Their UK financials are public. And it includes their annual employee costs. No guessing games required.
LMAO!! That’s it! Get out.
Where you see barren and uninspiring moons, I see repetitive and boring mining (FYI Prospector is $155) opportunities. And racing. And taking screen shots. And dreams. 
Here’s the thing.
- game has 3 mining vessels (Prospector, Orion, Vanduul Harvester)
- only the MISC Prospector ($155) is implemented in the game. And they did that in order to sell it when they implemented half-assed mining mechanic.
If you buy the $45 game - right now - you can’t mine. That being one of only two (the other being cargo box runs) money earn gameplay mechanics in the game.
Oh yeah, this is going to be fantastic. A patch with in-game ship buying is out. And the tribe are up in arms because the grind is now a reality.
I would think those putting out the funds would be happy with these numbers. Glad one comment said the demo’d mission earned 4000 in one hour - gives you some perspective. I guarantee you people would grind to these numbers…and probably do better than 4k/hr.
There’s not a single reputable dev studio that makes non-mobile games outside of Eastern Europe or China that would have an average salary that low.
Even if they do 10,000 an hour, that’s 162 hours of straight grind for one ship. 2100 hours for a Hammerhead. And judging from the USD cost of it, there are far more expensive ships out there.
Yes. It’s hilarious. And of course if we needed any stronger evidence that the game is catering to whales - who already paid lots of cash money for their chariots - this would be it. No way on this God’s Earth would even those crazy b@stards like us who grind in ED without noticing it, would grind in this game for crap like this. It’s not as if the tech demo (which is never going to be a “game”) is fun or anything.
But it’s totally not P2W though.
There’s no way to win a game that doesn’t exist. Therefore it can’t be ptw*
* Chris Roberts has claimed that the game can’t be ptw because there’s no way to ‘win.’ He’s something special.
I’m tired of all the bad news. Is there anything good about this game?
The con will eventually collapse.
Yes, it’s one of the few really long threads I think I’ve read every single post in.
Without this thread, I’d have no real idea of what is going on with this game (or whatever it is).
@dsmart has been posting great summaries of all the negatives, and even posts links to the more positive threads on reddit, so I can see how the other side thinks. Fair and balanced reporting!
Reading the thread you linked earlier, there are actually people arguing that the grind isn’t long enough because “we want ship purchases to be meaningful not play for a couple hours and get a new ship.” The mind boggles.
So the weird thing is in general if possible to grind, and it’s also possible for players to trade, prices eventually fall to almost zero – even if they start at ridiculous high prices. At least if people are actually playing the game there will be a huge contingent of grinders. MMOs use a lot of loot that isn’t fungible/tradeable to avoid this.
You are wrong. Southern Europe is also pretty cheap. $6k a month is above average employee cost here. Leads and very experienced seniors can do more (and maybe some mid-level engineering positions, which are less common than designer and artists, that are positions with more competition and thus lower salary) but average? Below that, at least if you don’t take into account executive pay, that could change the ecuation.
I’m seeing some parallels here between the Star Citizen whales (stella civis balæna) and the ancient species of pay by the hour flight sim curmudgeons. Those guys (and yeah, I think they were pretty much all male) were pretty adamant about the need to make playing Air Warrior and all that expensive and difficult to get into, so that the game was kept “serious” and the riff raff weren’t allowed in to clamor for things that would “cheapen” the experience (like, you know, usable UIs, decent performance, and general quality of life stuff). The pay by the hour gate was vigorously defended, up until the barbarians of monthly subscription blasted them off their hinges.
In the same vein, you still have folks in every MMO type game stridently attacking anything they see as making it easier for filthy casuals to gain the same rewards the cat assers have.
That’s something I’ve been calling out from the start. Chris Roberts and the cult have constantly hand-waved away any potential issues with this, but if you sell a ship for $1000, you’re screwing over someone. You either screw over your whale who gave you all that cash by making the ship not too painful to acquire via in-game means, or you screw over the vast bulk of your hypothetical playerbase by making the grind so obscene that the only realistic way of obtaining anything is shelling out hundreds or thousands of dollars – per ship!!
You simply can’t have it both ways. And if you’re CiG, you absolutely cannot piss off the whales or this whole ponzi scheme comes crashing down real fast.
As there are whales out in the vast customer ocean, there are also grinders that do ridiculous things.
Regarding grinders, since the requirement is purely financially based, there is definitely going to be a gold selling angle, and clan angle to all of this. Of course, this is based on the assumption that the game would be fun and a lot of people will want to play it.
What is the total number of contributors at the moment?
Despite enjoying the slow-mo train-wreck, I can’t avoid being sad about this. There’s a vision here, and it’s grandiose and compelling, but you can’t inject real money into your game without severe consequences. They should have sold only aesthetic items, but it was too tempting (and profitable) to sell gameplay elements… and that can only lead to P2W and extreme grinding.