big games.
Starfield went from a twinkle in Todd Howard’s eye to complete
Technically. Haven’t played it myself to judge.
DAE Starfield bad??
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I was an original backer, I’ve played various iterations over the years and it really takes a lot of rose tint to find the game as it is enjoyable. The core loop isn’t even in place yet. The systems that do exist and work are interesting, the graphics and aesthetics are top notch, in parts, and at times it feels like we’re going to get something revolutionary. But then you play for a while and the unfinished jank gets to you, it’s not very fun. It’s cool, it’s impressive, the scope is insane and you can get lost in the vastness of space in ways that other games just can’t even approach. But it’s not fun. You can make it fun with friends or by setting up your own goals disjoined from the gameplay loop. Like try and jump a vehicle into the cargo bay mid flight or see how tightly you can race around asteroids. But if you just play the existing little loops it sucks. This is of course my subjective opinion. You might love the bounty system and the combat. You might love the salvage runs and transport missions but to me it’s like Euro Truck Simulator which is about the most boring shit I can imagine. And both the space and ground combat just isn’t even remotely as good as other games that just focus on that, which is understandable but I’m always left with this feeling of “will I really enjoy the finished product?” And I’m not sure. The game they said they were going to make in the Kickstarter, that game I would’ve enjoyed. I loved Chris Roberts games as a kid, but this monstrosity it has become? I just don’t know.
That said I really do believe they’re trying to make the best game ever. They just don’t fundamentally understand why we need deadlines and a fixed scope to get things out the door.
Star Citizen is the poster child for scope creep.
Yup, this would’ve been much better solved with expansions. Just get the core loop solid, and then build on it.
Duke Nukem Forever enters the chat
Did its scope creep…? I thought it just circled a drain until it finally plopped out in to a gutter somewhere.
Somewhat, but they mostly kept chasing newer tech and had to redo stuff over and over again.
I don’t think they were chasing newer tech, so much as the development was taking so incredibly long that their current tech had literally aged out of the common gamer’s expectations and they HAD to do it over to seem current.
That may be. I do remember somewhere in a documentary that they kept re-developing stuff for different libraries/technologies. I think at least one was voluntary. I can’t recall which doc this was, though.
More playing constant catchup than chasing, but sure.
Truer words have never been spoken
I feel the same way. For the 30 or so dollars I spent as an early backer I’ve actually had some fun times in the game, and I don’t actually think it’s quite the total loss that people make it out to be, but it certainly should be far, far better than it is after a decade and 600m dollars invested in it.
That number is mind boggling. I can’t believe how much some are willing to spend on this “game”.
They cater to a special subset of “core gamers” and those people have ample funds to blow on their hobby.
It costs 35 bucks. Don’t listen to the liars.
Almost all my ships are in game and flyable. But whatever.
Almost
Lmao
yup, the one that is not finished yet isn’t and I have a loaner ship instead. You really are grasping.
I’m just laughing at the idea of buying a .jpg
I have a loaner ship instead
Lmao
And how much did you spend for all those ships? Still just the 35 dollars that you mentioned?
I’m sorry, I’m going to need to see your credentials and investment history before I take your advice on how I should spend my money.
I don’t care how you spend your money, but you were the one arguing that the game is only 35 dollars and that almost all your ships were in game and flyable. So it certainly seems like you have spent more than that. So it certainly seems this game is much more expensive to the people that are still most interested in it.
Ship insurance purchasable through in game currency yet?
There is no need to do so. “Currently, on the Alpha and Public Test Universe (PTU), all ships and vehicles are given a basic insurance plan that does not expire to facilitate testing. At this time, it requires no upkeep or fee for players to acquire basic ship loss coverage.”
Anyone who has donated to that in the last 5 years is an idiot.
I bought it for a short time. They have a 30 day policy.
I returned it within the week. Its just way too buggy. I dont even care about the pay to play ships, whatever.
But the bugs with missions was awful. The NPC/AI fighting is nonexistant. The flight characteristics were better with n64’s star fox 64. Its just not even close to being there.
Im a sucker for space games. If i want a flight sim ill play elite. If i want a space legs discovery game, ill play starfield. If i want to get stoned and look at weird animals with small heads and cool colors, ill fire up no mans sky.
If you want to have fun blasting ships in space try Everspace 2 (very close gameplay to freelancer)
You pledged to an early alpha and then complain when it’s alpha? Shock
No I purchased a game has releases going back to 2018 in 2023 and has raised over 600 million in capital.
Then returned it when basic functionality was broken.
The game has been ongoing since at least 2011 because that’s when I first heard about it and the Kickstarter was going.
Squadron 42 has been the primary development focus, star citizen is just the playground made by a few devs with left over sq42 modules - until sq42 launches then star citizen will be the main development focus. Until then, star citizen is just a fundraising platform, I thought this was obvious
Idiot here. Put in 40€. Skeptical before I put in the money. But I liked the vision and had some friends that liked the game. Played for maybe 40 hours. Had a lot of fun with it. And a bit less fun when it crashed right in a mission. That was 3 years ago. Haven’t touched it since. Maybe I’ll get into it again to check it out. But no hopes for it being completed
Of I understand you right that’s 1 € per hour. If you enjoyed those hours then that’s a pretty good return. Enjoy
The first (and last) time I put in money was in the crowdfunding days. In fact, I did it so early they weren’t even using Kickstarter for funding.
Even though the current alpha is very buggy, I also more than got my money’s worth over the many, many years. I really would like to see the game get finished. But, what’s already there is really impressive.
The game has missed every possible deadline, and there’s every chance it will never be finished. But, the one comforting fact is that it’s missing the deadlines because they’re being too ambitious. Like, they redid the game engine to use 64 bit precision instead of 32 bit because they want it to be possible to drop a wrench at some random spot on the surface of a planet, and have another player fly across the solar system, go to the right spot, and see a wrench sitting there.
I wouldn’t put any more money in today, but I’m still glad I helped fund the game, and because I’ve been able to keep from adding more money, I actually consider my money well spent.
I bought the cheapest version a few years ago. Turns out that the game was a tech demo, but a very glorious tech demo. Flying near the cities, to the atmosphere, in space, all were very beautifully done.
As a game, pretty much a failure though. As a money vacuum, pretty good.
I think it was a positive experience as a whole, though. Never experienced anything similar since or before.
Is this article written by AI? It has all sorts of strange errors and repeated words. Like the sentence at the end of this paragraph. I know it is popular to call out everything as AI right now but this article is suspicous.
Came in to criticise the writing too. Got AI or at least bad translation vibes. Really hard to follow.
There is a wierd amount of generative-learning articles on game/tech Lemmy. I keep seeing these articles from publications that I’ve never heard of and I get excited because “Oo new people in the space” then halfway through the article I feel duped.
AI has gotten to the point where it probably wouldn’t make these mistakes.
You’ve never seen ChatGPT break I assume. It can.
Never ask it for advice on anything technical. It is confidently incorrect about a LOT of things.
Never ask it for advice period. It is always confident because that’s the most believable way to present information on the internet. It is usually wrong because it is not actually intelligent.
Its great with programming
It’s not “great”, but it’s slightly helpful sometimes.
You know its weird, here people are downvoting me for agreeing its great. On another post I’m being downvoted for saying its okay. Y’all just don’t know and thats okay. If you know what you need and you are just unfamiliar with a library, ChatGPT can explain it fine if your prompt is concise.
If you have no idea what you are doing and know nothing about programming, its not going to help you. I am currently using it to assist with small tasks using Excel.Interop and it basically spat out a working program for me to tweak. Don’t really know what to tell you about that but I can post it to GitHub I guess.
Its fine with programming so long as you know to take it with a grain of salt and give it detailed prompts. Like for instance, if you don’t specify it usually defaults to Row 1 when dealing with ranges, thats fine, because I know what row I need.
I heard somebody say that it’s like a talented intern. Can produce good results, but you have to verify them yourself first before you use them.
Okay. 🙂
AI was at that point few months back. The quality is getting worse with each week now
If you need $600m to make a genre defining game over the course of decades, maybe it isn’t worth it.
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I’m ready for Starfield Citizen.
600$ million for TWO games. Cyberpunk cost 200$ mill and didn’t even work on official release.
Squadron 42 is the primary development focus.
Star citizen is built by a small portion of staff using leftover parts from SQ42.
When SQ42 is finished, star citizen will be tho main focus.
Stop giving them attention. Seriously.
Freelancer, to this day, remains one of my all-time favorite games for capturing the magic of space exploration. If Freelancer was born from this dude’s mind, I will happily wait for Star Citizen.
Freelancer had to be pried from his control because he couldn’t meet even the least ambitious deadlines. Chris Roberts hasn’t managed a successful project from start to finish in over 20 years.
Hasn’t he been working on Star Citizen for at least 20 years? I remember backing the original cash grab when I still had all my hair.
Kickstarter was like… 2011 or 2012, so just over a decade. I know because that’s 50 bucks I’m never gonna get back, but at least it was worth less back then xD
Daikatana was born from the same mind from which Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake were born…
Entire human beings have been born and have grown up in the time it has taken to get it to this point.
At some point you need to lock the scope and actually finish it.
11 years old is a concerning definition of “grown up”.
Do you need a seat?
That was a rollercoaster of a comment.
Likewise, there is a subscription model that allows you to maintain access to the title and is divided into two types: Centurion (€12.22 per month or €134 per year) and Imperator (€24.44 per month or €268 per year). The Imperator offers, unlike the Centurion, exclusive events and an allocation of in-game money per month to rent ships and weapons.
Some pretty sloppy work here. The subscription options have nothing to do with playing the game; it’s a buy once product with no subscription system at all. The Centurion and Imperator subscriptions are better thought of as a kind of “backstage pass”, they mostly just give you patreon style content and extra in game flair items. Are they worth the money? Unless you’re a die hard fan, absolutely not. But it’s not like you have to pay up “maintain access” as the article puts it.
This game won’t ever come out. At this point, the devs just steal money and see how much they can get away with.
I said the same thing years ago. At this point it’s Duke Nukem Forever level vaporware.
Well Duke Nukem Forever actually released.
Right. But in which state?
Full gold release? I’m not defending that pile of trash but it got an official release, that’s more that Star Citizen will ever get.
It’s because its grift. They’re cashing in on it through donations. If it releases, that stops.
Not a grift.
A grift implies that someone is making bank off of it.
No, Chris Roberts is instead burning money by having devs do work, then redo work to add in some last minute shit that he thought of, then repeat until the feature creep completely overtakes their lives. It’s the Chris Roberts way.
Work is being done on the game, but remember that treading water is also a lot of work.
Like Chris is “working” for free…
He isn’t, but he’s not out there buying multiple sports cars and a yatch either. I really do believe there isn’t anything sinister going on, just a whole bunch of good intended people wasting a collosal amount of money on a dream project where devs get to do exactly what they want and don’t need to adhere to deadlines, no crunch, no job security threats and just no pressure. It’s probably bliss working there but they have no hope of ever making an actual finished product because there is literally noone there with the goal to push a product out the door on X date. It will be done when it’s done, and everyone who’s ever worked in such a loose environment knows that means never until someone comes in and lays down the law.
And before someone comes in and says “Y indie project bla bla” remember that there is a VAST difference between a small game with say 1000-5000 man hours behind it and a large AAA game which Star Citizen aims to be which entail at minimum 100.000s of man hours of work. You can be extremely loose and take your time with a small idea like say Vampire Survivor and scope creep it to hell and back and it still won’t take more than a year or two until there just isn’t anything more to do but release it.
There is probably some clever parallel to draw here to utopian political ideologies but my brain is mush after a grueling week so I’ll leave that to someone else.
Didn’t ex employees come out to talk about all the money being wasted on luxury like paintings for the office and shit?
The biggest waste is all the employees and the offices to house them. Details like decorations and conference tables are just a red herring, it’s not the real issue. Just look at their road map, and then consider that they have 1100 people on payroll working on that roadmap, not including third parties like voice actors etc. It’s fascinating.
I knew I had seen something recently:
https://reddit.com/r/starcitizen/s/ieaGZ4CRwu
Look at the bit on the Manchester office.
It’s just because that irks you when there are layoffs. But office supplies are assets, they’re on the books and while they depreciate over time it’s still something that can be sold and doesn’t cost anything after you’ve bought them. The actual office building is different, since you generally rent it and the staff you need to pay monthly and you can’t sell them to recoup part of the investment. High quality chairs etc cost a fortune, but they also last a decade plus in many cases. Still earlier this year they had 1000+ employees, that isn’t sustainable for a game relying on donations basically. You need predatory microtransactions for that to workout which is of course part of the reason CIG monetizes in the way they do, they need to keep the boat afloat.
If the average salary is just $20k yearly were looking at a salary spend in excess of $20 million a year, not including offices or payroll taxes, benefits etc. And I imagine that the average salary is higher than that. If they are laying people off the reason is that someone in finance is putting his foot down saying this just can’t go on.
He isn’t, but he’s not out there buying multiple sports cars and a yatch either. I really do believe there isn’t anything sinister going on, just a whole bunch of good intended people wasting a collosal amount of money on a dream project where devs get to do exactly what they want and don’t need to adhere to deadlines, no crunch, no job security threats and just no pressure.
Source, your uncle works at CIG?
It’s been years since I followed it closely but I remember seeing a youtube video documenting in detail the nepotism and mismanagement going on at CIG like 5 years ago with evidence from their actual videos or public info on websites. Wasn’t there also a huge forbes article a while ago talking about the same thing? And if anything, the fact that all these years later we still don’t have any new info about SQ42 that was supposed to be almost done in 2018, less alone a finished game, just goes to confirm that they were right about at least some things.
I am saying they’re doing a shit job at delivering a game to us backers. I just don’t think it’s nefarious, just sheer incompetence. They value making the best thing highly, they think the best thing means the most feature rich and realistic thing, and thus they allow scope creep to literally eat money via man-hours in a way that can only and will lead to CIG going bankrupt long before a game is ever released in a finished state. Unless someone high up over there wisens up. Forces a hard deadline and cuts the scope down agressively to meet it and gets the game(s) released. But I find that exceedingly unlikely.
They have outright lied about state of development and progress being done. I remember when CR himself said on citizencon stage that SQ42 demo had to be delayed for a few weeks due to some last minute animation issues that would ruin the first impression, but that other than that it was practically done. Then few weeks later they released a crying video about how much work it is and why it takes so long and asking for understanding.
That was like in 2018 or 2019, and now 4 years later we still don’t have anything to show for it, even regarding sq42 alone. At one point it stops being incompetence, they are just full of shit most of the time.
That might very well be. My take on everything I’ve seen so far is that it likely was ready. Just that CR or someone else said “wouldn’t it be cool if we also had X in there?” And then they just said fuck releasing, we need X in there! Then X lead to Y and along the way someone proposed A and that would be so cool but if we have A why not B and…
If we had access to their Jira or whatever they use I can all but guarantee that the backlog grows faster than they can close issues.
And it’s also undeniable that they are developing stuff. Just very questionable stuff at times and they decide to redo stuff all the time.
I just don’t think it’s nefarious, just sheer incompetence.
Distinction without a difference.
he’s not out there buying multiple sports cars and a yatch either.
Haha, that’s not a yatch. That’s a motorboat, we’re talking in the $100k-$1000k range with the topend being unlikely. I agree the optics aren’t the best but it’s not at all crazy to afford something like that on a business leader salary. Sure from a pure ethics standpoint he should take a modest salary and keep at it until the game is released and his obligations to his supporters fulfilled and then get rich. But who has ever been that principled? I can’t really fault him for something everyone does. He’s also been fairly successful for a long time already so he likely had money before SC as well. Now if I’m wrong and another angle shows this is some gaudy 10 million dollar+ yatch he bought recently then I’ll absolutely reevaluate!
Chris Roberts
This is and always has been the biggest issue.
Hell - if Microsoft hadn’t given him the boot when they bought out Digital Anvil, it’s entirely possible that he’d still be working on Freelancer.
A grift implies that someone is making bank off of it.
Chris Roberts and the rest of the exec team are making bank off of it.
I mean who would ever suspect that the man who wrote and directed the Wing Commander movie could be incompetent?
Shocked I am, really shocked!
Woah. I got Gary Oldman confused with Alan Rickman. Rickman died back in 2016… and the article STILL made sense.
That alone makes me think they’ve spent way too long on the goddam game.
I supported it but, I stopped playing, not enough to do. Graphics are insane but, little to no actual content aside from ships that you need to pay real money for. The constant dB resets prevent me from ever really grinding the game, what’s the point of it will just reset next major update. I personally think the game is going to flop due to this.
I haven’t played the game but is it true that the ships cost real money? Do you also have to pay for the base game?
You purchase the base game which comes with a starter ship. In the game, you can do missions or do cargo trading to earn in-game money which you can use to buy ships.
You can absolutely use real world cash to purchase additional ships, which funds the development of the game. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Almost all the ships can be purchased with in-game currency.
The main plus point for purchasing ships with real money is they are acvound bound and will stay with you after a database reset.
So the devs are insentivised to keep it in a perpetual alpha stage, wiping users game progress every couple months.
Well, not all the gameplay loops have been fully fleshed out yet which is why it is still in the alpha stage. Database resets happen as festures are added.
I don’t know if i will go so far as to say they are incentivised to keep it in alpha.
I don’t think it’s possible for the game to flop anymore if we’re going off money made. In terms of them making money after they fully “release”, well… I don’t know if it will ever actually “release”.
Same for me. Although I really enjoy just low flying on the planets and enjoy the scenery but what made me quit is the insane amount of bugs. Sometimes it’s nigh impossible to even get from the down area to the ship it out of the hangar. Once it’s running, it’s incredible but the lack of reliability is just to frustrating.
I think it will fully come out in at least a perpetual alpha mode like 7 Days to Die one day.
I also think it will probably flop.
When are we gonna get the single player version of Star Citizen (Squadron 42) with Mark Hamill??
Every month a new report, every month some further indications that they are nowhere near release.
