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

IAE2951 has started (and the free flight event)!

A story in 2 parts:

(The Spartan transport is yours for $65, if you want it…)

Let the fun begin! :)

Provoked to another pointless screed, but I suppose it has some psychological value…

Micropayments and mandatory-payment gacha games are evil enough. I still just can’t believe someone pays the full price of a computer game (a real, working computer game) for a single ship among dozens or hundreds available, much less that anyone pays these really obscene prices that have been recorded. It’s just so irresponsible, no matter how much money they have. Bonfire of the vanities, for real.

As already pointed out, SC’s approach is similar to that of NFTs, but at least with a NFT, no matter that it’s only a token, there’s a cachet of uniqueness to it for the idiot collector who wants to pretend they’ve acquired art. Buying pretend-ships and worse, pictures of pretend-ships for such prices is just outrageously stupid, and then you multiply the stupidity by the fact the game barely functions as a basic ship simulator much less as an enjoyable entertainment experience and that it’s burdened with infinite bugs… Come on, now.

If the alpha is fun (and it is for many), what’s the problem with buying a starter package?

I don’t see the issue with paying “the full price of a computer game (a real, working computer game) for a single ship among dozens or hundreds available”.

Plenty pay for early access.

EDIT - Here is an overview of what the game added this patch:

I’m planning to go see the expo and participate in races and mining convoys with my org this week-end. Some of them have been playing the game several times a week for years, some are new. Certainly not all are whales. Some only have the starter ship and crew org ships or make their own money to buy more.

The rest of the funding model, I have no issue understanding the qualms, of course.

I don’t think anyone has a problem with that.
I also don’t think it would be a problem if CIG had raised its $300 million selling only starter packages, along with maybe a “Deluxe” package that included two ships of your choice for, say $200 or something.

I think the main issue came into being when it began to look like CIG was taking advantage of people with impulse control problems. For some, that pushes the funding model into the realm of predatory behavior.

I don’t know what’s actually going on there, but that’s how I’m reading the negative responses I’ve seen over the years.

Totally agree with those legitimate concerns as we’ve already discussed.

Miramon’s post seemed to encompass those who choose to pay for a single ship (starter package) in this specific game instead of any thousands of computer games. I might very well have misunderstood his post though. But I would be much less on board with that.

If you want to see what’s new (i.e. not everything there is to do, just the newest additions), have a look at that Space Tomato video above. He makes it a point to leave the glitches and bugs in his footage. I also watched a streamer walk out of an elevator, trip… and die yesterday.

So, you know, they’re is space for both those who have fun playing and those who are there for the buggy mess. :)

Oh, and we will be hitting $400M this week. Forget 300. So there is that.

Ah, I see. I took a different meaning of his post, but reading it again now, I may have been reading it wrong myself. :-)
I will try to watch that video today.

Thanks for the update. It’s hard for me to keep up!

LOL! You’re not alone. This funding is moving at
mel-brooks-spaceballs

People who buy ships in this game, especially ship not yet implemented, while not being rich themselves, are dumb. Fool and his money…
But if someone is rich and buys these ship to contribute to development (like people who pay 10K for highest tiers on kickstarters do), I have no problem with that.

It is done: Stretch Goals - Roberts Space Industries | Follow the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42

It’s amazing. After years of hiding the fact that they couldn’t possibly make server meshing happen, CIG said ‘f*** it, the fans will accept anything we tell them, so why not just admit we can’t make it work?’. And they were right! If you accept <=50 player instances, there’s no tech barrier here that can’t be dealt with given enough money.

Given the recent Q&A and discussions on this, I think the expectation among citizens (though I don’t pretend to know what everyone thinks) seems to go more like this:

  • Static server meshing should come in not too long after next IAE.
  • The people I hang out with expect it to mean… nothing performance wise at first. It simply means all the containers (things in the verse) will be fully handled by the new server management layers.
  • Server limits will still be at 50.
  • Very shortly after that, server meshing means the introduction of the long awaited giant lawless system Pyro, allowing players tojump between those 2 static instances. Alpha 4.0, Pyro and static server meshing are tied together.
  • And then, the expectation is that, in the following quarters, the player limits will progressively be raised (maybe closer to 100?) as the technology proves itself and is stress tested.

Players don’t generally expect much until dynamic meshing is there and the servers can start simulating bubbles within a system. And that’s obviously not expected next year.

But I don’t think there is in any way a resignation to play at 50 players per system forever in the player base. CIG would likely take a lot of flak if that still stuck around by IAE in 2023. Whether that would dent their funding, I honestly don’t know. I would hope it would though.

I’d go further than “began to look like”, quite frankly. They have a “VIP” section of their store with ultra-expensive ships that only people who have thrown over a certain threshold of cash at the game get access to and can see, last I checked.

They are targeting the whales with pinpoint precision.

Along with a section of the store unlocked by pledging over $1k there’s separate forums, an in game lounge, and priority support.

I think that the biggest shady things are:

Artificial scarcity of larger cost ships coupled with both a stated and consistent raising of prices on ships. It pushes a FOMO collector’s perspective and also psychologically makes people feel like they got a deal despite many of these ships being sold many years ago and still not even on the roadmap to be in the game.

Cash purchases include LTI - lifetime insurance. CIG has never exactly clarified how it will work, but purchased ships generally have this insurance that means that you can never really lose them while ships you buy in game won’t have it. Players buying LTI ships definitely think that it’ll be a big advantage. It lets them claim that it’s not a PTW game while encouraging PTW habits.

Reselling minor variations of the same ships as full price instead of having modular ships or something. It encourages the got to have them all collectors.

How much faster is the priority support in practice? I always wonder about that with any kind of software. As a benefit, it only matters if they get to you soon enough to cross some useful threshold. E.g., at work, priority support only matters if I know I can as a question at 3pm and get an answer before the end of the day in time to let the client know. In games, I guess it needs to be soon enough to not miss an event or a scheduled raid/fleet night or, for pros, a streaming session?

Wow.

Not being facetious here: in what meaningful ways is Star Citizen different from Scientology?

Well they aren’t cataloguing what their members say in auditing sessions to use as potential leverage against them later, encouraging backers to “disconnect” from family members and non-believers, or having devout backers effectively work as indentured servants in appalling conditions

I think Star Citizen’s development has been ridiculous, and in some ways perhaps rises to the definition of “scam” these days - but the differences between it an Scientology are myriad and extremely meaningful.

Roberts just wants your money to fuel his lavish lifestyle and his impossible dream game,

It sounds kinda like a casino model to me. High roller perks etc.

The whole thing gives me a bit of a Theranos vibe… start out with good intentions*, then when you ride the tiger a lot of ethical drift happens. That said, unlike Theranos they aren’t fucking around with something as serious as health care, and there is some kind of a product there however unfinished.

*I’m sure this is debatable, but I find it plausible that Roberts really wants/wanted to create the Ultimate Space Game.

I think “ethical drift” is a good term for what is going on. I still absolutely believe the project originally began with intentions to simply make a game. I think the amount of money that came in quickly caused the ambition to grow and spiral wildly out of control, with no publisher guardrails whatsoever on a guy with a literal track record for scope creep and being incapable of delivering a game on time and on budget.

Then because of that, you’ve got the pressures of the amount of money you need to keep that ball rolling - but what do you do when the majority of the people who just want to play your game already “own” it and may have for years? You find ways to wring more money out of that existing pool, and especially try to find out how to identify and exploit potential whales in that pool.

You’ve got early quotes from CR saying that the game isn’t a Ponzi scheme because they aren’t using new money to pay for old promises, which is effectively the totality of what is happening now years later.

And because backers don’t meaningfully demand answers, and are easily placated by the smallest gestures towards transparency… it just keeps going. Has CR ever had to explain how SQ42 went from allegedly being months away from finished in 2016, to not even having a release date in 2021? No, and the true believers will just hoover up any old shit he throws out there about wanting to make sure everything is perfect.

Or even better they deflect with “it’s never been done before!” - as though that’s a defense, and not a statement that should perhaps cause some reflection and concern in the people throwing thousands of dollars at a guy who - again - has a documented track record of overpromising while pissing away time and money.

At this point I think the product is the vague hope of that all-encompassing space life game you see in your head, not an actual game that will ever be finished and released. Or if it is, will be a shadow of what was promised and likely technologically out of date the minute it comes out in 10 years.

I think CIG was in fact much more realistic than Theranos. The latter could never be a success without solving an intractable biochemical engineering problem that had been extensively researched, and was founded by someone with no experience in the field. The scam always depended on telling people they had some propreitary magic in this area, which they never did.

The former could have been a success simply by being well run and cutting some of the sillier scope, and was founded by someone who, despite his many failings, had successfully delivered space games before.

Definitely. Though I can perhaps see some parallels in the sense that both became mired in trying to hide the truth of the house of cards from the public/regulators/backers.

Star Citizen could have delivered on what it originally promised years ago. But CR being CR, those promises just kept getting grander and grander, emboldened by the millions of dollars rolling in.

I still don’t understand what their financial model is even supposed to be once the game is done. Millions of people already own a copy, so you’re not getting it from retail sales. Selling ships forever and ever? That was supposed to be a backer thing, not a retail thing. Monthly fees? I’ll be curious to know how much running the servers costs, considering they can manage 50 per server right now, lol.