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

No idea, but they surely know they can’t milk the existing crowd forever. Plus (and I can’t believe this is a thing), there will eventually be a new generation of gamers coming of age that they’ll want to appeal to to keep the money coming in.

Spent some time on the official subreddit today and it was pretty funny. Started out with a lot of outrage, but then the diehards started counter-threading about how it wasn’t a big deal - or was a GOOD thing - and people were spreading “negativity”. My favourite was one where the OP mentioned up front that they have thousands of dollars in the game, as though this lent them more credibility in telling people to calm down as opposed to way less.

There was also one about how it’s backers’ fault for not realizing they were funding “one man’s dream” instead of a game, lol The cult-y vibes were plentiful as they tried to quell the masses and get them back on message.

Jim Jones didn’t pass around the Flavor-Aid by himself.

if they would create non-fungible ships and sell them as NFTs so that in game I and only I own the ship and can trade it as I want, then and only then… eh forget it.

Why would they go NFTs? The people already throw money down the drain without NFTs…

I actually think that they won’t pivot to NFTs for a bunch of reasons:

  1. There’s currently no real reliable way for people with a bunch of money in the project to get out and that sunk cost a lot of times keeps them invested in the project and eventually adding even more stuff. A lot of them have spent thousands in subscriptions which is blown, but they have four or five digits of ships that they might want to sell and get out. They can try and sell their account at a big loss and hope they don’t get scammed. NFTs would let people reliably exit the project.

  2. They have managed for a decade to convince a segment of whales that they are buying strictly limited supplies of digital spaceships. They do video card style drops of the highest cost ship pictures and they gate access to make it seem super exclusive but apparently they also will sell them to whales if they just ask. NFTs would make it clear what the “real” scarcity is.

  3. How the hell they get the funding they get is a pretty big mystery. They even had comments in one of their UK financials reports about how disclosing it would be a negative so they won’t. NFTs would provide a lot of external visibility on where the money is going and if there seems to be a lot of money laundering type wash trades.

  4. They would have to be competent enough to tie NFTs into their game where it takes months to cut and paste a coffee shop from one map to another and counts as a new feature to them.

That said, do they NFT off some stuff that isn’t actually tied into the actual game itself? Nothing would shock me.

NFT would seem an unnecessary complication to their current funding model. They can already sell “unique” ships or whatever if they wanted using the old fashioned centralized database.

Sure, but NFTs would allow them to be traded and enforce scarcity, which could generate buzz about how much they were actually worth. Of course their value would need to go up for that to happen, and while I do think Cloud Imperium is a bunch of scammers I don’t think they’re dummies.

But you can do all that without an NFT. A centralized database does everything an NFT does. The NFT just makes it kind of sort of distributed, something a company wouldn’t really need or want as an extra complication in their scarcity and trading scheme. There’s no use case, other than marketing buzz.

raises hand

That would be me, new backer last month.

Thank you for supporting one of my favorite entertainments :)

This will be the 12361st message in this thread - it would be a shame if it ran out of steam now!

I’m potentially interested in the game, not for the broken promises, but for what they have now. (All games reduce their scope). It certainly seems like a pretty cool world to visit as it is, though I want to wait until it’s less broken.

There will be another free flight event starting on February 17th where you can try the game for free. If you are just curious to see what it looks like now, that’s a great place to start.

Seriously. You don’t need more than this to see it’s a cult (at least among the true believers). This is cognitive dissonance at its finest.

It’s funny, that poster merely speaks the truth on the “one man’s dream” bit, though. The fault bit is the cult-y part, I guess, but I think there’s enough info out there right now that it is a somewhat known truth.

I think blaming the fans for expecting Star Citizen to actually hit any of the landmarks they set for themselves is my favorite part. Star Citizen truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

Nice Fucking Try, sir/madam/they/them.

What am I missing? I was very apologetic earlier in the thread for sharing mine (just in case people jumped into the previous free fly). But people here were ok we with it. What’s wrong with this one?

Edit: Oh, or did you quote it because it was deleted and it was fine to keep? Tone is hard to judge in writing.

They shared their code and then deleted it. I was also making an NFT joke. Poorly, apparently.

Since the original post has been deleted, I’ll post here in case anyone is curious. Star Citizen is free to fly right now until the 25th of February:

The ships available to fly are:

· Aurora MR - Iconic all-rounder
· 100i - Stylish solo tourer
· Nomad - Rugged hauler
· Cutlass Black - Pirates’ favorite fighter
· Prospector - Industrial miner

You can see them on the page above. If you are thinking of trying out the game, I would highly recommend giving the Nomad and Cutlass Black a try. They are very cool smaller ships.

And if you enjoy the prospect of sitting in an asteroid belt and getting rich with mining, the Prospector is the perfect ship. Worth watching a mining guide first though.

It’s a solid selection of ships and you could do worse than getting to try those out.