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

[dsmart]

@Bluddy

I think the usage of the word ‘scam’ here is problematic. You can step through the motions of a ‘scam’ without ever having ill intentions, and I think that’s what’s happening here. Even if the game stays as it is now, it’ll be a ‘game’ – it’ll accomplish virtually none of its objectives and won’t be any fun to play, but plenty of games/kickstarters have gone wrong before. The problem here is that they’ve found a way to keep funding their bad habit, and that allows their insanely over-optimistic ambitions to keep growing, which forces them to need more money. If you’ve seen the Double Fine Adventure documentary, imagine if Double Fine had found a way to keep getting money by adding more features – its ambitions would also have increased exponentially and outpaced its ability to create anything. The big question in my mind is, are the people at the top knowingly acting out of malice at this point? Do they know that this isn’t going to work out, while still taking people’s money? Because I think that’s the point at which it switches over from being just a train wreck to becoming a ‘scam’.

I agree with all of this because it completely encapsulates what’s going on.

To me, the “scam” is more about them taking money knowing they could never deliver on promises. There are other aspects of the scam. e.g. how they they sell a ship, don’t implement it, but then release a similar one to sell, while not implementing the original. It’s basically the engineering version of a Ponzi scheme.

Just days ago, I wrote a Tweet about their latest scam effort. The Idris, an eagerly awaited $1,000 - $1,500 capital ship they sold YEARS ago and which isn’t IN the game, is now getting a PAID upgrade (guns). Here’s the letter that went out over the weekend.

https://i.imgur.com/bImMIDr.png

They do crap like that. Also, selling land for a game that doesn’t have ANY such mechanics for it. Selling ships for which their core functionality (e.g. independent radar, turrets, drink mixing etc) doesn’t exist - and never will. The list goes on and on.

Chris found a way to monetize scope creep. And in doing so tapped into the broken-brained mentality of a few whales who are basically “hooked” *(see Scientology, Flat Earthers etc) into something they truly believe in. That’s how scams work; they prey on victims.