looks like shit
I backed it a lifetime ago and have gone back and forth between “it’s a scam” and “maybe it could happen” so many times that I just don’t care any more. As broken as it is and as slow as progress has been, there has never been anything like it. I check in a couple of times every year and usually have fun seeing the sights for a week or two. I think I’ve had enough enjoyment from it to justify my original cost.
Even though their goals are unreasonable, irrational, and completely mad, they have somehow managed to fund stable development for over a decade and have actually made meaningful progress. Will I live to see it realized? Who knows. I wish them luck for both their sakes and the people who spent big money on this ridiculous dream, but unlike many others, I have no hard feelings personally. I’d like to see it realized someday, but I have no more money to give them even if I wanted to.
When the scam managed to run long enough to, be it by a chance or choice, stop being a scam xD
I swear social media people with a very limited grip on what “scam” and “grift” means are more obsessed with Star Citizen than us who actually play it. I log on to do some space trucking when I need to relax, or want to check out whatever new has been added. I’ve gotten more value out of that game in the last couple of years than any I’ve bought since. Many AAA games I don’t even remember playing.
I like this take.
It seems like there are ‘victims’ caught up in the hype and sinking way too much money into SC. But if the gameplay is enjoyable, and fits your budget? Enjoy it. Hell yes.
My friends were very excitedly talking about setting up a corp in this when it was first announced.
They wanted my buy-in, and I asked if I could be head of HR, to which they said “yes”.
So I bought it, created our corp, and performed my ideal goal: set up a corp recruitment posting called “entry-level Star Citizen player” which required 10+ years in Star Citizen.
We’re now at the point where I have to find my log-in and change that to 20+ for the joke to make sense again.
Average Store Citizen player

We just need to buy another ship guise, they’re so close to release!
Learn to spell before you make fun of others’ intellects.

Learn to recognize mocking sarcasm before you make dumb comments on the Internet
I made no mistake. You should mind your own education more and spend less time throwing shade online.
Of course you did, which is why you chose to attack my intellect and spelling* instead of addressing what I’m mocking.
It’s ok if people make fun of things you like, that doesn’t mean they’re dumb or anything. Assuming people are dumb for making fun of people who have fallen for the scam for over a decade says more about your intellect than mine.
I have never had anything to do with Star Citizen, and I don’t care that you’re mocking it. I just think you should pay more attention to your spelling if you’re going to do so. It makes you look foolish.
Anyway, I’m done explaining this to you. Buh-bye.
I just think you should pay more attention to your spelling if you’re going to do so. It makes you look foolish.
Thank you for admitting you completely missed the sarcastic mocking. You could have saved us all some time by not protecting your ego from the start.
Anyway, I’m done explaining this to you. Buh-bye.
Good, saves me the trouble of breaking out the crayons to help you understand the point you’re ignoring.
I can somehow understand the people who funded it in the first place, but who invests now in a project which has already been in development hell for more than a decade and produced barely anything playable. Every whale has already been milked - what return of investment can an investor expect of Star Citizen?
It’s still $45 to access the game if you don’t have it yet(and that counts as a pledge, and therefore part of the game’s funding), but yea as a player and a backer I essentially agree. You’re basically spending money to skip game progression after the final wipe before release(whenever that happens).
IMO it takes some of the enjoyment out of the game even in its current buggy alpha form. You can earn basically everything except for the most recently(ish) released ships(and some cosmetic items) entirely within the game.
You do get a game to play for $45 though. A game with a zillion bugs and issues but a game nonetheless. I personally feel like it was worth $45 for the entertainment value I’ve gotten out of it. Not worth the amount I spent(like a decade ago), but the first $45 feels worth it now.
That being said, don’t buy the game if you expect a polished experience.
Not to defend SC too much, and full disclosure I don’t play it. But I have friends who DO play it and it seems like they are having a lot of fun?
They aren’t evangelists for the game or anything, so its not a fanboy situation. They just play it a lot, and with lots of other people. They have an online community and meet up IRL for events. Post vids of their exploits. It seems fun to me? I asked them about the bugs and stuff and they fully admit it is buggy and things are broken, they make no apologies for it. They figure out workarounds and share it with the crew. I don’t know, these guys are usually pretty critical of games but they seem happy weirdly. Maybe a cult?
There is no fucking way that I am ever going to pay for a fake star ship or anything so I’m not even considering it. And the entire funding model of the game seems batshit insane to me. But to me it seems like the idea that the game is unplayable doesn’t really match the reality? Its clearly not a good value proposition at all.
It definitely is actually “playable” now, and I’ve had a good amount of fun playing it this year, but it certainly isn’t ready for release or anything.
That said, the network infra they have created is pretty cool: 600+ player servers with relatively little issue, and the goal of 1000 long term is quite a feat of engineering.
They fucked themselves overpromising so much back at the beginning by giving the release dates they did while using like, Unity or something, and now they have the infra/engine to deliver, but nobody trusts them to actually do so.
Are 600 player servers impressive? I’m sure they have plenty of hardware and engineering involved but that doesn’t sound exceptional as much as expected for the scope they’re aiming for.
WoW is a simpler game, in that it’s effectively 2 dimensions and doesn’t involve physics, but that would be a fairly low server population, especially back in it’s heyday. Ditto for many other big MMOs.
EvE has 600+ player battles on a fairly regular basis, much less on a server instance in general.
I’m not super knowledgeable with how it works, but it is essentially a system for seamless jumps between multiple servers “meshing” them together so there is zero noticeable lag time between them. There isn’t a single loading screen going across multiple star systems, which is a pretty significant achievement, especially given how detailed the game itself is.
I’ve never played World of Warcraft or really any MMO, but it is my understanding that there are areas to load into new places (a short black screen on entering a building, a “portal” to another zone, etc.).
That’s cause Star Citizen is a grift.
100% selling hopes and dreams. I understand there’s a playable alpha, I was a backer for over a decade. There is no cohesive vision, just endless theory crafting and half baked implementations to maintain the illusion of progress, but every time they add something, they seemingly need to break something else for their 8 ticks-per-second system to be able to handle it…
Never preorder.
The fun thing is looking into history… especially the one of Freelancer. It would never have been released if it weren’t for Jörg Neumann who - in short - finished it.
Hell of a grift.
I have fun. You don’t have to pay more than the 45 € beginner pack, if you don’t want to. Its still rough but you can see how the pieces start fitting together.
they’ve funded a billion dollars and worked over a decade on a game. it should not be rough.
You don’t have to pay more than the 45 € beginner pack
That’s an absolutely obscene ask for an eight-year-old game with no prospects of being finished in the foreseeable future – let alone that it has macrotransactions for things like paints and intentionally puts you at a disadvantage to players who paid hundreds of euros for this stupid piece of shit grift.
nah it’s not pay to win. it’s not hard to earn in-game money and buy ships with that
Eh,depending on which state the “economy” is in, it can be pretty hard. There’s threads all over spectrum about how Grundy and broken things always are.
If there was much game to actually win, I would definitely call it pay to win.
“Hey come pay yesteryear’s AAA title price for a game that’s been overpromising and underdelivering for the better part of the past two decades” is not the sales pitch you think it is…
Sunk cost fallacy is a bitch. One must be severely delusional to think that after paying however much you did AND waiting for 12+ years, having a barely playable alpha when the original timeline was for a 2015 release AND it’s still being promised for a 2027 release (which, given the state of the alpha, is likely to be missed too), this is in any way acceptable.
How much of a financial investment do you think €45 is over 10+ years? It’s nothing. There’s literally no sunk cost fallacy here
Holy delulu. The fact that you didn’t get anything for over 12 years AND you still protect the company AND urge others to invest is proof of the fallacy here. The inability to admit you’ve been scammed. That you didn’t get what you’ve been promised over and over and over.
Didn’t get anything for over 12 years? Shite, I gotta tell my friends we’ve gotten nothing out of the months of game time we’ve put into the game the last couple of years, especially these past 12 months. CIG has been scamming us with countless hours of gameplay!
Bruh lmao
Where did I urge anyone to buy the game? Or protect the company for that matter?
I’ve watched the pieces “start fitting together” for like 14 years now… There is fun to be had, but it’s an ocean wide and an inch deep imo. SC stopped being fun for me the moment I realized most of the fun I was having was imagining hypotheticals to pass the time while fighting their shit product to function in some meaningful way. This becomes especially painful when you see all of the effort is supposedly going into a single-player game that we’ve barely seen while they fail to deliver an acceptably functional version of the product we actually play and use the ships we payed money for in…
It has other massive problems with the company’s motives. For example: why balance the game to incorporate cohesive and effective multicrew ships, and sell 1 person a 725$(CAD) ship (hammerhead) to invite 6 other people to crew, when they can leave it’s future balance a dream and have everyone in OP F8s (or whatever the current light fighter “meta” ship is at the moment) for 260$ each… 725$ dollar multicrew ship, or 1,820$ in light fighters. hrmmmmm A Hammerhead should melt light fighters according to it’s stated purpose when sold, but it’s been effectively useless for years and years now, as one very clear example of what’s going on overall.
Multicrew will NEVER BE FUN until they’re done milking their base, and they’ll never be done milking their base.
Doesn’t matter that you can try the game for free several times a year either. Stop having fun! Grrrrr!
/s
I’ll wait thanks, I have not paid that much in a game all year and don’t intend to start now on something so unfinished.
I bought a $60 ship back in 2013 or whatever and have only tried it a few times since.
I would definitely recommend waiting for when - and if - it comes out as a polished product.
Most of the limited number of projects I backed on Kickstarter have succeeded, but Star Citizen is one of the two lessons I learned about throwing early money at big projects. Can’t believe it’s been over twelve years.
Never cared for SC but Shenmue 3 was my very memorable lesson in the crowd funding market. On the one hand it was released relatively on time, and I got my backer bonus. In the other, there still wasn’t actually a game to play.
Man I wish I knew how to scam idiots like this
-
Appeal to the authority you give yourself based on *past experience (leave out any negative past experience) *religious/spiritual “insight” can be a substitute here
-
Present an ambitious “vision” that claims to require said past experience to fully grasp
-
Allow your targets to start building the product in their imagination based on the crumbs you gave them with step 2
-
Sell disjointed tangential products that don’t interfere with the player’s dream logic and promise they will connect to your cohesive vision with time
-
Find “technical delays”
-
Express that you need backers to buy more of the dream to help get through the “technical delays”
-
Repeat for 9 years until the market begins to retract
-
Open the dream up to asian markets
-
???
-
Profit
All it requires is being a soulless piece of shit.
-
Game development as a service.
I love how they say “next year” like that was the expected release date to begin with.
In ‘24 they announced they’d be releasing the SP campaign after not having an official release target since early 2020.
Me having spent zero dollars on this. Only interaction ever was installing that hangar thing back when it was the only thing. Maybe there was some demo when the space station first became available and some fps gameplay test.
Still looking forward to it. If the story is good, works on Linux, I’ll buy it. I remember a decade ago being worried the Haswell and Maxwell PC I was putting together wouldn’t be good enough when Star Citizen would drop. Not very concerned anymore
Star Citizen works well on Linux via a community-maintained tool called LUG. Getting other fancy peripherals like head tracking requires some creative use of a Windows VM, because those peripheral makers don’t support Linux. If Squadron 42 ever actually materializes, then the community will have it covered.
I am ashamed to admit that I fell for the scam. It was 2019, and Pyro was right around the corner (except it wasn’t, and wouldn’t make it into the game until 2025). They showed off jump points with a super amazing megastructure ring, an in depth economy simulation, and lots of other really interesting stuff that has still not made it into the game.
Over time, I began to realize I had been scammed. The game just continued to be broken and lacking in features, update after update. Eventually I had enough and sold my account for good in 2024, with the 4th consecutive year of failing to deliver Pyro Since then, I have continued to check in and have not once regretted my decision to cash out of the scam. It is still a buggy and unfun mess. They have scaled back their projections for 1.0 from 100 systems to 5. Their idea of science and exploration is “go here and scan”. It is a shell of the game that was promised years ago, and will never be able to live up to the hype. Overpromise and underdeliver is their mantra.
They have scaled back their projections for 1.0 from 100 systems to 5.
Wow is that the first realistic thing they’ve done?
2016, for me. 42 was supposed to release the next year…such a scam…
Squadron was just another turd on the dumpster fire for me. I didn’t back the project for it, but the fact that it’s been “two years away” for the last decade +, is just another indicator of how much of a scam this thing is. I will be seriously shocked if they manage to finally push it out the door next year, and even more shocked if it is not a totally shit show. There’s no way it lives up to how insanely high it has been hyped up, and I’m just going to be chowing down on popcorn when the shit hits the fan.
Note that Duke Nukem Forever released (poorly) before this travesty.
What you can play right now in Star Citizen is arguably better than what Duke Nukem Forever will ever be.
I’ve played elite dangerous for 4k hours. Done everything there is to do in that game. Had a great time. Glad I chose that game instead of the SC scam.
People still contribute to this scam? That‘s a shame.










