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They aren’t half as shady as every other AAA gaming company. These things are blown way out proportion and CIG is held to double standards. They have crunch time and NDAs for disgruntled assholes? Oh no, the world is over, this company is pure evil like none other! It’s really not a big deal that this one refund has an NDA. Their others don’t, so it’s a weird thing, but to say this is proof of wrongdoing is fallacious grasping. To believe what Massively has to say about Star Citizen is like listening to what fox News has to say about Climate Change. Every little thing they can spin into making cig look bad they take, even things every other company does without issue. Hating SC gets way more engagement and ad revenue then almost any other kind of critical article in gaming. Just look at any post about SC on this community compared to others. It’s insane. And I don’t use that term lightly.
Ten years on and you think their growing players count and revenue is still just hype? No. The people who try the game are sticking around. If it was just hype it would have died years ago. It is genuinely fun to play right now. I can tell you this because I’m having lots of fun in it right now. When is the last time you played it?
Where does any game spend it’s money? That’s not ever public info. The fact that SC is publicly posting its revenue is opening them up to this double standard they are better than other companies with. We know they just bought a massive new building to hire more devs, so the evidence suggests they spend their money on development. They don’t spend any of it on dividends for any already rich ultracalitalist investors because they don’t have any, so they already have every other AAA company beat. (Those investors also invest in gaming journalism).
Pitchforks and rabble rousing is fun, but I actually play the game. It is a fun time, worthy of hundreds of hours as it is right now. Many people have thousands of hours. The growing number of players and growing revenue tell a different story than your ill informed guesses and chipped shoulder. This is as much a tech demo as any other early access game. I know this because I actually play it regularly. The lived experiences of the vast majority of players outweighs the angry whinging of people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
Who cares if it never finishes? It’s fun now. I have had much more than my money’s worth of fun. $50 ten years ago is still paying off in enjoyment now and it’s getting better with every update. This is what the overwhelming majority of the growing number of thousands and thousands of regular players all say. Crying about it doesn’t change facts.
Always remember “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
There’s a lot of bullshit in the Star Citizen controversy. Hating it generates a lot of revenue for Massively and The Escapist (two of the worst tabloids in the industry). Just play it once during a free fly before you judge. If everyone did that, these articles wouldn’t exist.
Racing in VR is such a great experience, I’d love to see more of it. Simulation and arcade style. But you’re right, we need one with a robust, slow paced progression system. I remember really enjoying unlocking everything in NFS Porsche Unleashed, going through the eras, starting slow but getting slowly faster. Then NFS Underground 2 came out and still stands alone as the best example of racing progression by a large margin. Then it’s like the gameplay design has been going further back in time since then. I am using the same simple progression mechanics in new racers that I used in Sega GT 2002, and they were old then.
As to why, it feels like they don’t have AAA budgets anymore. The high quality simulator games like the Dirt series have to spend their whole wad getting the physics and performance right, there’s not much left for anything else, so it’s just menus and a simple money system. That’s just my guess, it could just be they need to hire a couple RPG designers among the gear head ones.
My personal loop these days is singing along to my show-tunes paylist while delivering space cargo, which is (usually) super chill. But I’m excited about expansions to multicrew stuff. I’m a fly boy, a big aviation nerd irl. I want to fly, and I want a Chewbacca to help with the other stuff. It’s just a matter of tricking a player into swearing a life debt…
I really enjoy Star Citizen as it is right now. They push out huge updates every quarter so it’s getting better and better. I paid $45 and have hundreds of hours of fun. The energy people spend hating this game, inventing conpiracies, and circle jerking misinformation is super irritating. The hive mind’s assumptions are wrong, the lived experiences of a growing number of players is fact. This game would have gone bust long ago if it wasn’t fun, a scam, or not making steady progress. Instead it’s revenue and player counts go up every year. The people who try it stick around more often than not.
I actually do appreciate the clarification then, thank you. But I’ll still suggest to the readers of this convo, articles like these aren’t written for the edification of its readers, it’s written to bait engagement. The speculations of gaming journalists on Star Citizen is as reliable as Fox News’ speculation on the Mexico/USA border.
And as someonewho has been following following the numbers, it’s growing in revenue and daily active players every year. They just opened a massive new office in Manchester so they can hire more people. The people they do hire get paid well and stick around for years. If they were worried about cash flow, they have a lot of fat they would be trimming right now, but their expenses and revenue keep growing in step with eachother. They have no investors to pay, no vaults to fill. They make money and spend it growing the business. Those expenses represent 12 years of good wages and benefits for workers.
Star citizens success is a threat to capitalist, investor focused gaming. Gaming news is run by game industry capitalists and has zero oversight or accountability for bring truthful.
So they made over 150 million in profit so far, make more and more money with more and more players every year and that’s a sign they are failing? “STEADILY GROWING PROFITABLE BUSINESS IS DOOMED TO FAIL!”
The speculation of gaming journalists is the worst way to get reliable and responsible gaming news.
That is $700 million is revenue for Star Citizen, not development costs. More and more players are joining by trying it and sticking around, and CIG is making more money every year because it’s genuinely a fun game now. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t have $700 million in revenue from a growing base of paying customers after ten years. But that doesn’t get clicks from ignorant salty cynics. “IT BAD SCAM” is a more profitable headline than “fun game enjoyed by many”.
When videogame “journalists” are drumming up controversy, you always have to take it with a grain of salt. Lord knows we have enough of it.
I spent a grand total of $45 dollars on this game and I have had hundreds of hours of fun. Imagine buying a game for less than the cost of a new AAA game, playing it, enjoying it for dozens of hours or more for ten years, then someone who has never played it starts telling you how you have to spend thousands of dollars and actually didn’t have fun and it’s not a game, it’s a scam because you heard this one guy spent his life savings on imaginary space ships and regretted it. That’s how Star Citizen players feel; it’s very confusing.
But it can be that detailed for nothing, so why not? They own Bing Maps. They already have optional extra high detail for certain areas you can keep on your hard drive, just as you suggest. That’s why some people have a TB of game content. That’s what the new game wants to fix. The Bing stuff fills in the bits that aren’t bespoke. In the new one it streams it all, and most people who actually plays the genre are very pleased about it.
It’s just using Bing Maps data, which is smart. Not everyone flies at 35,000 feet, low altitude flights look spectacular and are accurate in a way no stored world map could. The terrain is automatically generated from Bing data, not hand modeled. Every building is in the right spot, is the right height, and the exact right shape, and it costs me no storage. It’s an obvious evolution of the genre with all kinds of benefits. Like all airports on earth, even grass landing strips, that are visible in Bing Maps, exist in the game without having to be hand modeled or stored locally. It detects them automatically then plops down an in game runway, tarmac, and taxiways on top of the satellite imagery in the exact shape and size as the real thing. It’s really cool!
Because it is accessing petabytes of world data. In the old days, you’d store the world on your PC and they had relatively insane storage requirement. Now it’s just too much. The current MSFS has 300GB of content, but you can download areas of world data on your hard drive to cut down on streaming data in areas you go to often. So a lot people have a 500GB+ drive just for MSFS. This new one is supposed to require much less space.
I thought of a third gripe! I would have preferred to play this game in Japanese, but only the main story lines are translated. Being loving to your horse or overhearing villagers talking about your deeds is totally lost in playing with just subtitles. You really need the dialogue to be in your native tongue to get the full story and atmosphere. Every spoken word should have been subtitled and translated. This is an accessibility issue, too. Deaf people just don’t get to experience that part of the game.
That’s fair, I loved that side of things, too. I’m more talking about the conspicuous and samey cliffs that look and feel a little too contrived, strictly made for gameplay purposes like creating paths, blocking off areas, providing platforming challenges and assassination opportunities. They were overused and unnatural looking sometimes.
Larger than life beauty for beauty’s sake is done so well, in that game, it’s an amazing experience, the overuse of little cliffs everywhere is really my only gripe. I spend more time walking on my horse along paths than I do galloping straight to my destination. I like just soaking it all in. I’m playing it right now for the first time; I did the first act and the DLC, I’m about a quarter of the way tbrough the second act now. Loving it.
Edit: Oh I do have a second gripe, but with the DLC, and it’s the same gripe I have with all DLC. It was obviously written by the B team, the writing is less subtle and everything is a bit more extreme. Still a good time, but just a wee notch lower in writing quality than the main story.
Relative to its time, yes, but Sims 3 is peak Sims. It improved on 2 in every way, but the thing they did the best and left out of 4 was the create a style tool, which allows you to make any surface any texture and colour you like. You could have a wooden sweater and metal carpet. No limits. You could make uncanny replicas of most homes, furnishings and all.
I haven’t played the second one, but in the first you were never not aware you are in a videogame. It was a nonsensical labyrinth of gimmicks. It is a 3D metroidvania, almost. It really sucked the life out of the story so I’m in no rush to play the sequel. I’ll be bored and it’ll be on sale one day and I’ll try it.
Well that’s just not true. You don’t just rename it to .exe and it will work on PC. The already made multiplayer will look for non-existent hardware, using obsolete and insecure methods to secure to a service that no longer exists on a completely different operating system. They would not only need to completely rewrite the client side net code from scratch, they’d have to write their server side code from scratch too, on top of paying a massive monthly fee to AWS or whatever to host it. Adding multiplayer won’t convince enough additional people to buy it to offset these costs; almost everyone is buying this game for the single player. Adding multiplayer means less profit and more delays.
So if you miss a payment your mouse shuts off?
How is your standing policed, with an always online requirement? So if I move and need to wait to get my internet up, I can’t use my mouse?
Are they legally liable for lifetime support or are you signing away that right in the EULA and they can end support for your “lifetime” mouse on a whim?
I’d rather rent my furniture than subscribe to a mouse, but both practices are exploiting this world’s rampant financial illiteracy.
Pixel Dungeon: Roguelike, infinitely replayable. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.watabou.pixeldungeon
Auralux: A simple real time strategy game. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wardrumstudios.auralux
2048: Simple to learn, difficult to master puzzle. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.androbros.puzzle2048eng
Their justification is that they need the PSN to moderate the community; right now they can’t ban anyone, and only didn’t launch with this requirement because it wasn’t ready. But now the temporary grace period is ending. You need to agree to terms and services by signing up for PSN, including PSN codes of conduct they enforce in every game. Without that, they can’t ban you for conduct you didn’t agree to.
The counter argument is that they didn’t make it clear enough that this was an eventuality, and that they could and should find alternate means to moderate their PC community that doesn’t exclude so many players.
I suspect this is more about policing third party monetization than community moderation.
But games journalists are the most ethical and truthful of all journalists and definitely haven’t been misrepresenting this project to drum up drama and clicks for years. It’s just a coincidence that Star Citizen drama makes their shareholders richer.
No need for an informed opinion here, I will keep the opinion The Escapist and the Reddit Hive Mind told me to have, they’re never wrong. Derek Smart? More like Derek Genius.
Passionately enjoying something is far less cringey than passionately hating a videogame this much.