Star Citizen - Chris Roberts, lots of spaceship porn, lots of promises

Hey, just like Fallout '76! Well, that has 24 players I think.

I think the cutscene stuff with the actor motion capture is done, well at least filming definitely is. Whether the cutscenes are actually done, who knows. There is certainly hot debate on how much other SQ42 content is done. I’d say not that much. Too much would likely be reliant on SC content - locations, star systems, planets, etc.

I think at this stage, if a significant portion of SQ42 was done, they’d show it. "We don’t want to spoil the story’ is just them hiding behind the fact they don’t actually have anything significant to show.

At this stage, it’s been years since the Gary Oldman teaser trailer - that is probably on the cutting room floor now as their tech has evolved and driven a desire to re-render or edit it.

I keep coming back to money laundering. It’s the only explanation that makes sense to me. I just can’t otherwise understand how even a passionate user base could be throwing 2m at this in a day.

Right. How could these jamokes draw a new record amount of money recently 1) in the middle of pandemic and worldwide economic issues and 2) after 8 years of no game. I’m not in the game’s target market but it makes no sense to me.

There’s rumors that all the initial motion capture stuff had problems being used. Considering the fact that none of it is in the game maybe it’s true.

I think the ship sailed a long time ago on just getting a producer to put things in line and finish the game, if Roberts would even be capable of giving up that kind of control to a producer in the first place.

Even if you ignore all of the technical debt they’ve built up that is probably insurmountable, the problem is that Chris Roberts has promised the throngs of True Believers all kinds of things that are nowhere near finished over the years. Roberts promised 100 individual star systems in the game - are they even up to 15 total planets/planetoids yet?

Then you pile on all of the other new mechanics and modes he’s unveiled to keep that backer money enthusiastically coming in… what happens if he savagely curtails all of those promised things in order to finally “put out a product”? Backers will likely riot to cries of false advertising and broken promises. A dozen class action lawsuits will launch. The media coverage will be even more horrific than it is now. It’ll be a massive failure, and anyone who might’ve bought the game anyway, ALREADY bought access to it years ago. CIG already spent that money!

I think CIG will string this out as long as they can, because they know the shitstorm that awaits if or when they finally admit that the party is over. And as long as they keep finding new sources of funding, like they did with that VC money for “advertising”, they don’t have to.

But hey, maybe someone can scoop up the art assets during bankruptcy proceedings and eventually use them in a space sim with a half-reasonable scope, and a producer who can actually ship things.

I think it would be hilarious if Crytek bought the assets for a song at bankruptcy and included them with the engine or sold them as add on assets.

Wasn’t there a tie-in with Intel for some SSD storage ages ago for Star Citizen?

“You need the fastest IO in the world to load this pile of shit, Buy Intel”.

Guessing that these devices will be considered “Retro computing” by the time SC is out.

Sometime in the next, I dunno, five years, CIG will (with a heavy heart, obviously) announce that they are making the difficult decision to start SQ42 over from scratch. It turns out all their mocap was done with a certain level of fidelity, and technology has improved since then, and it wouldn’t be fair to the players unless they had the highest possible quality animations in the world…

Will that be before or after the UE5 switch?

After they fork Lumberyard into Sawmill.

Lumberyard to sawmill? Seems like a step backwards.

Then there’s Sawdust.

Seems like the class action suits are going to come now or later. Although later might also be a time when there are little/no assets to chase.

That’s precisely what some of us have been speculating on for some time now.

In order to launder money, you have to put in bad money and extract good money. In this regard, the bad money is buying JPEGs, given their high value. You then convert that to good money by reselling those JPEGs on the Black market; because even getting a refund (within 30 days) from CIG requires identity verification in some regard. Buying $5K worth of ships, then suddenly wanting a refund is sure to raise some alarm bells at CIG - assuming they give a shit.

Back in 2017, I wrote Star Citizen - Money Laundromat blog in which I speculated that’s what was going on. In fact, now more than ever, I am 99.9% certain that’s the only plausible explanation because not even their [unaudited] financials make sense.

I can see how people get sucked into buying ships. a friend of mine got sucked into this game recently and has a little group of friends hes found who play it, I think it plays into almost a bit of a group think mentality. one guy buys a new ship, everyone oohs and aahs and comes to see it, it’s a little self reinforced group think. I am a bit worried for him. He got me a copy of the game recently, and it just feels REALLY unfinished. I don’t know what he sees in it. I think it’s the social experience. I just don’t get it, when you could play something like Eve which is so much more fleshed out in nearly every way.

It’s a similar phenomenon to what happens in many free to play online games. One person gets a thing that is sold, and everyone else then wants that thing. The thing, whatever it is, is ballyhooed in Twitch streams, forum posts, “community contributor” reviews, etc. and rapidly transcends any objective value, because it has no objective or use value. It’s all in the mind. This happens all the time with, say, World of Warships, or games like that. The difference there is that the game actually exists, works, and the things you buy actually do the things they are supposed to, however silly.

I don’t get it, wouldn’t the jpeg be tied to your account?

I suspect they sell the account, like they used to in MMOs back in the day?

Possibly. You’d still need whales to move any significant amount of money to make it worth the trouble. Just slightly cheaper whales.