I spent 40$ on it back in 2013. I looked forward to playing the single player campaign.
Then I found a girl. Went through university. Got a career. Had two kids. Got a divorce. And now I have time to play it again, but feel like I’ve mostly grown out of gaming.
GG Chris Roberts.
Man I wish I knew how to scam idiots like this
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Appeal to the authority you give yourself based on *past experience (leave out any negative past experience) *religious/spiritual “insight” can be a substitute here
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Present an ambitious “vision” that claims to require said past experience to fully understand
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Allow your targets to start building the product in their imagination based on the crumbs you gave them with step 2
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Sell disjointed tangential products that don’t interfere with the player’s dream logic and promise they will connect to your cohesive vision with time
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Find “technical delays”
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Express that you need backers to buy more of the dream to help get through the “technical delays”
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Repeat for 9 years until the market begins to retract
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Open the dream up to asian markets
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???
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Profit
All it requires is being a soulless piece of shit.
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My friends were very excitedly talking about setting up a corp in this when it was first announced.
They wanted my buy-in, and I asked if I could be head of HR, to which they said “yes”.
So I bought it, created our corp, and performed my ideal goal: set up a corp recruitment posting called “entry-level Star Citizen player” which required 10+ years in Star Citizen.
We’re now at the point where I have to find my log-in and change that to 20+ for the joke to make sense again.
I can somehow understand the people who funded it in the first place, but who invests now in a project which has already been in development hell for more than a decade and produced barely anything playable. Every whale has already been milked - what return of investment can an investor expect of Star Citizen?
It’s still $45 to access the game if you don’t have it yet(and that counts as a pledge, and therefore part of the game’s funding), but yea as a player and a backer I essentially agree. You’re basically spending money to skip game progression after the final wipe before release(whenever that happens).
IMO it takes some of the enjoyment out of the game even in its current buggy alpha form. You can earn basically everything except for the most recently(ish) released ships(and some cosmetic items) entirely within the game.
You do get a game to play for $45 though. A game with a zillion bugs and issues but a game nonetheless. I personally feel like it was worth $45 for the entertainment value I’ve gotten out of it. Not worth the amount I spent(like a decade ago), but the first $45 feels worth it now.
That being said, don’t buy the game if you expect a polished experience.
Not to defend SC too much, and full disclosure I don’t play it. But I have friends who DO play it and it seems like they are having a lot of fun?
They aren’t evangelists for the game or anything, so its not a fanboy situation. They just play it a lot, and with lots of other people. They have an online community and meet up IRL for events. Post vids of their exploits. It seems fun to me? I asked them about the bugs and stuff and they fully admit it is buggy and things are broken, they make no apologies for it. They figure out workarounds and share it with the crew. I don’t know, these guys are usually pretty critical of games but they seem happy weirdly. Maybe a cult?
There is no fucking way that I am ever going to pay for a fake star ship or anything so I’m not even considering it. And the entire funding model of the game seems batshit insane to me. But to me it seems like the idea that the game is unplayable doesn’t really match the reality? Its clearly not a good value proposition at all.
I love how they say “next year” like that was the expected release date to begin with.
Man I was so stoked during the kickstarter. No suits controlling Chris Roberts, crowd funded, open development of an epic space game.
Now, I’m pretty sure I won’t even have time to play it by the time it’s released. They got my $45 a long time ago, and I’ve spent more time on SC than a lot of $45 games, but…yeah, I’m not excited about it anymore.
Gonna get Senior Citizen before full release Star Citizen
Soon the game won’t need funding because it will be eligible for retirement pension
Average Store Citizen player

We just need to buy another ship guise, they’re so close to release!
Note that Duke Nukem Forever released (poorly) before this travesty.
What you can play right now in Star Citizen is arguably better than what Duke Nukem Forever will ever be.
Fucking scam. This is as bad as a crypto scam.
I am ashamed to admit that I fell for the scam. It was 2019, and Pyro was right around the corner (except it wasn’t, and wouldn’t make it into the game until 2025). They showed off jump points with a super amazing megastructure ring, an in depth economy simulation, and lots of other really interesting stuff that has still not made it into the game.
Over time, I began to realize I had been scammed. The game just continued to be broken and lacking in features, update after update. Eventually I had enough and sold my account for good in 2024, with the 4th consecutive year of failing to deliver Pyro Since then, I have continued to check in and have not once regretted my decision to cash out of the scam. It is still a buggy and unfun mess. They have scaled back their projections for 1.0 from 100 systems to 5. Their idea of science and exploration is “go here and scan”. It is a shell of the game that was promised years ago, and will never be able to live up to the hype. Overpromise and underdeliver is their mantra.
They have scaled back their projections for 1.0 from 100 systems to 5.
Wow is that the first realistic thing they’ve done?
2016, for me. 42 was supposed to release the next year…such a scam…
Squadron was just another turd on the dumpster fire for me. I didn’t back the project for it, but the fact that it’s been “two years away” for the last decade +, is just another indicator of how much of a scam this thing is. I will be seriously shocked if they manage to finally push it out the door next year, and even more shocked if it is not a totally shit show. There’s no way it lives up to how insanely high it has been hyped up, and I’m just going to be chowing down on popcorn when the shit hits the fan.
yeah but how sick is the game gonna be after $1 billion in funding
Now imagine it being double that good for just $2 billion!
$1 billion !?
That is insane.
Elite Dangerous had a budget of £8m… if Cloud Imperium Games can’t release SC for a hundred times that amount it’s because it’s a grift.
it’s because it’s a grift.
Always has been.
Look at the price of those ships you can buy, its always looked like a very obvious attempt to keep rolling in money while always juuuuuuust being a bit too far away to release. But just give us a few more million and we’ll toooootally release it.
You did a reverse EriKa KirK there. I think you meant “grift” not “gift”
I did indeed.
I blame Samsung’s appalling autocorrect.
so ducking annoying
🦆
🛞
Probably want to get a different keyboard then (one that doesn’t send them everything you type, for one)
Game development as a service.
That’s cause Star Citizen is a grift.
Never preorder.
The fun thing is looking into history… especially the one of Freelancer. It would never have been released if it weren’t for Jörg Neumann who - in short - finished it.
100% selling hopes and dreams. I understand there’s a playable alpha, I was a backer for over a decade. There is no cohesive vision, just endless theory crafting and half baked implementations to maintain the illusion of progress, but every time they add something, they seemingly need to break something else for their 8 ticks-per-second system to be able to handle it…
Hell of a grift.
I have fun. You don’t have to pay more than the 45 € beginner pack, if you don’t want to. Its still rough but you can see how the pieces start fitting together.
You don’t have to pay more than the 45 € beginner pack
That’s an absolutely obscene ask for an eight-year-old game with no prospects of being finished in the foreseeable future – let alone that it has macrotransactions for things like paints and intentionally puts you at a disadvantage to players who paid hundreds of euros for this stupid piece of shit grift.
nah it’s not pay to win. it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that
Eh,depending on which state the “economy” is in, it can be pretty hard. There’s threads all over spectrum about how Grundy and broken things always are.
If there was much game to actually win, I would definitely call it pay to win.
“Hey come pay yesteryear’s AAA title price for a game that’s been overpromising and underdelivering for the better part of the past two decades” is not the sales pitch you think it is…
Sunk cost fallacy is a bitch. One must be severely delusional to think that after paying however much you did AND waiting for 12+ years, having a barely playable alpha when the original timeline was for a 2015 release AND it’s still being promised for a 2027 release (which, given the state of the alpha, is likely to be missed too), this is in any way acceptable.
How much of a financial investment do you think €45 is over 10+ years? It’s nothing. There’s literally no sunk cost fallacy here
Holy delulu. The fact that you didn’t get anything for over 12 years AND you still protect the company AND urge others to invest is proof of the fallacy here. The inability to admit you’ve been scammed. That you didn’t get what you’ve been promised over and over and over.
Didn’t get anything for over 12 years? Shite, I gotta tell my friends we’ve gotten nothing out of the months of game time we’ve put into the game the last couple of years, especially these past 12 months. CIG has been scamming us with countless hours of gameplay!
Bruh lmao
Where did I urge anyone to buy the game? Or protect the company for that matter?
I’ve watched the pieces “start fitting together” for like 14 years now… There is fun to be had, but it’s an ocean wide and an inch deep imo. SC stopped being fun for me the moment I realized most of the fun I was having was imagining hypotheticals to pass the time while fighting their shit product to function in some meaningful way. This becomes especially painful when you see all of the effort is supposedly going into a single-player game that we’ve barely seen while they fail to deliver an acceptably functional version of the product we actually play and use the ships we payed money for in…
It has other massive problems with the company’s motives. For example: why balance the game to incorporate cohesive and effective multicrew ships, and sell 1 person a 725$(CAD) ship (hammerhead) to invite 6 other people to crew, when they can leave it’s future balance a dream and have everyone in OP F8s (or whatever the current light fighter “meta” ship is at the moment) for 260$ each… 725$ dollar multicrew ship, or 1,820$ in light fighters. hrmmmmm A Hammerhead should melt light fighters according to it’s stated purpose when sold, but it’s been effectively useless for years and years now, as one very clear example of what’s going on overall.
Multicrew will NEVER BE FUN until they’re done milking their base, and they’ll never be done milking their base.
Doesn’t matter that you can try the game for free several times a year either. Stop having fun! Grrrrr!
/s
I’ll wait thanks, I have not paid that much in a game all year and don’t intend to start now on something so unfinished.
Agreed, IIRC they have a free weekend every now and then. A couple of years back I gave it a spin, realized what I wasn’t missing, and went back to Elite Dangerous and No Man’s Sky. You know, working space games…
Yeah, NMS and ED are both fun. Though I have found after a while each game becomes “now what?” kinda thing. I have played other sandbox games but in those I struggle to find much purpose in doing anything.
Expanding factions could give long term purpose but it doesn’t really give you anything. Maybe if you got access to a factions finances a bit and could more directly control them, faction owned fleet super carriers kind of thing?
Yup, very much make your own activities games, but both continue to grow. NMS especially just keeps bashing out free updates (Best Ongoing Game again at this years The Game Awards) and has monthly or so expeditions for the new things if you need more direction. Corvettes went over well.
Has NMS been speeding up the pace of new updates too?
I swear I last played it only a few years ago, but now I count 17 new updates after that
Think so ? I put these games down for a while and come back later, explore the new content, muck around for a while, and put them down again… Love 'em both, but not all the time.
True, NMS is certainly doing better at adding new stuff
I bought a $60 ship back in 2013 or whatever and have only tried it a few times since.
I would definitely recommend waiting for when - and if - it comes out as a polished product.
Most of the limited number of projects I backed on Kickstarter have succeeded, but Star Citizen is one of the two lessons I learned about throwing early money at big projects. Can’t believe it’s been over twelve years.
Never cared for SC but Shenmue 3 was my very memorable lesson in the crowd funding market. On the one hand it was released relatively on time, and I got my backer bonus. In the other, there still wasn’t actually a game to play.
I played this game more than i played red dead redemption for example. Like way more, and it was cheaper. 1 billion is insane, everyone knows that. But there are crypto and nft games that gobblet up 250millions and it’s just a standard asset pack made by a guy in a week and there isn’t as much of an outrage, because people just want to be mad.
“There are worse grifts” is not the discussion point you think it is.
You’re part of the problem.














