Star Citizen Just Had its Biggest Crowdfunding Day Ever With $3.5 Million in 24 Hours
Star Citizen Just Had its Biggest Crowdfunding Day Ever With $3.5 Million in 24 Hours
The crowdfunding effort for the space simulator Star Citizen continues, and the game just enjoyed its biggest day of funding ever.
I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding.
This thing is a scam, and you're all being taken for chumps. The only worse fraud than SC is buying Fatalities on Mortal Kombat.
There is this tiny company called Nihon Falcom. They make this game series called Trails that I adore. they have like three programmers work on each entry.
In the time since Star Citizen was announced they have released:
- The Legend of Nayuta: Boundless Trails 2012
- Ys: Memories of Celceta 2012
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel 2013
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II 2014
- Tokyo Xanadu 2015
- Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana 2016
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV
- Ys IX: Monstrum Nox 2019
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II
- Ys X: Nordics
as well as a bunch of ports of older games to modern platforms and localizing them to the west. All of these are worth playing and some of these were GOTY material for me.
Its good to quantify how much time has passed, and how much you can get done with a smaller budget and focused scope.
Do you play indie games? They seem to be exactly what you're describing.
I play mostly smaller games, and am very patient with my gaming habits. Haven't bought a AAA game in a very long while. Still follow these kind of news because they trend set the whole industry and encroach everywhere with bad practice as big publishers represent the majority of the industry releases and also the grossest revenue.
that's a fucking thing?!
It's now a season bundle. But it was $10 per fatality x 3. One for Halloween, one for Thanksgiving, and one for Christmas. That was a total of $30 for a whole minute of cut-scenes. They successfully Overton it, apologized and now it's $10 for the three scenes. But yeah, now buying Fatalities is a thing, look forward for your Easter Fatality edition and an extra Bunny skin version for only $4.99.
People will buy fucking anything, it's hopeless.
I'm all for having both. I personally prefer 'AAA' games over indie games but I think there's just different flavours for different folks.
That said, SC is a mega scam at this point and I can't believe people are still continuing to fund it to this level.
Yeah, Underrail is pretty good.
imagine a bigger game with great graphics and a whole ton of technical innovation, AND have people be paid well, that is for chumps
This project is baffling
don't judge until you've seen the dynamic cloth physics! that is what everyone wants, right?
I paid for star citizen a decade ago and honestly enjoyed it enough for about 2 days. It always felt exciting to see how ahead they were of early Xbox 1 / PS4 games in their scope with volumetric effects etc.
The trouble is, 90% of their innovative content has been long overtook by general game progression, they're making a game that could have probably launched with the PS5 and been innovative and are already falling behind there. I genuinely believe that they were Innovating their game slowly over time and there were amazing things in the works, but they missed the moment that it was exciting and new by so many years.
I’ve been part of some amateur game dev projects and SC has the vibe of an amateur project where the devs are constantly focusing on whatever catches their fancy at the moment, going back and tinkering with things they’ve already made, and sort of aimlessly scope creeping. There’s nobody to strongarm them into writing, much less following a game design document.
All of that is intuitive to me to understand.
Then there is “the dream” that is being sold to people who want this type of game. That level of very specific fandom is also easy to understand, at least from a distance. People get super into all kinds of games and spend outsized amounts of money and time.
Star Citizen is like the perfect storm of these elements.
If you don't know what you want except a nebulous dream, you can't tell that you're dissatisfied with what you actually have, and don't realize that what you're doing isn't actually getting you anything. This applies to both the devs and the fans.
I have a friend who is obsessed with it. I asked him if it was a money laundering scheme. He agreed its the most likely situation.
A few of my guildmates play SC as well and they try to get other people to play, but every time an open period happens, the servers always shit the bed with instability and the play experience for the new player is awful.
It's so funny trying to hear them rationalize bad servers and inability to do basic things as just part of the experience.
I'm convinced they made the game as a side project to their true goal of inventing dynamic server meshing.
We are talking about Chris "feature creep" Roberts here, though. The guy can't stop himself from retasking a team with yet another "immersive" thing they need to waste their time on.
So who knows. Could just be bad management, but I wouldn't put it past them to be doing this so they can license and sell the engine or something. That is, until other developers snipe their employees and use their knowledge to develop server meshing themselves.
After a decade and an astronomical amount of money spent, this thing is still in pre-alpha. People have left school, got married, have kids, played and forgotten No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, and now Starfield, and there is still no Star Citizen.
It's time to accept that Star Citizen will NEVER be released, because what Chris Roberts is selling is "dream as a service" which can be anything you want it to be, and one that never has to end for as long as the "game" is still in development.
The moment an actual product is released is the moment the flow of money will stop.
I once saw a comment on a SC update video from a guy who claimed to have backed up SC as a teenager, went to college, entered the industry, was part of a team from start to shipping a video game. twice, and still SC is in pre-alpha. He said that now as a veteran of the industry he realizes that SC is a scam. Like, 99% of the stuff they hyped as their envelope breaking new tech for video games, has already been done by dozens of games at a fraction of the cost.
Yeah, server meshing at the scale they did it has been possible for years. The issue is overlapping it at the planetary and multi system scale for hundreds of thousands of people and all of their inventory objects simultaneously.
They essentially just handed these objects to a master server that has to monitor all of them, instead of having each client server doing it individually. It's like a backup technology that can respawn all tracked items in the event of a server failure. They've basically just added redundancy. I don't foresee performance being improved when this overlord monitoring server inevitably gets taxed to capacity tracking everyone's shit.
That's not entirely true, if they ever went full release there's still a fuck ton they can charge players for and milk. It's just their Kickstarter that won't make money anymore.
That being said you're correct, they've essentially pioneered the concept of "Game Development as a Service" in the same way live service and early access games are doing now regularly.
Personally even if SQ42 launches I don't think they'll get the persistent universe up to their original vision for another ten years. They absolutely aren't going to hit their 100 solar system metric from the 2011/12 era. I'd be surprised if there ends up being more than ten at launch, but it would surprise me even more if the game ever has an official launch at all.
What's most likely is that this game will remain in early access Alpha forever, allowing it to shield itself from criticism while taking it's sweet time constructing the game they said would release back in 2016 originally. That will allow them to justify keeping the Kickstarter open forever while also spending most of their time creating and selling new ships in a game that doesn't even have gameplay loops for most of them. Then they'll occasionally drop a new star system or loop to keep the hopes of players up.
This new dynamic server meshing technology they just showcased (at the tech demo level of complexity) is their only hope for making the game playable. The performance of the game isn't due to stress on your rig as much as networking latency because their servers are overloaded. If they can scale it to the planetary, and eventually multi system level, then they might have something worth picking up. I'm not going to pay for it until that game exists, though. Which it probably never will.
"Pre-alpha" would be if they hadn't started coding. It's alpha. There's something you can play, it's just buggy and incomplete and thus not beta. Alpha for this long has enough stigma, you don't need to exaggerate like that.
You know you can literally play the game right now?
Technically true, you can play the current build of a game that's been in perpetual development with distractive milestones continually added so as to distract you from the promises made in years past.
It's so frustrating to see people in this thread posting objectively false statements about SC. Yes, it's behind schedule and yes it suffers from scope creep. But it's not a scam and it's not vaporware. People who give them money know exactly what they are getting into. You can buy a ship now and fly it immediately. You can spend hundreds of hours in the game in it's current state. Even pointing out that it's playable gets downvotes.
Wait, people are still dumping money into this?
I think it has turned into a sunk cost fallacy for so many now. They put so much money into it they can't afford for it to fail/not continue.
But you could play it again in a new ship
As a day 1 backer i would like to offer my sincerest apologies.
Get ‘em, boys.
IMMA SHAVE HIS DOG
I gave them my 45$ at the beginning and said call me when it's done.
Do you have any nachos I can murder? Or at least beat up a little?
This is just like EVE Online for me - I am more interested in reading about the drama than the actual game itself.
I have a subscription for my skill queue even though I literally have no computer right now.
When I get back, I'm gonna be able to fly most of the heavy assault cruisers and armor logi!
Drama how you're supposed to play EVE Online
I dont have the energy to care about this game, just like I dont have the energy to care about George RR Martin or Patrick Rothfuss never finishing their products either.
Writers, no matter how good, are just regular people. I have much higher expectations and not as much patience towards a game studio with infinite money and no released games whatsoever in over a decade.
Yeah, that's a good point, and I didnt mean to directly disparage them, only to say that at the decade point or so I just dont have the capacity to keep anticipating something entertaining. That was also my biggest reason for just not giving a shit about the avatar movie sequel. Kid me would have been all in, now I just dont care enough to spend the time money and effort on it
God damn fucking Patrick Rothfuss... What a beautiful story to likely never have an ending. Don't read into it, anyone... Not unless he releases that last book.
Same. Until these things are physically in my hand I've got plenty of other stuff to get on with, what's the point of wasting years chasing them. It's the same with any marketing really, give me a title, pitch & release date, I'll see you then.
Star Citizen is only available on a single platform too. At least Cyberpunk was multiplatform.
Holy moly! Squaresoft really bet hard on FF7
If I had just made FF6 then I'd be pretty damn confident too
Shenmue! Shenmue is on that list, wholly crap that almost as embarrassing the people here saying that the SCs fans are not being scammed. And anyone who thinks this is a scam must be brainwashed/part of a hivemind.
I finally tried this game and holy shit is it terrible. The UI is janky and unintuitive. The movement is slow and stiff or sonic on crack and nothing in-between. The frame rate is terrible even on a decent machine with appropriate settings. Just overall a bad experience. I don't care if it's still "In development" get your fundamentals right before you go adding more shit.
People think you can slap on an "in development" sticker to anything and absolve it of all criticism.
I mean, there's not a lot of incentive for them to change the way they operate...
This is exactly why "new" phones suck so hard these days. Why do good things when doing nothing is so profitable?
Stop giving these scam artists money.
I have no proof but I'm convinced it's some sort of money laundering. Especially when they released the $30,000 DLC bundle to get everything
I think you're probably right.
Why would they have over 500 employees? There's plenty of valid complaints but why would they have so many employees if it was truly intended has vaporware?
Scam Citizen still hustlin
JFC, I guess there's a lot of suckers in the world
You don’t understand they released a cinematic trailer of slow moving scenery only shots that makes it game of the year.
orchestral music intensifies 🎶 🎵 👌 😌 ❤️ ♥️
One was born every minute back in PT Barnum's day; seems more like every millisecond these days.
Wtf
Chris Roberts hookers and blow fund isn't going to fund itself y'know
I am not proud to say I was an original backer, but luckily only for like 25 bucks.
It became clear after a year or two it was vaporware. even if a product ever comes out it'll not be what I backed originally, which was Privateer TNG. So I stopped following the game, never played any of the tech demo's and just shake my head warily when I see news articles like this. Bernie Madoff is in jail for basically the same thing. How can people still support this travesty.
Calling it vaporware is a bit silly they have over 500 employees and have tech nobody else has you can play right now. If you have an original package you can sell it on the gray market for much more than you paid for it. I understand it has had troubled development but you don't know what you are talking about.
What does the number of employees have to do with not having a finished product while also being the highest funded game in history? By this logic I am sure since FTX had 650 employees they must be all above board, if that was all some ponzi scheme they why the staff?
troubled development
This is the biggest understatement of the year.
you don’t know what you are talking about
EXCUSE me? I was an original backer, I know EXACTLY what I backed. If you like what Star Citizen is doing then enjoy yourself. But do not tell me what was promised to me and what is being delivered now has ANY bearing on each other. Beacuse it does not.
I dumped $60 into this like... 12 years ago I think? I knew it was a Chris Roberts scam but was willing to take a chance on modern freelancer.
How the fuck are people still pumping money into this? How is this not been exposed as a government or criminal front?
It's depressing to know that it's actually apparently more profitable to never really release a game than to release one and it be moderately popular
What exactly is this game trying to be?
Whatever they can get you to pay money for
I really can’t see it either. This thread is almost proof that there is some kind of massive confusion. People are arguing about whether this is a pre alpha or an alpha, whether it’s Star Citizen in alpha or Squadron 42, an FPS game in the same universe. Their website doesn’t make it really obvious either. I don’t know how such a confusing product makes so much money.
Sometimes I wish Fdev had done a better job of updating elite dangerous and really putting in effort for cleaning up mechanics issues.
But then I see stupidity like this and realize I am so much better off lmao. At least I have a 1:1 milky way game to play whenever I want.
God... Elite has so much potential. Its almost so good, but just stumbles so much. Like... i bought it so I could walk around my ship. Thats like my fantasy and they were promising it, but, alas, they still don't have it.
Elite is great but too damn shallow. And don't get me started on odyssey. The game did not need space legs jankps.
That's why I like what star citizen is doing. Fdev is not only beholden to shareholders that force out unfinished unpolished crap lacking in content, but they have 262828 other games to focus on so they took the lazy way out: get a minimally viable product out and then axe most of what braben talked about elite being in favor of small lore additions and an attempt at FPS stuff but again as lazily as possible.
I loved what elite wanted to be but I hate the greed and laziness. I'll wait another 10 years for star citizen for it to be the best game ever because I know for a fact no one is ever going to attempt this again, it's too expensive and no company will ever spend the money if they have a publisher.
These comments sections are almost laughable because we see the dichotomy of gamers "OmG TeN YeAr AlPhA!" but every other game it's "OMG DELAY IT! ITS NOT FINISHED!"
Public broadcaster radio just struggled to raise $500k for charity, and then get to see this bullshit.
Maybe they should put out a product people want to pay for.
Or say that they will eventually.
Star Citizen players and Escape from Tarkov players. Both think their game will be finished before they are copied/cloned by a faster/better studio.
This has already happened with Tarkov. Tarkov has been copied and cloned, but none of them are nearly as popular. Call of Duty didn't even really come close, and that's AAA. The game has already been around for 7 years. You would think someone had the time to make a better extraction shooter by now, but no one has. I honestly wish they would hurry up, because Tarkov is a mess from a netcode and performance perspective, it's just great in the game design department.
The Fun Pimps have entered the chat
I think I've reached the point where no one will be able to convince me that Star Citizen is not a money laundering front.
I don’t know about a front, but when they have this kind of income, they have zero incentive to actually launch the damn thing, and every incentive to just keep dangling the carrot
In Spanish we say “música paga no suena”. Or “Paid music (service) won't play”. As in, if you actually want the DJ, Mariachis, or band to stay the whole party, withhold payment until the end. If you pay upfront they will arrive late and leave early. They already have the money on the bag, and no legally binding responsibility to actually deliver any product. Even with this new round of crowdfunding, tomorrow they could just claim they already delivered what could be done with the money and disappear into a fiscal paradise. And not a single chump who backed up this decade long fraud would have any single recourse to fight back.
How the fuck are people still falling for this scam? Oh right, half of our country worships a braindead cheeto blob. edit: Damn so many trump simps in the thread. "omg everything politik" yeah welcome to fucking lemmy
Americans try not to make everything about us politics challenge (impossible)
Everything IS about US politics 😛
"Scam" implies that they're not delivering the product, and they are, as in you can actually go and play it. There is actually a fair bit to do. Not overly exciting non-stop heroics, but the game is trying to simulate what life in space would be like, and does a pretty good job of it so far.
I literally can't play this game, my PC has 16GB of RAM and it runs out of free memory after like 10 minutes and crashes to desktop. When your "fix" is to just buy more RAM or increase your page file size, then your game is a fucking scam. I understand new games require more powerful hardware, but this is Amazon lumberyard ffs.
It's not even that new anymore. A 1080ti was tip of the spear graphics technology when this game first became "playable."
new games
It's a decade old lol.
It's actually not lumber yard anymore, it started from that but they've Rewritten most of it. And they literally show you the code and such during their like 2+hr devs videos. It's never going to release but the technology is actually genuinely impressive.
Sadly 16GB just isn't much anymore. Windows alone will happily eat 4, steam sometimes 2 for no reason (usually not but can happen when it's web process leaks) games like icarus claim minimum recommendation is 24.
Which is absolutely insane and developers need to get their shit together but it's just the way things are going.
I honestly feel like they should just release Squadron 42 now and then do Star Citizen. Let us have the ships and combat in an Ace Combat style game just in case Star Citizen never release.
That's the plan. They started with star citizen being the focus and then 2 years ago they pulled most of the staff to finish SQ42. Now that they're in the "polishing phase" for sq42 they have started pulling people back to work on star citizen. Next year is going to be big for star citizen, very very important core tech being implemented and a deluge of content should come with the reallocation of workers to star citizen.
Source: I'm literally obsessed with star citizen/sq42 and know too much about it, send help. (My wallet is ok lol)
"(On SQ42) ...but our plan is to be feature and content complete by the end of 2019, with the first 6 months of 2020 for Alpha ... and then Beta." - Chris Roberts, 2018
Apparently the order of operations is reversed for Chris Roberts in that both "feature complete" and "content complete" come before both "alpha" and "beta".
There might even be a "delta" and "gamma" - you never know when it comes to this man and the absolute slipperiness he employs with the English language.
Fingers Crossed.
I backed back on kickstarter, and still wanna play it.
Is that Mark Hamill?
"Hi, I'm actor Mark Hammill. You might remember me from such unfinished games as Untitled Star Wars Game 3 and Untitled Star Wars Game 7."
Yes, he is a major character in the single player campaign along with Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Gillian Anderson, and others who provided voice acting and facial performance capture.
Yes. He's joined by Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, Mark Strong, Andy Serkis, John Rhys-Davies, Ben Mendelssohn, Liam Cunningham, and many others in Squadron 42, the story-based spinoff to Star Citizen.
... that may one day actually get released...
it's a huge success story for Star Citizen. I htink they are delighting the dreams of people who want to travel and work in space, but know they can never afford to really do so. Bethesda's Starfield is a sort of attempt to do Star Citizen, but it's just not as gritty and realistic as Star Citizen.
Starfield is single player, so it's not really in the same category. Star Citizen was meant to connect people, which is why the lack of launch sucks so hard. Nobody can ever convince me it's playable without a permanent, persistent universe for this reason.
It's a really interesting one, it's done much better than most people expected and seems to have a very strong community. It could evolve into something really interesting in the long-term, like it's entirely possible that twenty years from now it'll still be going strong with a healthy user base, it might even have the scope to really embed itself and still be popular in fifty years.
I never expected it to get to where it is and I never expected it to get to any of it's previous milestones, now I'm starting to really wonder how far it could go
I’m so happy that I’m on the sidelines of all this. I think watching is significantly more enjoyable than being part of it.
The older I get, the more things this is true for.
Cause it's the game dev that never ends it just goes on and on my friends…
Sunk cost fallacy
Is it worth pirating to play it single player today and get an idea of its current state? Or is the game online only?
Spacebourne 2 immediately comes to mind. It's only one dude doing everything, so it's both amazing and lacking at the same time.
Also Evochron Legacy, a real passion project of a space sim.
The singleplayer experience, called Squadron 42, is not yet available. Online only for the public alpha test.
As to whether or not it's worth it, you can be the judge. They have multiple free-fly events each year (although the most recent one just passed I think) where you can download the game and play for a whole week for free to see if it's for you. I would wait for the next one to come up and try it then, if you are curious about it.
Generally, I try to steer people away from it even though I'm a fan of the game myself because it's just so rough around the edges and the initial mystique and wonder of exploring a vast solar system quickly wears off and gets replaced by tedium and lost progress due to bugs and glitches, so it doesn't make for the most enjoyable experience. YMMV.
I'd say just wait for SQ42 to come out, however long that may take. Possibly within the next few years if we're being optimistic.
I don't think it's possible to play the current game single player (offline) meaningfully. But there are very regular free fly events, I think you barely just missed one. I'm not sure I'd really describe it as worth it regardless for most people right now, it's still very alpha and has a very steep learning curve to actually work out how to progress on your own. But it is a beautiful thing to explore still.
WARNING
This ROBERTS SPACE INDUSTRIES. You game locked for virus and crime.
Please send further $3.5 MILLION USD in iTunes GIFT CARDS to further unlock services and ships in the future maybe.
I really confused by all this hate. Has anyone here actually tried to play the actual game? It's pretty damn impressive what they have now.
I'm not confused at all, timelines are forever moving goalposts, and each major "milestone" is really just a tech demo addition with no cohesive product. You can walk around spaceships, get auto generated quests, or get in some pvp where the person who bought the best ship wins.
The underlying promises have been continually missed with constant deflection that amounts to "hey look at this shiny thing we just did".
It’s still alpha. 11 years after I threw $100 their way.
Some people may be happy to play buggy alpha builds as they trickle out, I want to see a finished game without the perpetual feature creep.
We haven’t even seen Squadron 42 which was supposed to be out in 2014.
They showed off Squadron 42 earlier this year. They're definitely spending money on stuff since it had a ton of A-List actors in the game. Graphics look amazing, everything looks so detailed... The game engine however was struggling. During the gameplay footage it constantly looked like the frame rate dropped to 15fps. They claim the game is "Feature Complete" (whatever that means in their definition...) and now is in the polishing stage. I honestly don't think their CryEngine based Engine will run well even on the latest and best hardware when (if) it finally releases unless they make massive changes to the engine...
I'm sure it is, but they lost me almost a decade ago when I paid for "alpha access" made dozens of bug reports, put a hundred hours into a broken game, signed up at least ten other people, and then lost alpha access because I wasn't enough of an influencer.
All I wanted to do was play a buggy fucking game and give them free (professional) QA and they instead decided to restrict access to a bunch of extra exclusive PTU alpha influencers. That's the second I decided to not give them any more money or free labor.
Bug reports from random players aren't that useful. The bottleneck is fixing the bugs not finding them. For any bug you report to a games studio, there is a good chance they already know.
It's not a game. It's a demo that's been given more money than any other game in the history of kickstarters, and it's been going on for over ten effing years.
Does it look cool? Absolutely. Am I totally 100% behind the idea for the game? Absolutely! Can you play the game right now in a way that all of your progress isn't erased? No. But you can BUY progress that will.
So that's what people do. They buy things to make progress in a universe that's possibly never going to be officially launched. In August they reported making over $600,000,000 to date. For a game that's never launched, or set a launch date, or put together a serious road map.
I did multiple times, it's a fucking mess.
The confusion comes because most people are jaded by the dev cycle, which has been incredibly expensive while delivering almost nothing of substance for years. On top of that, many have defended the dev team with a lot of fervor despite this, so I think people take it less seriously when people praise the game.
I’m personally skeptical, but I’ll definitely give it a better look if it gets released.
It seems a lot of people haven't played it. It's quite playable and has less bugs than the average new AAA game.
It's currently got 4 planets, each with 3 or more moons, and many stations that can be visited. 6+ game loops and around 30 flyable ships.
Yeah people spend way too much real money on it, but 90% of the fly read ships are purchasable in the game. At least give the damn game a shot before you shit on it. The community is super nice and willing to help new comers.
Edit: Not sure why everyone is so upset. This is my experience and every argument I've seen against sc is about bugs or spending real money on ships. Let people enjoy the games they want without getting so mad cause someone likes a game you don't.
and it only took almost 15 years and a three quarters of a billion dollars to get... most ships flyable, and a couple planets.
and you say that as if its praise worthy.
Everyone gets too upset about it. Personally I payed $45 for it, and I feel like I got more than $45 worth of game out of it even if I feel like it's a total mess. I don't think it's a $500m, 15 year game, I guess, but to me it was a $45 game so it doesn't bother me.
It's a mess, but people are playing the new COD and that's a mess too. Maybe it's because I've only been playing for 8 months, but I find it super enjoyable.
What are they gonna do with that money, buy some new office paintings?
Well, I guess I expected too much of the lemmy community to not leave a bunch of idiotic, uninformed, seething comments on anything SC related.
It's just reddit without all the content.
Omfg this timeline sucks soooo bad