Oh boy a Star Citizen thread.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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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.
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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.
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.
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Such an incredible scam. I have friends that spent thousands on this shit. They are like cult members.
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.
Sunk cost fallacy
Well, that's like just your opinion, man!
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...
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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.
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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.
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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
No less bugs in the gameplay either, it's incredible the kind of really basic bugs they still have and cannot fix.
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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 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.
What will happen first, we make it to space or this game releasing?
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 🤣.
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."
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