Star Citizen Hits $900 Million in Crowdfunding After a Record-Breaking Year: Why Backers Continue to Support It 13 Years Into its Development - Entertainment Niche
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Star Citizen, the controversial yet massively ambitious space simulation from Cloud Imperium Games, continues to defy expectations, shattering its all-time
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226m

Tried a free weekend of Star Citizen a year ago.

It was awful.

Everything, and I mean everything, was insanely tedious. The UI/inventory was god awful. The movement felt clunky. There were bugs galore. The learning curve was extreme.

Initially the scale and visuals drew me in, but then I started experiencing all the awful and couldn’t believe I was playing something with over a decade of development.

Major pass on this one.

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12h

I’m totally unrelated news Everspace 2 and Rebel Galaxy have been great additions to my Steam Library.

Picked up the latter for like 3 dollars on the latest Steam sale.

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141d

I keep watching YouTube content about the game every few years, just to keep up with what’s going on. Once the game hits 1.0, has all the rave reviews, and changes gaming forever, I’ll put in money.

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151d

If you think about it, SC did change gaming forever. Now everyone release unfinished games and calls them “alpha” while they use the money from sales to finance development. Many games are perpetually unreleased now. Their model has spread like cancer and made gaming worse for everyone. Meanwhile their stinking pile of garbage still has you falling out of elevators 13 years into development.

Star Citizen didn’t start that trend. Star Citizen was one of the “me too” games that jumped into crowdfunding after Mount & Blade saw success with the model. The only way SC has changed gaming is by being a joke the way Duke Nukem Forever was.

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51d

They were among the first and popularized it. Their success with it fueled what we see today. They may not have been be first but they were clearly the most popular example (and continue to be)

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581d

I really want to play star citizen, it sounds cool, but I don’t want to play it until it’s done.

I know I will never play star citizen.

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12h

I remember a couple years ago where they did a release weekend and I was super excited to actually give it a try and all you’re basically had the capability to do is walk around his spaceport it was incredibly boring and incredibly disingenuous to call it a game.

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141d

some other company will make and release a better game

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13h

Exactly, there’s already much better game and the list will only get long

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201d

Everyone here should go to YouTube and watch the investigative journalism docu “Sunk Cost Galaxy”. It’s EXCELLENT. I think the dude making it had to stop because of legal threats, but the parts that are out are VERY enlightening.

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501d

The broader gaming community often perceives it as a scam, criticizing it for its long development timeline, delays, monetization model, and ongoing technical issues.

That’s because it is a scam, full stop. The game will never leave alpha. It’s been 13 years, what you see is all you’re gonna get. They’ll keep releasing several hundred dollar ship “DLC”s every year or so just to keep the money flowing, but they’ll never deliver a finished product. Damn shame too.

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331d

If you look into Chris Robert’s history you’ll know it’s not a scam. You’ll also know he should never be given full control of any project or it will turn into exactly this; something that never finishes.

TRBoom
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291d

Yeah this’ll probably end like the last game he made.

The money will dry up, a big company will buy him out, they’ll kick him to the curb if the buyout didn’t actually include that as part of the deal, and then they’ll give the devs like 6 months to wrap it up.

Freelancer was a freaking awesome game though.

alaphic
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61d

When you’ve still in alpha 2(ish) decades and a cool BILLION dollars later, I feel like even Kojima is looking at you like ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

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31d

idk some of the ships are literally just single concept art images and have been for years, kinda hard to imagine that can possibly be in good faith.

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1d

Good faith, no. There’s about as much good faith as a silicon valley tech bro looking for venture capitalists.

I don’t think Chris Roberts doesn’t believe in what he’s doing. I genuinely think he wants to make what he’s promising because he’s been trying to do that since the 90s. But he’s also milking the development time/funds as hard as he can.

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31d

He’s also using the funds to live out his dream of being a movie producer, something he desires as much (if not more than) being a game developer, with the Squadron spinoff mainly being an excuse to hire big-name actors he likes to deliver his script.

Not that that’s a bad thing, but he hasn’t really changed much over his decades-long career, flaws included.

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520h

He filmed those scenes 10 years ago now.

Some of the actors are going to be dead before it releases

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21h

Lies! They will live forever! In Star Citizen!

Ok, maybe just in the alpha.

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31d

Well, some of those actors know him. Mark Hammel has worked with him before in Wing Commander.

But yeah, you’re right; same old Roberts.

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creator
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1d

I installed it because of the free flight that ends tomorrow and it ran horrible on my nvme ssd, I’m talking about freezes when traveling 5-10 fps in space, 30-40 while in the hub, funny thing is that I think it ran better years ago when I was again testing it for a free flight with my Nvidia GPU

So two reasons either it’s a me issue because I have an AMD GPU though yet again, I don’t think so.

Or it’s still really unoptimized, which is a shame because I really like the premise of the game, I like the scale of it and it did things better than Starfield.

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141d

It’s really unoptimised. From what I could gather, it’s CPU bottlenecking massively.

Harvey656
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41d

As a long time player, its probably settings. Which isn’t your fault.

This shit is optimized like a snail in an f1 race, it just doesn’t work. Turning clouds up is actually a viable way to get the game to run well, its super cpu bound, so if you turn up some settings it offloads some of that work to the gpu, freeing up some fps.

In my experience it plays way better now, but SC is a cranky bitch and its a free flight, never played a free flight that plays well, usually because players who don’t know what they are doing clutter environments with busted ships, trash and more.

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31d

I don’t know if this is still a thing, but a while back it was actually better to run the game on high settings even if your PC normally doesn’t handle high settings well. I don’t remember exactly why that was the case, but it worked.

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41d

Saw an argument somewhere that its not an alpha anymore. Alphas you can still change fundamental things, that its okay to break things at this stage still. Star Citizen cannot, without messing up its established economy and game systems now, its selling what is the game at this point. And only receiving updates.

JohnnyFlapHoleSeed
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101d

Yeah, the ‘shit or get off the pot’ phase ended a decade ago, and it’s still in alpha. It’s a goddamn scam

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291d

900 million USD and 13 years of development and they still don’t have the single player linear story game Squadron 42 released.

The visuals were absolutely crazy 10 years ago and are starting to look dated today. They’ve gone over and reinvented the wheel several times, including using a game engine that was never meant for online play.

The only thing that is keeping this level of incompetence afloat is the shit ton of money that people keep pouring into this. Previously Roberts had some executive that would kick him off a project if he got too… ambitious. But now he’s in full control of his project and… Well… For the first, and ONLY, time ever I take the side of the executives.

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creator
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101d

I always believed that they didn’t expect the game would go that big and now they don’t know what to do to cover their own asses.

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1d

I wonder if it’d be out by now if they had picked a different engine. It can’t be easy finding devs experienced in fucking CryEngine, especially when you’re using a heavily-customized fork of an ancient version of that engine.

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320h

They hired about 1/3 of the cryengine staff.

Not many of those are left.

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41d

The choice of CryEngine was because of Crysis, a game that was infamous for PC killing visuals. Roberts doesn’t just want a gran open universe, but also something that looks like real life.

Which is why on two occasions new ships were put off from development in order to competent overhaul existing ships to look better, as better graphics became the norm.

I’m surprised development hasn’t completely paused once again to overhaul everything for raytracing.

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211d

I generally wonder, how the hell can you get almost a billion dollars and still not have a functioning product after 13 years?

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There is a functional product. I played it years ago.

But it ain’t finished yet, which is the insane bit given the breadth of funds and length of time.

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41d

Well, if they release it they’ll stop getting money shortly after, so why would they?

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81d

I backed the Kickstarter back in 2012 or so. Maybe I’ll be able to play it when I retire :D

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41d

Thats me, backed it when it came out, play it a bit every couple years.

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Yup I got suckered in 2016… You know the year Roberts said everything was going to be released… If by sone odd chance i ever come across Mr. Roberts he and I are going to have an adult conversation about how much I like being lied to to get my money…

Agent Karyo
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161d

The funniest thing is that 13 years and $900 M later, they still don’t have a working economy or even a basic balance concept. They have 200+ ships (many in JPEG form for over a decade) in their cash shop they’ve thought about beyond flashes sales videos and 3D assets.

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71d

The grift is the buisness now

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101d

Damn, a lot of hate for a game no one apparently plays

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31d

I never spent any money but I remember being pretty excited back in 2013 or so. Luckily I’m not a huge idiot in this respect and decided to wait until it was at least mostly done before I got it. There’s a few things that have come out of the crowd funded R&D program that this turned out to be, like trim sheets and such that are kinda neat though.

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It’s reasonable to be outraged over a scam, or a ‘scam adjacent’ project. They’re everywhere, and literally screwing up the world.

That being said, I wouldn’t want to criticize the gameplay, either. If it’s fun, it’s fun; that’s very personal. But the predatory FOMO aspect is completely fair game.

Destide
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21d

I put in £30 early on almost a pound per year at this point

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21d

How have I never even heard about this game?

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11h

That is genuinely surprising, but I’m terminally online so maybe it shouldn’t be. These articles get trotted out every 6 months or so when Star Citizen passes whatever milestone. Lots of people enjoy it, some people complain about it, but it’s certainly an anomaly in the gaming space.

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