Vapourware Scam Citizen - Only people with too much money can become StarCitizens! WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW MORE?

[Perkel]

get those 100s of systems in this lifetime

The funny thing is, even this time estimate is highly optimistic.

"Star Citizen for our time!"

Considering tech they developed they could literally make quickly 100s of systems if not 1000s and quickly get that stretch goal.
They could make 100s templates for stations and populate those systems with those stations, use that arc corp city plan and copy paste it everywhere with slight changes on 100s of planets etc.

But that would require to change that "like hand made" mantra they are following.

 

[Haba]

Yeah, end result will be "hand-crafted dungeons" like in Oblivion. In practice planet landings and station interiors bring very little to the table. It could just as well be a single screen static menu.

But because Chris Roberts, they'll sink in a few million that.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

2mln people, average support is 90$ or something like that but that includes people after 2014 which were buing game for 40$ and then split for both mmo and single player which is each 60$

A realistic estimate is that about half of those are paying customers. This was leaked a few years ago by Turbulent, the company that does the web development and other stuff for them.

Considering that a large part of the player base probably only bought basic tiers, this means you have a relatively small core of fanatical backers who provide a huge chunk of the money. Someone's gotta buy all those 1500 $ capital ships, land plots (any update about those? lol), and tanks (whatever happened to them, any updates? No? I thought so).

 

[fizzelopeguss]

if anything can give me a hard-on these days, it's a new chris roberts game.

Lol, you fuckin' retard.

 

[Perkel]

2mln people, average support is 90$ or something like that but that includes people after 2014 which were buing game for 40$ and then split for both mmo and single player which is each 60$

A realistic estimate is that about half of those are paying customers. This was leaked a few years ago by Turbulent, the company that does the web development and other stuff for them.

Yeah obviousy there are wales there but you need to put serious thicc glasses if you think you have here 100s of people to get 223mln which is their current state of funding. Even if you assume everyone paid 1000$ then you would still have 200 000 people who did it.

Well whatever happens SC people absolutely don't give a flying fuck. Just last year alone they added about 30-40mln to chris bank account. I am still shocked to see such huge amount support they get.

And since they made their finances public we know this is not fake number.

 

[Angthoron]

get those 100s of systems in this lifetime

The funny thing is, even this time estimate is highly optimistic.

"Star Citizen for our time!"

Considering tech they developed they could literally make quickly 100s of systems if not 1000s and quickly get that stretch goal.
They could make 100s templates for stations and populate those systems with those stations, use that arc corp city plan and copy paste it everywhere with slight changes on 100s of planets etc.

But that would require to change that "like hand made" mantra they are following.

Okay you were doing some good 10/10 bait but this one gave you away, troll.

Still, good game

 

[Perkel]

get those 100s of systems in this lifetime

The funny thing is, even this time estimate is highly optimistic.

"Star Citizen for our time!"

Considering tech they developed they could literally make quickly 100s of systems if not 1000s and quickly get that stretch goal.
They could make 100s templates for stations and populate those systems with those stations, use that arc corp city plan and copy paste it everywhere with slight changes on 100s of planets etc.

But that would require to change that "like hand made" mantra they are following.

Okay you were doing some good 10/10 bait but this one gave you away, troll.

Still, good game

Not a bait really. I mean if you want i could show you their planetary tech where they can create whole systems in seconds and perfectly manpulate planet surfaces in minutes creating better looking planets from micro to macro than any other space anything (whatever it is Elite or Space Engine). It is all in their dev videos. It is all based on random generation with tuned methods to get really good looking planets.

It takes for them a lot of time to get new planets because they hand tune everything after planets are generated so you won't end up with Elite/Space Engine like planets which all look the same once you have seen few

Though i wouldn't expect "good" game. I am in only for Single Player because at least it will provide some good looking space romp whatever they can produce good gameplay or not. But outside of that i wouldn't expect for MMO to be anything amazing just like Elite because multiplayer limits what player can do ultimately and for space game that limit makes space mmo pointless.

edit:

Speaking of which Space Engine will be releasing soon on Steam with huge update to graphics:

 

[Angthoron]

Not a bait really. I mean if you want i could show you their planetary tech where they can create whole systems in seconds and perfectly manpulate planet surfaces in minutes creating better looking planets from micro to macro than any other space anything (whatever it is Elite or Space Engine). It is all in their dev videos. It is all based on random generation with tuned methods to get really good looking planets.

Wow, this sounds great. So why isn't it in the actual, you know, pre-alpha for people to test? I know they've showed off god knows what in those dev diaries now, that's cool, but why is it not out for testing? Why not dump a build with a bunch of planets? Or planets existing currently but with re-generated surfaces? Sure would shut up the sceptics. They had dev videos of female chars moving around and doing shit. Where are they though? It's not a question to you, it's a question to the devs, really. Where? Is? All? The? Hyped? Shit? At? Like where's the missile AI at bruhs or idk whatevs. I mean, That Which Sleeps also had cool vids and welp where's that now.

Though i wouldn't expect "good" game. I am in only for Single Player because at least it will provide some good looking space romp whatever they can produce good gameplay or not. But outside of that i wouldn't expect for MMO to be anything amazing just like Elite because multiplayer limits what player can do ultimately and for space game that limit makes space mmo pointless.

Well, I am curious to see what SQ42 will be like in the end. Or whether it will be. Now that their primary focus is back to that, we might even see a demo this year.

 

[AN4RCHID]

Wow, this sounds great. So why isn't it in the actual, you know, pre-alpha for people to test?

Cause it doesn't sound great, it sounds like NMS syndrome to populate the game with 1000 randomly generated planets and generic space stations. There has to be a balance between crafted content and procgen stuff.

 

[thesheeep]

Wow, this sounds great. So why isn't it in the actual, you know, pre-alpha for people to test?

Cause it doesn't sound great, it sounds like NMS syndrome to populate the game with 1000 randomly generated planets and generic space stations. There has to be a balance between crafted content and procgen stuff.

Why?
This isn't some story driven single player adventure.
Procedural content (or at least initially created in a procedural way) would fit this game just fine.

That is, assuming that the procedural generation doesn't suck.
So you are probably right anyway

 

[Angthoron]

Wow, this sounds great. So why isn't it in the actual, you know, pre-alpha for people to test?

Cause it doesn't sound great, it sounds like NMS syndrome to populate the game with 1000 randomly generated planets and generic space stations. There has to be a balance between crafted content and procgen stuff.

Why?
This isn't some story driven single player adventure.
Procedural content (or at least initially created in a procedural way) would fit this game just fine.

That is, assuming that the procedural generation doesn't suck.
So you are probably right anyway

It's a public alpha. I wanna see this stuff. Why is it good enough to show in a dev diary but not on action?

 

[AN4RCHID]

You can see it in game now on the 8 moons and Hurston. They didn't have a modeller painstakingly mapping each hill and valley, they're obviously built using procedural generation. They could swap some color palletes and mix and match assets to generate infinite planets like E:D, but without any unique assets or visual style they would look samey and get boring quickly, like E:D.

 

[thesheeep]

You can see it in game now on the 8 moons and Hurston. They didn't have a modeller painstakingly mapping each hill and valley, they're obviously built using procedural generation. They could swap some color palletes and mix and match assets to generate infinite planets like E:D, but without any unique assets or visual style they would look samey and get boring quickly, like E:D.

Planets in space looking boring? No shit...
I'm honestly not sure what you are expecting. That someone would go ahead and manually model planets? That's absurd.
They might eventually go ahead and add unique landmarks to each, but even that would require quite the extreme amount of work for not too much purpose. Afaik, SC is not meant to be a game about exploring every single planet. It is not something like Empyrion (which features quite a few unique locations on each planet while being procedurally generated).
Planets serve more as different backdrops for missions in SC, don't they?

The only thing really requiring more manual effort put into them are hubs.

Then again, with their delusions of grandeur, who knows what the real goal is...

 

[Perkel]

Planets in space looking boring? No shit...
I'm honestly not sure what you are expecting. That someone would go ahead and manually model planets? That's absurd.
They might eventually go ahead and add unique landmarks to each, but even that would require quite the extreme amount of work for not too much purpose.

This is what actually SC folks are doing and why it takes so much time to do it.

They first generate planet via procedural generation.
That procedural generation not only is heightmap but also objects displacements like rocks, vegetation, biomes etc.
Artists first generate as much as they want to get planet they like.
Then generated planet gets to artist which then do what you say, change biomes, add landmarks, megastructures etc.

 

[RRRrrr]

It’s a group of several hundred(?) hardcore cultists who are keeping this project afloat by constantly sinking more money into this. Sure they also get some new backers here and there, but the whales is where the money‘s at.

It makes you think, though. The whales are a market segment with endless potential that has hardly been tapped. Even for a 60$ game, a single whale buying a 30,000$ ship bundle is worth 500 ordinary buyers. This roughly means that milking 10,000 whales is more profitable than having 5 million players ordinary players buy your game. Pleasing 1000 whales is more important than pleasing half a million players. Mind blowing, really.

Star Citizen might be onto something here. I see why they have zero interest in developing SQ42, which has no whale potential/allure.


Star Citizen could have had the political intrigue of Eve, massive cities build by player guilds, epic space and land battles to capture these guild cities (with vechiles, air support and defensive structures) and complex economy revolving around player mining/crafting. Imagine Eve's system for capturing (fortifying) systems, but instead you fight over an entire planet. Instead, it has nothing. Those hundreds of millions should have been used for optimization in order to support large battles. Instead, they poured them in fancy graphics that can hardly support yourself on the screen and battles of 50 players are considered big.

But you get to LARP around the ship you paid 30,000$ for and enjoy the flushing physics in your personal toilet, yay! Completely simulated water, too! And the wrinkles on your sheets change dynamically depending on how long you slept!

Even EVE Online cannot support large scale battles properly, and Star Citizen is a joke in comparison.

 

[Dexter]

Believing that it is going to fail is one thing. Knowing that failed, and knowing that everyone else knows that it failed, is another. Imagine the amount of backlash from the whales once they realise they have been duped. That the base game is just a tech demo with awful frame rates. You can expect law suits left and right.

Honestly, if mass lawsuits were going to happen we would have likely seen them by now. As it stands it seems as likely as Scientologists suing Scientology for stealing money from them. I think at the point some of the True Believers™ actually open their eyes there will probably be nothing left to get back anyway.

I'm not sure what all of this has to do with Crowdfunding though. Most Crowdfunded projects by credible people are out and released by now, even if some of them underdelivered. Not sure how "Star Citizen" would have some huge influence on any massive amount of other projects. Also not sure why you would want Crowdfunding to "die" in the first place, seeing as it's useful if you don't fall for people selling you a Ponzi Scheme.

I disagree with the comparison with GTA, 200 million dollars was more than enough to make a decent game, not this game as it is but a more than decent game, the problem was Chris Robert's insane mismanagement, he should have focused on one feature at time. Fucking release Star Citizen without planetary landings and out of the ship exploration, just do an Elite Dangerous type of game with more content and once he has a stable money making machine, he would add the rest of the systems through the years as free DLC for backers. Making a content rich Elite Dangerous on 3 years with the budget of 200 million dollars was more than enough to get things going.

GTA V cost a total of ~$265 million to develop and market and it's an actually finished, released game: https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/...ease-tipped-to-rake-in-1bn-in-sales-1-3081943

According to The Scotsman, the upcoming video game “Grand Theft Auto 5” (“GTA 5”) is this most expensive video game ever produced, sitting at a development and marketing budget of £170 million, or $265 million.

Its development cost is estimated to be somewhere around $140 million: http://archive.is/PdhCi while GTA IV apparently cost somewhere around $100 million to develop: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/09/28/gta-5-sales-hit-1-billion.aspx

Graphics got better, maps got bigger, the already expansive "open world" premise behind Grand Theft Auto was taken to new extremes in the development of Grand Theft Auto IV. As a result, the game also took longer to create; missing its initial launch date of October 2007. It also cost more, with a reported development budget of $100 million. At the time, that was among the highest ever development costs for a video game.

As people have pointed out, Star Citizen (with the new investment) is about to overtake GTAV as the most expensive game in the history of the gaming industry, with its alleged $217 million pledged: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals and the added Billionaire investment of $46 million: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattpe...-studio-behind-crowdfunded-game-star-citizen/ I'm not sure if they added the $2.1 million they got on Kickstarter to their counter, but that would put them above the entire development and marketing budget of GTA 5.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_games_to_develop

Does anyone that plays their latest Super Triple Pre-Pre Alpha 6.7 or whatever strike that all of this money actually went into developing anything tangible? Does "Star Citizen" strike you to have about the same production values as Grand Theft Fucking Auto V? Does anything they've shown or even "promised" even come close?

I follow game technology for over 20+ years. I can see what is feasible or not.
Saying that it is impossible for them to make even game of size of GTA5 is simply false statement in almost every measure there is.

Depending on your definition of content i think it is reasonable to assume that they already went beyond GTA5 effort just in raw numbers and aside from few definitions almost all rest is waaaay beyond gta5 already.
And that is just taking into account SC multiplayer part alone with whatever content we saw already not including single player campaign which is their primary focus from start and content it has we didn't see.

Well, that's certainly a prime example of what you have to deal with with Star Citizen Cultists. This certainly adds weight to my theory that Perkel is potentially legitimately mentally retarded.

 

[Perkel]

Well, that's certainly a prime example of what you have to deal with with Star Citizen Cultists. This certainly adds weight to my theory that Perkel is potentially legitimately mentally retarded.

Talk about being butt-hurt.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It makes you think, though. The whales are a market segment with endless potential that has hardly been tapped. Even for a 60$ game, a single whale buying a 30,000$ ship bundle is worth 500 ordinary buyers. This roughly means that milking 10,000 whales is more profitable than having 5 million players ordinary players buy your game. Pleasing 1000 whales is more important than pleasing half a million players. Mind blowing, really.

Star Citizen might be onto something here. I see why they have zero interest in developing SQ42, which has no whale potential/allure.

It's hardly inventor of the model, just the most prepostrous example of it so far. The whole AAA publisher craze with lootboxes was because mobile and MMO markets had shown that adapting psychological targeting to whales from gambling industry was extremely lucrative, especially because video games aren't subject to any gambling regulations. Heck, the term 'whale' is directly taken from casino lingo! The same fundamental predatory tricks are at work with SC as well, and the market segment (people with money and a psychology vulnerable to the tactics) is the same.

 

[Perkel]

It makes you think, though. The whales are a market segment with endless potential that has hardly been tapped. Even for a 60$ game, a single whale buying a 30,000$ ship bundle is worth 500 ordinary buyers. This roughly means that milking 10,000 whales is more profitable than having 5 million players ordinary players buy your game. Pleasing 1000 whales is more important than pleasing half a million players. Mind blowing, really.

Reminds me when one of Liverpool players spend like 40 000 € on fifa online ultimate team
Some people just have so much money that they don't really care.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

It makes you think, though. The whales are a market segment with endless potential that has hardly been tapped. Even for a 60$ game, a single whale buying a 30,000$ ship bundle is worth 500 ordinary buyers. This roughly means that milking 10,000 whales is more profitable than having 5 million players ordinary players buy your game. Pleasing 1000 whales is more important than pleasing half a million players. Mind blowing, really.

Star Citizen might be onto something here. I see why they have zero interest in developing SQ42, which has no whale potential/allure.

It's hardly inventor of the model, just the most prepostrous example of it so far. The whole AAA publisher craze with lootboxes was because mobile and MMO markets had shown that adapting psychological targeting to whales from gambling industry was extremely lucrative, especially because video games aren't subject to any gambling regulations. Heck, the term 'whale' is directly taken from casino lingo! The same fundamental predatory tricks are at work with SC as well, and the market segment (people with money and a psychology vulnerable to the tactics) is the same.

What makes Star Citizen amazing tho is the fact they manage to refine the model even more. It is a whale model for things that have yet to exist

 

[Dexter]

It makes you think, though. The whales are a market segment with endless potential that has hardly been tapped. Even for a 60$ game, a single whale buying a 30,000$ ship bundle is worth 500 ordinary buyers. This roughly means that milking 10,000 whales is more profitable than having 5 million players ordinary players buy your game. Pleasing 1000 whales is more important than pleasing half a million players. Mind blowing, really.

Which is why, aside from this being a scam at this point, it would be better for everyone if no actual release version of this ever sees the light of day and they go bankrupt or get tangled up in legal issues. At least somebody would have learned a lesson.

Their planned "business model" is essentially this applied to Mainstream Western gaming: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016417/-100-000-Whales-An

 

[Angthoron]

It makes you think, though. The whales are a market segment with endless potential that has hardly been tapped. Even for a 60$ game, a single whale buying a 30,000$ ship bundle is worth 500 ordinary buyers. This roughly means that milking 10,000 whales is more profitable than having 5 million players ordinary players buy your game. Pleasing 1000 whales is more important than pleasing half a million players. Mind blowing, really.

Reminds me when one of Liverpool players spend like 40 000 € on fifa online ultimate team
Some people just have so much money that they don't really care.

The guy that took a bunch of money out of his son's college fund certainly didn't care.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

It makes you think, though. The whales are a market segment with endless potential that has hardly been tapped. Even for a 60$ game, a single whale buying a 30,000$ ship bundle is worth 500 ordinary buyers. This roughly means that milking 10,000 whales is more profitable than having 5 million players ordinary players buy your game. Pleasing 1000 whales is more important than pleasing half a million players. Mind blowing, really.

Reminds me when one of Liverpool players spend like 40 000 € on fifa online ultimate team
Some people just have so much money that they don't really care.

The guy that took a bunch of money out of his son's college fund certainly didn't care.

That's really the sticking point: Gambling addiction is a real thing. Which basically means that this sort of behaviour on part of game developers and publishers is unethical in the extreme, because it's deliberate predation and exploitation of a specific sort of problem some people have.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

That's really the sticking point: Gambling addiction is a real thing. Which basically means that this sort of behaviour on part of game developers and publishers is unethical in the extreme, because it's deliberate predation and exploitation of a specific sort of problem some people have.

Gambling addiction is a mischaracterisation because it implies the existence of a complete game. There is no such thing in here. This is a money fracking model based on a gaming cult. It will exist as long there are nonsensical people out there keeping “the dream” alive. Eventually they will get tired of the same old excuses and delays, until they stop buying new stuff that doesn’t exist.

Which basically means that this sort of behaviour on part of game developers and publishers is unethical in the extreme, because it's deliberate predation and exploitation of a specific sort of problem some people have.

What is unethical is being credulous and easily impressed. They deserve being take advantage of.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

It makes you think, though. The whales are a market segment with endless potential that has hardly been tapped. Even for a 60$ game, a single whale buying a 30,000$ ship bundle is worth 500 ordinary buyers. This roughly means that milking 10,000 whales is more profitable than having 5 million players ordinary players buy your game. Pleasing 1000 whales is more important than pleasing half a million players. Mind blowing, really.

Reminds me when one of Liverpool players spend like 40 000 € on fifa online ultimate team
Some people just have so much money that they don't really care.

The guy that took a bunch of money out of his son's college fund certainly didn't care.

That's really the sticking point: Gambling addiction is a real thing. Which basically means that this sort of behaviour on part of game developers and publishers is unethical in the extreme, because it's deliberate predation and exploitation of a specific sort of problem some people have.

I mean could Star Citizen even categorized as "gambling"? These stupid people literally buy JPEG or GIF and don't even get the file. They are buying promises that they will be given those 3D model in game when the game is ready.

Star Citizen is on snake oil salesman category.