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Why finish a game when you’ve already got the in game purchases working for you?
A finished game means legal liability for bugs and performance issues. a perpetual alpha is legalese for we don’t have to do shit and people still buy expensive ships in the game."
All of this for what will end up just being a video game.
Nothing world changing, no lives will be saved, no problems solved, nothing will be different. There will just be another MMO on the market slowly dying off as people lose interest.
It will be amazing if its lifecycle lasts longer than its development.
Throwing away money isn’t evil when WE do it!
$220 invested since 2015 myself. I think I was just really depressed at the time…
it’s only 800 million dollars, the same cost as a few movies combined. Who cares if lives get saved, they were just going to die eventually anyway now they just suffer on earth longer.
Oh boy a Star Citizen thread.
So in the same week back in 2013 I did 2 things.
- Buy a Star Citizen package with the game and a ship with lifetime insurance
- Buy a 3 pack of hand built laser pointers from a local online store
Now the price wasn’t exactly the same, but close enough that I considered them equal. A week after buying the laser pointers I get an email saying that parts were on back order and there’d be a delay.
A week after that, their entire online store presence vanished, and they stopped responding to emails about my order.
To this day I’m still more salty about the laser pointers, since at least RSI keep sending me emails with updates.
Should have called your bank and did a charge back. Takes a few minutes.
I should have and honestly might have, been long enough that I don’t remember that aspect.
I bought the second cheapest package a decade ago. I’ve enjoyed more time watching videos going over new updates and covering development than I have playing the Alphas. Did I get my money’s worth? Probably not. Do I really care? No. I’ve wasted more money on bigger disappointments over the years.
Yeah, got the cheapest package around the same time. Hop on every few years to see what they been doing, see if my PC has been spec’d out of playing. Think I paid $25-30 Canadian? I’ve put more time into it than a couple other games I’ve spent the same or more on, and I stepped off the hype train. Sad, in a way, that it seems like it’s just going to carry on the way it’s going forever. It was a cool vision, but they’re just printing money so I doubt it will ever come to much more than what it is.
I wish I could market my passion projects with 1% of their abilities
Not so fun fact about marketing, they recently fired the head of marketing because he was pushing too much for new fancy ships to sell. He was pushing the devs towards things that can sell.
Management said stop, go work elsewhere, now we polish stuff for a while to have a stable platform for the alpha players before adding new stuff.
So if you could market like him, maybe you’ll be jobless now 🤷🏻♂️
Aye but the ten year run of marketing the game during development was probably pretty nice.
800 millions nice apparently.
They made some ground breaking tech. There’s simply nothing else like it. It’s not smoke and mirrors, people do have a game to play. Server meshing and fidelity is still unmatched, especially in space sim area.
The game is marketing itself for a long while now.
Server meshing being “unmatched” is mostly marketing BS.
You have examples of MMO games leveraging server meshing (with Pentium CPUs) from 20+ years ago.
I mean, that really depends on how you define server meshing.
Star Citizen is the only MMO I’ve seen where you can be standing in one server, look at players/objects in a different server (a few feet away) and actually shoot/interact with those objects without noticing any difference.
The only way you can even tell they’re in a different server is by keeping an eye on a server identifier using some console commands, and walking/flying over the boundary.
In every other MMO the servers are either completely separate, or there’s some sort of loading screen between areas.
This is from an article on Dark Age of Camelot from 2003:
The heart of Camelot, it turns out, isn’t in the English countryside but in Fairfax, Virginia. There Mythic keeps 120 dual-processor Pentium servers running linux. Each group of six servers runs what mythic calls a gamespace—a virtual world inhabited by thousands of players. The idea is to create different gamespaces for different types of players.
Design decisions also reflect the need to keep players happy. While each gamespace could conceivably handle 20,000 simultaneous players, Mythic limits them to about 4,000 players each, adding new gamespaces when necessary instead of increasing the load on the ones already up. “If you have too many people, the worlds get too crowded,” says Denton. “The last thing you want is to be bumping into thousands of people.”
We also have multiple example of CIG trying to market common tech (serialized variable!) as some of milestone.
That doesn’t sound like server meshing, that just sounds like 6 servers sharing the work load for one area. Most likely a case where one server handles all AI/NPC logic, another handles trading/transactions, another handles health/damage/combat, another handles chat, etc.
Using your Dark Age of Camelot example, server meshing would be expanding the map using 2 different “gamespaces” and allowing players the ability to transition between those gamespaces seamlessly without any loading screens and without realizing that they even crossed a boundary at some point. It let’s you massively expand the area in which you can travel without loading screens.
I stand by what I say. It is clear that CIG are being dishonest in terms of what they have achieved.
Server meshing is mostly a marketing project to maintain confidence in cash shop spend. Not saying people haven’t worked on it, but the main aim is to keep selling JPEGs.
Using your Dark Age of Camelot example, server meshing would be expanding the map using 2 different “gamespaces” and allowing players the ability to transition between those gamespaces seamlessly without any loading screens and without realizing that they even crossed a boundary at some point. It let’s you massively expand the area in which you can travel without loading screens.
So a single dual core Pentium Pro CPU handles a shard of 4K players, with a comparable server CPU being limited exclusively to trading/transactions and another high end Pentium Pro being limited to (as per your description) a high traffic IRC server?
Do you have any sources on this? I am genuinely curious. I am happy to learn more about Dark Age of Camelot’s architecture (even if I am wrong), but I also won’t take CIG marketing/propaganda at face value.
Do you have any sources on this? I am genuinely curious.
I’d ask the same of you. I tried looking into it a bit more, but I couldn’t find much information on how they actually split up resources among those 6 servers. I was just listing out some examples of how they could separate the workload between them.
I’m not familiar with Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) beyond what I can find scanning through some twitch streams. The maps seem tiny (big for its time, but tiny compared to Star Citizen). I am much more familiar with other games that are more comparable to Star Citizen’s scale (like No Man’s Sky, Eve Online, or Elite Dangerous).
In DAoC, I see that there are 4 different “Realms” that make up a gamespace. https://camelotinsider.github.io/albion.html
I’m not sure what’s required to go from realm to realm. Looking at the map from that link it looks like there is some sort of separation between them.
I see loading screens for players jumping into caves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt5lbZIdt50&t=70s
Which means that those are most likely handled by a different server.I also see players being teleported when going into/out of some sort of fort:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOPy3WAlNFk&t=600sFor instance, the player walks up to the door and they can’t see any of the players that are outside of the door/fort. Once they teleport outside of the fort, they look back and can’t see any players that were inside (player tags/names). I’m certain that if anyone tried to peak in through the windows of the fort they wouldn’t see players either.
Server meshing overcomes limitations like that.
So, it seems more likely that some of these 6 servers are dedicated to running different parts of the world and any interaction between those parts are handled with teleporting/loading screens. And then maybe 1 or 2 servers are dedicated to some universal backend database/services that brings everything together.
Most games work hard to disguise loading screens and these separation of boundaries. That’s why we’re seeing a lot more quick cutscenes between areas, or even animations where you crawl through a tight space and conveniently can’t see what was on the other side before doing so. It’s the easy way to handle things and that’s totally fine.
It’s something that Star Citizen doesn’t do, which is why you can be inside a space station and look out the window at players flying around, or be inside a massive ship locked in FPS combat while the pilot is taking you through the wormhole that connects one solar system to another.
Such an incredible scam. I have friends that spent thousands on this shit. They are like cult members.
Sunk cost fallacy
If you spend thousands on an unreleased game, the only one scamming you is yourself.
There is some forum of mind washing going on with this game. They spent so much time watching videos and reading posts on this game it was crazy. I am telling you when you talk to these people they act like cult members. This piece of shit game kills you while riding in a elevator. A 800 million dollar game that you can’t ride in an elevator without sometime dying because of bugs in the game. Insanity.
People spend thousands on fully released games. Some people are highly susceptible to the kinds of tactics game companies use to sell things like ships in Star Citizen and microtransactions.
Came to this thread right after one about how MTX accounted for ~55% of gaming industry profits in 2024, which is only a 1.7% increase YoY. There’s a reason these ships are sold and hyped the way they are, and it’s specifically to snare people who have impulse control issues.TL;DR - Stop victim blaming.
Well, that’s like just your opinion, man!
It’s really crazy that people still have interest in this game.
Interest, I can understand. Trust and faith? Yeah, I’ll pass, thanks.
Stop having fun wrong!
Honestly they would solve the majority of pushback by just announcing the game as being released as live service instead of pretending it is still in early access as if there was a roadmap to a real release.
I think they’d receive more flak for regarding the game in it’s current state. As it is, they’re giving you exactly what they say they are: a still in development game. People who are still buying into the game do it knowing the game is still in development.
I’m an early backer of the game. I got suckered into a ship upgrade during a “sale” within a year of backing the game. I’m not upset about that. But I think people who got suckered into spending hundreds of dollars on ships early on have more legitimate complaints than folks buying in right now. Early on, it wasn’t known how it was going to go down. There was a lot of hype. But now, you know what you’re getting.
And yes, I fully understand that backing games is risky, and we shouldn’t pre-order games. I’ve changed a lot in my buying habits in 10 years.
I think the legacy of the game will entirely depend on how it turns out. If they end up releasing a game that people love, all will be forgiven.
It’s not early access, you’re alpha testers and pay for it.
Once the game releases, if it ever releases, youll likely have long stopped playing.
Not saying people can’t like doing whatever they like doing. I guess maybe my wording should have been closer to that it’s crazy that people still believe this game is going to see a full release and/or giving money for it. It’s an insane amount of money that has been poured into this game at this point to still be saying there’s no full version available still.
11 years after release date. They apparently went to the vaporware school of Leon Umsk.
No less bugs in the gameplay either, it’s incredible the kind of really basic bugs they still have and cannot fix.
Can’t and won’t/haven’t are two different things.
damn I forgot I backed this game like a decade ago. I will have to put my account details in my will so my children to play…maybe.
I don’t recommend that anyone spend money on this without knowing what they’re actually getting into. $40-45 is all you need to access everything that the game has to offer.
There’s a “freefly” event coming up sometime next month if you want to try it out for yourself and see if you like it or not.
If you do decide to try it out, keep an eye out on the Bug Avoidance Thread that we posted over here: https://lemmy.world/post/27541360
The game can be very buggy, but knowing how to avoid the worst bugs can make a big difference. Even then, there are still bugs that will get you. It’s not for the faint of heart.
One thing to keep in mind about the “$40-$45 is all you need” statements that litter almost every Star Citizen thread is that the math doesn’t really work out.
As per CIG, you have around 2.5 million paying accounts (with many of them being alts). 2.5 M. * $45 gives us $112.5 M, so just 14% of their revenue.
It’s clear that they will put the overwhelming majority of their resources into something that gives them 86% of their revenues; milking whales, selling JPEGs and power creep cash items (with the vast majority of the older cash shop items being either outright non-functional or abandoned).
All you need to do is follow the money.
For me, I followed the development for about 1-2 years before buying into a starter package. Then, I didn’t spend anything else until I was confident that they would continue to deliver updates (about a year later).
I’ve continued to fund them here and there over the years when I feel like they’ve released some good content, but that’s because I’m comfortable supporting them.
No one actually needs to do that. With $45 you can just go out and do some FPS missions where, at the end, you’re rewarded with some of the higher end ships (Contested Zone gameplay).
Even easier is that you can just hijack an NPC/abandoned ship and, as long as you store it in your hangar at the end of each session, you can keep on using it for anything.
There’s really no need to actually pay for anything beyond the initial starter ship because almost everything else is earnable/hijackable in-game.
why are you comfortable supporting someone who’s obviously wasting money
It’s ok to admit you bought into a scam…
I’ve had more fun playing this “scam” over the last few years than any other game.
I’m getting some strong “STOP HAVING FUN!” vibes from you…
It really depends on how you define “scam”. It’s not a scam by how I would define it.
With the loosest definition possible, sure. I bought into a scam. I’m not a fan of all their marketing tactics.But the game is playable enough for me and I really enjoy playing it. I did my research and I knew what I was paying into at the time. I’ve gotten my money’s worth already and I’m still enjoying it, which is a lot better than what I can say for some other games out there.
It’s a company that has taken in hundreds if millions of dollars for something that they know will never materialize into an actual game.
We had a really confident businessman come into my rural college town 6 years ago with a big development plan that was going to revolutionize the downtown. He graduated from the local college 20 years ago and was supposedly some hot shot businessman in Miami now. He brought in all these local investors, signed agreements to purchase the land once the city gave him approval and grants, “purchased” a house and some other properties that were going to go along. He took up several city council meetings wherre he brought in his big design plans, feasibility studies, and everything else. But everytime he had to show he had the funds to get approval for development,he hemmed and hawwed and asked for an extension.
It turns out, he had made a similar pitch to quite a few other small towns. The house he “purchased” he actually was just renting, and then sub-renting it out while he was “out of town on business”. He didn’t put any of his own money in, relying instead in local businesses and landowners who signed him onto their deeds or gave him right to first refusal on their deliapadated properties. His 'feasibility studies" all came from a firm no one could find any actual information about. Fortunately no one really lost anything beyond a lot of time and legal fees backing out if his bad faith contracts, but it’s established that the “developer” was really just a conman trying to grift the town. A scam.
Star Citizen is no different than any of the metaverse crypto scams from 4 years ago, it’s just a bit more polished and at a grander scale. If you think that $800 million to develop a half-backed game that doesn’t deliver on any of it’s fundamental promoses isn’t a scam, then i would love to pitch my riverfront development project to you when you have the time.
Thanks for typing that out. I really appreciate the example from your own experience. I’m glad your city didn’t get in too deep with that scammer.
There are a lot of different kinds of scams, not all of them are the best for comparing to something like game development, so maybe we can find something a bit more applicable (like No Man’s Sky).
No Man’s Sky made a lot of big promises leading up to it’s initial release.
Was No Man’s Sky a scam while it was under initial development?
Was No Man’s Sky a scam when it first released?
If yes, was it still a scam while Sean continued to improve the game with the first few updates?
Would you consider No Man’s Sky to be a scam in its current state today?
scam implies that you didn’t know what you were getting into, for almost a decade you could easily tell star citizen wouldn’t release soon, therefore it should be considered a scam at that point in time, the early investors were scammed, but not the current ones those that feel that way are either idiots or failed to do basic research.
deleted by creator
The game can be very buggy, but knowing how to avoid the worst bugs can make a big difference. Even then, there are still bugs that will get you. It’s not for the faint of heart.
If they pivot hard enough, sounds like that could be the game, lol
bug avoidance list
800 million dollars
I think the release for the single player game is clearly in sight with the 1 hour demo they showed last year.
Thats what they said 8 years ago when they released a 90 minute demo.
Star Citizen is a grift. It always has been, it always will be.
It’s certainly mismanaged. I haven’t paid for anything, but the single player stuff seems to be coming together, though I remember not being blown away by anything I saw.
V762 Cas is also clearly in sight.
Oh sweet child…
What will happen first, we make it to space or this game releasing?
fake and Gary
I got this “game” for free back in 2014. I can’t recall the last time I logged into it. There was never anything to do. If they ever release anything they promised, I likely won’t be able to log in anymore 🤣.
