Since I haven’t seen anyone post this, I thought I’d share the new Star Engine demo video from Cloud Imperium Games.
Ok, I know we love to shit on that “game”, but that video in and of itself left me speechless.
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It’s objectively a good target for ridicule that the game has raised enough money to make the next Grand Theft Auto off of a strange and exploitative business model, been in development for over a decade, and still has no release date. At the same time, there’s more game in that public alpha than a handful of fully released products, so calling it a scam never made sense.
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It is not normal, under any circumstances, to take 10+ years to make a game. The rest of the industry is encroaching on it, and it’s ridiculous there too. Right now we’re looking at a AAA industry that’s taking about 5-6 years to make a game, and everyone knows that has to come back down somehow; the ones that go longer than that are Prey (2006), Duke Nukem Forever, Beyond Good & Evil 2, etc. Not a great track record.
the business model was no more “exploitative” than something like Apex or PubG that make literal billions yearly off cosmetics
Those are bad too. In different and sometimes arguably worse ways. But at least you get the product at the point of sale and not an IOU. That, of course, makes Star Citizen an easy target once again.
People have their ego wrapped up in the criticisms about the game, they don’t like the idea that they got duped into hating on something by people who profited off their rage. People need to stop trying to save face; they were wrong about Star Citizen and SQ42.
I saw a trailer for this game with Gary Oldman in it 8 years ago. 8 years. They cast a lot of fan favorite actors that were already, let’s say, of an advanced age, and I’m betting one of them dies by the time Squadron 42 comes out. I’m looking forward to playing Squadron 42, but if it takes you 8 years from the time you had something to show for your work for that single player mode to come out (which can and should be smaller in scope than an MMO and have none of the CI/CD restrictions that a live service game has), then you can bet your ass there’s something to criticize there. At the very least, project management. And it’s totally fair to criticize someone for choosing to make the wrong game (overscoped) when your massive AAA company doesn’t exist yet and scaling up to meet that need apparently takes over a decade.
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I get that Star Citizen is extremely up your alley, but there’s a lot of colorful language in your post about how much of an advancement this is or how it’s doing so much more than some other game (pretty difficult to make apples to apples comparisons about number of features in a cowboy game), and let me just summarize that as being very subjective. What we can actually play and get hands on is a game that, after all this time, has some rough technical performance and plenty of bugs, paid in exchange for features that offer only diminishing returns as you expand the circle of the game’s audience out further from the people looking for the strictest simulation. Starfield couldn’t get 60 FPS on console, even skipping 80% of the minutiae that SC is targeting, and Red Dead Redemption II also took flak and criticism for how the game felt to play for prioritizing a lot of simulation-y things as well. Those games aren’t immune to criticism either, and they were able to come from teams who had successfully built acclaimed games in the past, iterating on them.
Also, that “8 years” is in all likelihood including several years of greyboxing, engine work that’s reusable for future projects, and other pre-production work with a skeleton crew, while most of the studio was at work on GTAV and its own secondary MMO alongside the single player. Cyberpunk 2077 was announced back in 2012 with a CG trailer, but I distinctly remember a Giant Bomb interview with a CDPR designer in ~2014 ahead of the Witcher 3’s launch. Of course most of CDPR wasn’t working on Cyberpunk yet. Jeff Gerstmann asked what Cyberpunk was looking like at that time, and the CDPR rep just responded that it was a stack of design documents a foot high off the desk.
If people are aware they are getting an IOU, that’s not exploitive.
It is. For all the reasons that everyone says not to pre-order video games, pre-ordering a ship that you don’t even know when you’ll really be able to use it is exploitative, and it’s priced to cash in on whales. At least it’s not a blind box preying on gambling impulses, but I still find it to be gross.
The very least you can do is stop gaslighting. Every step of the way people have been stepping back their criticism, they’ll say this features not coming and then it does and they drop it off their list, they say it’s a scam and now it’s suddenly “Well of course it’s was never a scam, no one would actually think that.”
Don’t attribute to me what others have said. Plenty of other people have called this a scam, but right at the top, I said that never made sense to me. Maybe a few weeks ago, I said something right here on the fediverse that someone interpreted to be too positive about Star Citizen, and the next response was to ask me how much I paid into the game. Those people probably haven’t changed their minds. I am not them. I think for myself. That is not me gaslighting you. It’s me having a different opinion than someone else you spoke to.
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I don’t think it’s about loving to shit on something, you can only get burned so often with overhyped games, i rather have the game speak for itself when it’s released.
I am in shock at the number of people upvoting positive comments about this scam project. Until they refund all the people they defrauded to get the project off the ground, they will continue to be dragged down by their own fucking karma.
Suckers want to spend money on it now, knowing everything we know now? That’s on you. But plenty of us didn’t know we were being conned at the time.
Spending more than a basic access package is absolute stupidity and those that do it and regret it have no one to blame but themselves. I spent $45 dollars and play the exact same game and can buy most of those expensive ships with in game money after a few days of playing.
I have had hundreds of hours of great times in Star Citizen. Your anecdotal experience and very emotional hatred for this project because of your own bad financial choices doesn’t make my good experience, the most common experience, untrue. The massive, growing number of active users trumps your loud minoroty’s passionate hatered. Hatered 100% based on hot, salty tears because you wasted your own money on pretend spaceships like a spoiled child, not based on an objective look at things. You were 100% informed about the realities of this project, you just ignored it. I know this because I’ve been following it too and didn’t spend buckets of money on a videogame that isn’t even done yet. Because that would be really irresponsible of me.
This game keeps making money and keeps adding more users. This is because it is fun to play for more people than not. Otherwise they would be failing after this many years. Grow up, get a life, focus on games you like, ignore the ones you don’t like a healthy adult. Don’t spend money on speculative projects if you don’t want the project to change, caveats have been everywhere saying as much since day one. The only person that lied to you was you.
Before Star Citizen got announced, I tried to get up a project that would’ve been better, bigger, and far more revolutionary… only I didn’t lie about it, so funding fell on blank stares at best, and a bunch of insults at worst.
Congrats, you voted with your wallet to get conned, so you got what you voted for. Same with No Man’s Sky.
The average citizen has no vision or perception of the costs involved, so you either con people, or nothing gets done.
Are you a well-known developer though? One of the reasons why Starfield attracted so much attention was the name Chris Roberts attached to it. As flawed as his legacy is, he’s a household name in the industry. Are you? What was your project about? How big was your team?
Precisely, you just described what’s needed to pull a con. My project was just an engine capable of running a real-scale galaxy with consistent time travel, we had no great concept artists capable of churning out eye candy marketing material. Should have made it a solo project about digging mines, or something.
Oh, so they’re like, actually making something with all that money, huh. Wow
Always have been, that’s why calling it a scam has always been ridiculous. You can think about the feasibility of the project and quality of their decisions what you want, but they were always very honest and transparent about the work they are doing and the huge goal they are chasing.
We’ve been trying to tell y’all this for years, we just want you to have fun and not listen to horrendous “journalists” that smear Star Citizen for clicks. But you don’t create multiple offices across the world with over 1000 full time employees and dozens of third party contractors if you’re trying to scam your fans. You also can’t create a AAA studio from the ground up in just a few years. This studio started with 8 people in a basement and it grew slowly, because you have to. Only so many people are looking for work at a time and only so many of them are hirable. It took them 10 years just to have as many devs as other AAA studios, but they knew they had the budget to go AAA from early on. So for a long time there weren’t enough people to deliver a game of this scope in a reasonable time. They knew it, we knew it, it was part of the plan. They were hiring like mad across the world for years and years because the payoff in the end will be a well supported AAA game like no other. Now that they are chugging along at full speed, people are starting to see what the rest of us have been trying to show you. Yes, Chris Roberts wants to be a billionaire CEO. But he also wants to build a rad game in good faith and has the money to do so.
So yeah, it’s taken a while and will be a while still, but it’s a genuinely fun game to play, even now. If it goes belly up tomorrow I’ve already got my money’s worth of enjoyment out of it. Every quarter, new massive updates drop. Once Squadron 42 is launched and running smoothly I think it will change a lot of hearts and minds. Just play SC during a free fly week. It’s janky as early access games always are, but genuinely a fun time.
You should all be angry at the shitty hit pieces that deprived you guys of quality online scifi shenanigans by lying to you about this game and remember gaming news isn’t always good journalism, sometimes reputable sites will post tabloid garbage because there are no rules, only shareholders and click quotas.
