this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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Over $600 Million Later, Star Citizen Is Now at the Alpha 3.20 Stage::Star Citizen’s long-running development has inched forward yet again, this time to Alpha 3.20 stage.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolutely rediculous that it's been allowed to go on for so long. Biggest scam in gaming history.

[–] Astroturfed 55 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I think it's incompetence really. They've basically started over on shit multiple times. It's sort of that perfect is the enemy of good mantra at work. They're never going to finish it.

[–] Evilcoleslaw 6 points 1 year ago

Why even try to finish it if you can just keep raking in money with fundraising? It's a scam, not incompetence.

[–] rifugee 3 points 1 year ago

I think that they're making perfect the enemy of good...and they can because people keep throwing money at them. Most dev teams don't have that luxury.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is exactly it. They're continously pumping out content and updates; no scam would put in this much effort. But most of the effort is deeply ineffectual. It's obvious that there's some serious lack of organisation. They're trying their best, but their best just sucks (and that's not a dig at the people doing the grunt work, it's clear that they're very talented).

[–] Ya_Boy_Skinny_Penis -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hard to call it "effort" when they've been in an alpha state for a decade.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Effort and achievement are very different things.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I think it's both. Or rather, their only competence is scamming people with false advertising.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

It's performance art - that's the entire point of it. Kind of like Microsoft Word

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sunk cost falacy: The game! 😂

[–] Saltblue 3 points 1 year ago

Scam citizen, people talk about Todd, but Chris Robbers is the most successful scam artist on the industry, true Capitan Ajab if you may, milking those whales to the dead.

[–] just_another_person 33 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Okay....so............when can we try it out?

[–] newthrowaway20 59 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can play it now. They even offer a free weekend every now and then. I tried it a few years back but never got very far into it..

Who knows, the game might release by 2030 at this rate.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

They had a free week recently. But it ended up taking almost the entire week to actually successfully install and launch it. So I played it for maybe 5min

[–] Coffeemonkepants 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can also pay for it and get a refund, which is what I did. It isn't anywhere close to being finished.

[–] just_another_person 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm just super curious at to what $600m would get me. Maybe suckering people into paying for it out of curiousity was their genius business plan along though.

[–] cyd 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's the cost of about three typical AAA games. Genshin Impact's costs up to around its second year of development is also about that much.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The average cost of a AAA game is $80m.

"AAA games are the big-budget games that large studios and publishers typically make. The average AAA game takes about four years to develop, with an average cost of about $80 million and higher. But this amount can vary significantly depending on the type of game and its level of complexity."

-https://rocketbrush.com/blog/how-much-does-it-cost-to-develop-a-game

[–] Supervisor194 11 points 1 year ago

AAA games also tend to do esoteric things like "release" and "become profitable" and "spawn sequels."

[–] Ace0fBlades 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Whenever you want...provided you spent like 50 dollars on a starter ship in 2014

[–] Eggroley 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] SupraMario 4 points 1 year ago

They have sales, I grabbed it a few years ago for like $20. Yeah it's got bugs but I've got a good bit of time playing it. It's got plenty to do, people in here didn't really play it and are on the hate train. Don't be a whale and you'll get your money out of it.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

This is still a glorified tech demo and a walking simulator with ships. Gunplay is pretty sad,pvp is out of the question with that performance, gameplay loops are either bugged to hell or boring as hell.

Instead of adding more ships they should be focusing on polishing and improving what they currently have at least. It's sad really.

[–] Yokozuna 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

So with some quick math, if everyone that played the game spent the same amount of money each person would have spent $126 on it.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yes, but that’s never how these things work.

Just as an example, I played a mobile game for a while. F2P was an option, and some players did that just fine. Some put maybe $10 in just to get the ads and annoyances to go away.

Then there was one specific user, who spent so much money on the game, he got banned more than once for having more of different kinds of resources that would normally be impossible to get in that quantity. They spent tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on a mobile game.

They then quit, because they reached the point where they could no longer progress. Not because of another paywall, but because the game literally could not function at the level he pushed it from a resource standpoint.

[–] Blubber28 8 points 1 year ago

Those people are often where most of the money comes from in f2p games. They are referred to as "whales" by the gaming industry.

[–] Yokozuna 2 points 1 year ago

My man I just quickly crunched some numbers to find a average, of course you have variance in the spending habits of players from person to person.

Crazy that people can throw money away like you described though, they must live in a totally different world than most people. And getting banned for having more resources is honestly the funniest thing to happen from dumping money into a f2p game.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

IRL Spiders Georg

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Honestly pretty middle of the road as these things go. A world of warcraft subscription is $200 a year right now.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Why is that in a tech community?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Hold on, I'm not familiar with Star citizen, but do you have to spend real money to get ships in this game?

The MISC Hull C added with the Alpha 3.20 update costs an eye-watering $500

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AFAIK all ships can/will be purchasable with in game currency, but they're available to backers for IRL monies during development. Been a while since I played but that's how I remember it!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is correct. Everything is buyable with in game money. You can also rent ships in game, so if you want to get into something like, say, mining, you can rent a mining ship and then use it to earn enough to buy one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

And in game it does not take long to get enough money to buy any ship.

So shipbackers really are backing the program, and not buying access to ships as an exclusive thing. Buying in-game ships is a fun game loop

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

$25,000. That's how much a single ship can cost.

https://rarest.org/entertainment/expensive-star-citizen-ships

This game developer is such trash.

[–] lemmyBeHere 7 points 1 year ago

After a couple of free weekends, I was on the verge of buying it but then I saw that they separated squadron 42...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Playing starfield vindicated the development of Star Citizen. I eventually stopped playing sf after 30 hours to go back to sc because I feel more enjoyment in the immersion given to me.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Immersion" when every NPC stands around doing nothing in a t-pose and some of them sit half in the ground.

Not really sure where you got immersion from. The entire city is also just a prop on planets you can't really interact with (except the space port part).

I've felt more immersed in Cyberpunk.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair, starfield NPCs see through walls, and stare into your soul at all times.

Lets not pretend the bar is high in either game when it comes to NPCs.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That does still sound a whole lot better than t-posing, tbh.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They also t-pose, just not often. And sometimes they vibrate, before hovering into the air? Idk the NPCs in Starfield are weird as fuck sometimes. It just felt like a hilarious thing for them to choose when the meandering NPCs aren’t really the focus of either game, but less so SC.

[–] Saltblue 4 points 1 year ago

This is pure copium

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