8 Years In, Star Citizen Fans Are Increasingly Upset - Kotaku

Those who paid for the game back in 2012 — and have either paid or kept paying since — are growing increasingly unhappy at developer Cloud Imperium Games’ lack of apparent progress and communication.

https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/07/8-years-in-star-citizen-fans-are-increasingly-upset-that-star-citizen-is-still-being-star-citizen/

Nice graphics but the game looks stiff and sparse. Needs more density illusions.

clickbait non-substantive article boosted by clickbain non-substantive forum post , cause you're bored.

Wow, no shit.

I call that the ghetto side of PC gaming

1. Kickstarting crap games that never come out

2. Paying tons of money for whale products

I pay 15 dollars a month for a good game that I play a lot called WoW classic and I play some Starcraft 2 an stuff like I don't play trash or pay for trash on PC like these people.

Eight years. Eight. It has been so long ago, that back then, Bioware was a top dev. That's how long it has been. Its insane to think that people are still defending this scam.

Wait... Star Citizen is still happening? I thought it was a vaporware scam where the dev already had lawsuits piled on from the backers...?

There is no way this game can justify the time and money invested in it.

I hope Ashes of Creation is not the next Star Citizen because that thing sure is promising.

Its never coming out. Ever!!.

WoW is as big of a whale product as they get. Monthly fee, paid expansions, micro-transactions, etc.. They have been milking WoW for 16 years!

"Crap games that never come out"... LOL

Hollow Knight is one of the best games I have ever played and it was a Kickstarter game.

Come on man... at least if you are going to troll, don't come off looking like a dumbass and a hypocrite.

Rofl

More clicks for Kotaku, then.

I have preached since Day Z that early access and crowd funded games are a joke, especially the ambitious projects.

Who ever believed this would ever be a finished product in the time they said it would be complete are daft, the level these guys are trying to achieve requires a team twice the size with a budget to match along with the skill of someone like Rock Star to create it.

I hate to say it to people who believed in this c*** but I told you so 5 years ago.

5 years ago, the scope of the game was nowhere near what it is now. This project has probably had the most feature creep ever. If they had locked it down earlier and made a much more limited game, it would have been out by now.

But what if you bought a 10.000 dollar space ship?

I remember years ago when Herms were bragging about this game lol. It's pretty nuts that after all these years it's still not done.

Announced last gen. Touted to be impossible to run on last gen consoles. Last gen ended, this gen is about to end and new gen will begin. This will equate to the game being in the development during three console generations. They have raised enough money that equates to 6 triple A games and no end in sight. Its pretty amazing indeed.

Fools and their money and all that jazz. THHBO. lol :P

Not clicking that click-bait. It also funnt to see when native English speakers don't know the meanings of spam and vaporware.

I just can’t believe the amount of money they ask for some of the ships!!!

They are more concerned with releasing $14k and $27k DLCs instead of actually finishing the game. Im not sure what people expected.

@biggest_loser:

This is why you should never create an ambitious game and rely so much on Kickstarter. Star Citizen should have more than enough to have finally finished the game years ago. If it were being developed under any other company, it WOULD HAVE BEEN FINISHED YEARS AGO. Maybe not perfectly but it would've done and everyone who supported it would've been happy to see it completed.

I know that this sounds a little too negative but at some point, CE must've made the decision to continue milking the project for more money. The existence of all those microtransactions doesn't make them look any better neither. Why finish something when you can keep making more money off building it?

hollow knight did not have fans give them millions to buy him a Lamborghini. even wow is a scam. it should be free to play after 14 years of paying them. all of these games are scams.

the pc fans should be pissed.

Yeah I am frustrated, but I still support Star Citizen.

I've invested more time (and enjoyed it) into the alpha builds of Star Citizen than I have most AAA games in recent years. I got bored with RDR 2 after a few hours; I still read up on SC and look forward to new alpha builds.

I think we will be seeing it come out in the next year or two. Meanwhile I will be enjoying all the other games that come out in addition to my backlog. I think people fail to realize that we don't really lose anything by SC taking their time.

Also, just my two cents on the matter, but at this point Star Citizen is too big to fail. Even if Chris Roberts were to die, or the company go bankrupt, some other publisher would probably snatch it up. Between the progress they made, the Hollywood talent they've already payed and filmed...there is no way this game is not coming out.

It just might not be for five more years :P

*sigh*

a.) you can fly the ships in-game without paying those prices, and b.) you're not paying for the ship, you're funding the game. The ship is, I don't know...a perk. The more you fund, the better the ship you get.

People, including some Star Citizen fans, can't seem to wrap their head around the fact that you are not buying ships. You're funding the game and being rewarded with a ship. Might seem like a fine point, but it's a distinction nonetheless.

You can go pay a full-game price (or less, actually, I think some ship packages are like 30-40 dollars) and get the game. You can then play the game, make in-game currency, and then rent these expensive ships and fly them around.

Additionally they have in-game expos and "fleet week" where they let you try out literally every ship in the game.

Nah man, they're the best.

Some are a gambles, some fail...but most are a delight to participate in their development. Provide feedback. And so on.

I've had more fun playing games in early access, games that are crowdfunded, than pretty much all AAA games released in the past decade.

Shit man, I've got like 400 hours alone in Factorio. Probably 200+ in Star Citizen. Hardspace: Shipbreakers just came to early access and I already have 10 hours invested in it after three days.

RDR 2? Probably 10. AC Odyssey? About 55. CoD: Warzone? Well I've been playing that a lot, but only when my friends want me to.

I guess what I am saying is this: even in their unreleased state, I've enjoyed more indie, crowdfunded, and early access titles than I have AAA and other games from major studios and publishers.

@mrbojangles25:

If the creators of SC were to go bankrupt, some other publisher would just take whatever they have already made and wrap it up to complete it. Probably save whatever else that was incomplete for a sequel and call it a day. Do you think you would've been happy with that or do you like where it is now? Which is basically like Minecraft with endless updates. I think a big part of the vision is that it will never be complete because they're constantly coming up with new ideas. Which is good and bad, depending on how you see it.

Of course they are upset, they were ripped off ... this had Vaporware written all over the place, i'm very surprised people felt for this scam and i'm even more surprised they are still giving away their money for a glorified demo that will never be properly release while those higher ups involved are having the time of their lifes while naive gamers pay their vacations.

This kind of games gives crowfunding games a bad rep.

@mrbojangles25: The game shouldn’t need more funding! It’s a con right now with not much to show for it! Yes you don’t have to buy them but the cost they charge for some pixels is crazy! Clearly you will support it no matter how much the drain it’s fans wallets

To be fair you guys, while Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012, it didn't really enter pre-production until the last Witcher 3 DLC (Blood & Wine) was wrapped up in 2016.

As for Star Citizen, long development is one thing, but the game's in a state where you can play, and more importantly, buy things with real money. The Kickstarter was at the time one of the most successful ever. It was successful before they typed their first line of code. There was no longer any onus on getting the job done because the thing's already made its money back. It's like hiring a decorator and paying them day one. There's no incentive to keep working after that because there's nothing else waiting for them at the end.

By the way, since this is Kotaku we're talking about, did anyone ever read the Kotaku article by Jason Schreier (before he left Kotaku) explaining the development history of the game? It's fascinating.

Yes, it was fascinating.

I think a lot of people forget they essentially had to remake the game from scratch a few years ago. Yeah, they've been working on it for 8 years, but really it's more like 5.

What part of "you're not paying for the ship, you're funding the game" did you not understand?

And the wallets are only drained as much as we want. 40 dollars. 4000 dollars. Totally up to me and you and everyone else.

I can't imagine anybody could still be pissed about it at this point, or holding out hope for it for that matter.

Star Citizens ambitions were meant for 2030. Not 2020.

Cant believe I bought this game... I thought I was getting a Wind Commander sequel. Feel duped... with only myself to blame. Oh well Im over it by now, and never expect to get any kind of ROI.

I know that but the reason I said 5 years ago is simply because I didn't believe the developer was capable of pulling off a AAA quality game based on regardless of budget and time.

A lot of these developers who take the route are amateurs or people which no publisher wanted to back.

If a AAA publisher with 100's of millions in the bank see's these outlandish idea's for a game and doesn't want to invest CLEARLY it means they who have the experience KNOW its just not possible.

Just look a Rockstar they spend 262 million on a GTA5... it took them 3 years with OVER 1000 people working on it, why people 1/2 people working on it that are LESS talented and CAPABLE with less than 100 million for the first 2 years of development.

Its why they extended their "Ambition" they raised 300 million... And now it looks like we will be lucky to get it in 2021.

It will be a buggy mess. I have no faith in the developers.

Some of the best games to come out in the last decade are kickstarted.

One of them even got a 10 on this site.

Let's be honest here, "Those who paid for the game back in 2012 — and have either paid or kept paying since" are morons. It's as simple as that.

People still support this scam?

They made EA look good.

EA.

Those games weren't ambitious games that only a AAA developer with billion dollar publisher backing them can pull off... The games that succeed in early access and kick starter are indie level games in terms of scope, graphics and complexity.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing with the dev's philosophy of endlessly announcing new goals as long as people keep giving them money or correctly pointing out that they shouldn't have expanded the scope of the game to the point they had literally no chance of meeting their goals.

Obviously I'm in the latter camp.

People can support anything, even things they consciously know will harm them. This should not surprise anyone.

Okay let's for a moment seperate the stupidity of people (fool and his money and all that) from the equation and let's just say we're talking about people spending obscene amounts of money on virtual ships in a game that may never even launch and let's even say that's their money they're entitled to do with it what they please and all of this, according to you, is in the interest of funding the game.

So my question to you is: what percentage of the profits the game makes if any are you going to receive when the game goes on sale?

You are, after all, their benefactor, their sole income, their cash cow with a seemingly endless supply of 'support funding' and it's your huge cash injections that's making all their dreams possible so what are you going to get out of it when all is said and done apart from a virtual fucking ship that cost them literally nothing?

$300 million scam. Biggest scam in gaming history.

It's OK guys, they released a Roadmap of when their Roadmap will be ready ;P

While it’s not quite ready, it’s currently top priority on the web team’s current projects. In the immediate future, we plan to deliver the following communications:

Give an explanation of the goals of our new Roadmap and what to expect from it

Show a rough mockup of the proposed new Roadmap

Share a work in progress version of the Roadmap for at least one of our core teams

And then finally transition to this new Roadmap

Username checks out, ha.

Yeah the successful Kickstarter games I'm aware of are all indie 2D handpainted, Doom clone or pixel art stuff.

Was there ever even a single successful 3D Kickstarter game, either critically or financiall? Yooka Laylee is the closest I'm coming up with...

It's important to note that the average donation is 100 dollars.

So while the attention-getting "OMFG this dude spent 10,000 dollars to fund a game he really wants for a fake ship!!!!!!" has people foaming at the mouth, the fact is that the average amount is actually less than the cost of a new AAA game with Season Pass DLC.

Shit man, I regret every single penny I spent on Battlefront 2 Ultimate edition, something that cost me $110 for a finished product. I don't regret any money I spent on Star Citizen (which was definitely under $110).

I guess what I am trying to say is this: calm down, people. This game is successful because a lot of people want it to be made, not because a few people are throwing a shit load of cash at it.

From Forbes:

The grand total right now is $300,355,763 raised from 2,712,248 people, so yes, that means the average donation per contributor is over $100, so more than any $60 box game would have cost.

Also nice to see that damn near 3 million people are interested in a space sim. Niche? Where? I see mainstream!

-----------------------

@blueinheaven: As for profit sharing, the benefactors, and what % they get in return? None.

Again, for like the third time, you're not buying ships, you're funding the game. It's not a donation, and they're not profit sharing. People do this knowing that, by the way. The ships are simply there as incentive, not as a product.

Personally, I think it is bat-shit insane to throw 200+ dollars (let alone 10,000) at a game, but apparently there are enough people out there with enough disposable income and the desire for a really awesome space sim that it baffles people like me and somehow angers people like you that they would spend so much.

I mean let's look at it from their shoes (as hard as that might be): the best space sims we've had in the past decade are, what?

• Everspace? An arcade sim.
• Strike Suit Zero? Another arcade sim.
• Elite: Dangerous? Great game but, not exactly thrilling.
• X4? Meh, an OK game but not quite up to AAA standards.

I mean, I don't get it personally, investing that much in a game. But I have to admire their optimism. And there is definitely a niche but significant demand for this kind of game.

When it comes out, be it next year or ten years from now, it will be a title to revolutionize gaming. You have to play it to know what I am talking about, but the game is simply incredible. The tech alone (not even including gameplay) makes it stand apart from any other title, space sim or not.

--------------------------

You also need to understand this: the sim crowd is hardcore. These are people who spend a few hundred bucks for a HOTAS set up they will use for like two games.

They spend 75 dollars for a single plane DLC in DCS: World.

Go look up DCS: World and their DLC. The base game is free and includes a couple planes, but the DLC is in excess of...well....at least a few thousand dollars combined. Now casuals would sit here and think "Wow, they want us to spend 75 dollars on one plane? One piece of DLC? And there's dozens more to get?" but the fact is that one plane is worth a few thousand hours of gameplay.

I think people fund Star Citizen knowing this will likely be the only game they will play for like the next 10 years.

Sorry for the long read hahaha. Clearly I am passionate about this game, and feel the need to combat misinformation about it. But at the same time, I also get the complaints; I want this game to be finished yesterday, but not because I feel entitled to it; simply because I want to experience it!