• dustyData@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • echo64@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • whereBeWaldo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          Call me shallow but I enjoy the fanservice ( not the naughty type, I mean when characters from the previous entries come back/get mentioned) so I enjoyed them thoroughly, Kuro 1 and 2 are also great, they bring a lot of new ideas to the table.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Rokk@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • orrk@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      imagine a bigger game with great graphics and a whole ton of technical innovation, AND have people be paid well, that is for chumps

    • froggers@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      don’t judge until you’ve seen the dynamic cloth physics! that is what everyone wants, right?

      • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I actually will only play a game with realistic sweat and tears. Oh, they are hard at work on that?! Well FINALLY, I’m SO fucking glad. Thank you SO much, Robert’s Space Industries. You guys are definitely NOT complete hacks.

      • Khrux@ttrpg.network
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • SSTF@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • dustyData@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • sebinspace@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Think part of it is that Chris Robert’s comes from a time when games couldn’t be patched.

        • SSTF@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          No, there’s really no excusing this game’s development. If anything, Robert’s should have learned from Freelancer to have a tight core product that’s actually shippable.

          At this point Internet nerds are locked into throwing money at Star Citizen’s development, making it the closest thing humanity has achieved to a perpetual motion machine.

    • OttoVonNoob@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      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.

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        1 year ago

        I literally cannot think of a worse way to launder money then an extremely high profile public crowdfunding campaign.

        • Murvel@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Laundering? They’re not even entering as investors are they, so they are not really expecting any return other that a presumably finished game at some point?

        • Asafum@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          That and they release their financial reports every year…

          The people in this thread are astoundingly hateful idiots that are just doing the groupthink thing to be part of a group that lets them feel “smarter than you.” It’s really disappointing to see this every time star citizen is mentioned, but I’ll just continue to enjoy it and then welcome all these people when it’s completed as they suddenly stop hating on it because it isn’t fashionable anymore.

      • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • smoothbrain coldtakes@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • orrk@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          to be fair, its issue is that they literally have a whole flood of people trying the game, like 70%+ is people just trying the game then

          • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            It’s not like these free play periods are a surprise to them. They are in complete control of how hard their servers get pounded and when.

            • orrk@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              sure, but AWS only has so many servers ready to spin up at any one time

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • dustyData@lemmy.world
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          Dude, it was a random comment on a YT video about 8 months ago. I have zero chance of finding it again. It’s just an anecdote. So, as much as I hate to say it, just…trust me bro.

    • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • Heavybell@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      “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.

      • Shadywack@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • infinitepcg@lemmy.world
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        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.

      • Veraxus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It released years and years ago. You realize that, right? That it’s playable… and people like it?

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          No it entered into alpha about 10 years ago. Not even beta, it’s alpha, there is barely any gameplay to it.

          I’ve seen grey box proof of concept pieces with more functionality

        • Rogers@lemmy.ml
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          Uh oh looks like you are not following the hive mind of the sub! It’s sad but funny how little people know about SC but still insist they know its a scam when all they know is what they read from hit piece articles. I can’t wait for sc 4.0 server meshing is such a game changer

        • orrk@lemmy.world
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          how dare you come to our echo chamber with your “facts”, we need to repeat the clickbait headlines and nothing else!

            • infinitepcg@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              This is just debating definitions. They release playable builds regularly but it’s still in alpha.

              • Asafum@feddit.nl
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                1 year ago

                It’s almost never worth discussing star citizen with haters, they just love to hate they don’t care about nuance. The hate is the bandwagon and they get to feel smarter than other people for being on the “right side.”

                Nothing will change their mind until the game is declared 1.0 complete and then they’ll act like they never hated the game and they just wanted to wait for release.

                • Rogers@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  It’s odd how so many people seem to take it personally when someone says something good about SC

    • CptOblivius@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • infinitepcg@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Why is it so hard for people to imagine that there are players who like the game as it is and see value in buying ships? After 10 years of development, people have a pretty good idea of what they are getting into.

        • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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          If people were smart and had good ideas of what they were getting into, no scams would exist, ever.

          lol

        • vanya913@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Sure, and people spend tons of money and time on gacha mobile games. Doesn’t mean that they haven’t been scammed.

  • finthechat@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    This is just like EVE Online for me - I am more interested in reading about the drama than the actual game itself.

    • Mango@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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!

      • Furbag@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        SC wouldn’t run on any console currently in production, and even if it could/did, you’d own a console several generations newer than what it was meant to play on by the time it officially released.

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        1 year ago

        why should they care about consoles, exactly? Especially when we know that a bunch of licensing requirements from consoles are literally giving control of your project to Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo

        • PlasticExistence@lemmy.world
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          It’s relevant because it’s the most expensive game ever, yet it only targets one platform. The second most (and others) can at least justify some of their expense because they’re targeting multiple platforms which does have a cost.

          • orrk@lemmy.world
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            ok AND? the fact that it’s the most expensive game ever already clashes with the policy of publishing with console service providers, there are drawbacks beyond cost to porting software to console, and I will remind you that both Microsoft and Sony are Running AMD64_X86 architecture so porting isn’t the difficult part.

            it’s not my fault if you fall for console ports justifying price.

              • orrk@lemmy.world
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                what exactly am i “not educated on”?

                because both the Xbox series X/S and the PS5 use AMD Zen2+RDNA2 with Zen2 being a chipset that uses the X86_64, fundamentally there is nothing much separating the two, and I will remind you the if at times buggy, Cyberpunk ports where done in just a few months towards the end of the project that spanned many years.

                or maybe you meant it in regard to Microsoft and Sony having a significant amount of policy control towards licensing anything that is release on their consoles?

    • M0oP0o@mander.xyz
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      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.

  • TIMMAY@lemmy.world
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    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.

    • deus@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • TIMMAY@lemmy.world
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        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

    • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      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.

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      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.

  • TheKracken@lemmy.world
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    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.

    • pancakes@sh.itjust.works
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      People think you can slap on an “in development” sticker to anything and absolve it of all criticism.

    • Alimentar@lemm.ee
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      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

    • Rogers@lemmy.ml
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      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?

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    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.

    • Rogers@lemmy.ml
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      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.

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        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?

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        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.

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          1 year ago

          Are you aware they had a backer vote on the direction of the game? It was on if they were going to have stretch goals after the original KS pitch. 94% of the votes went to changing the game into something bigger (more features added). I understand it sucks for people that wanted the smaller more realistic game but they lost the vote. And again you can sell your ship for more than you paid, sometimes way way more. Should they have ignored the vote that was that overwhelming?

    • CluckN@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You don’t understand they released a cinematic trailer of slow moving scenery only shots that makes it game of the year.

      • jdf038@mander.xyz
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        1 year ago

        orchestral music intensifies 🎶 🎵 👌 😌 ❤️ ♥️

  • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    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

  • LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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?