Star Citizen

[Don]

So I've heard of this game and saw some threads on it, and it seems like although nobody has a playable version of this game you not only can pay for kickstarter on something that doesn't exist but now they're selling DLCs on a game that does not yet exist for large amount of money. I mean, it's one thing DLCs are screwy and whatnot, but usually when you buy them it's understood that it's something in a game that exists that you can play no matter how little sense the said content might be. I'm not sure about buying additional P2W stuff on a game that can't even be played right now. In the other thread about the decline of consoles we had some discussion about how AAA games are kind of dying. Well, I'd say part of it is because if you can sell stuff that doesn't even exist for money there isn't much motivation to make a good game. Curt Schilling's company was able to get some money support from the state of Rhode Island on a game that was never finished and yes people involved said they lost a lot of money but when a company loses money that includes salary and stuff. That is, for a quite a while the net profit of all airlines that ever existed was less than $0, as in they lost more money than they ever made since airlines begin as a concept, but that doesn't mean certain guys like pilots and the usual higher ups or even the average employee didn't get paid well while the company's losing money. If you paid yourself a million dollars and your *company* lost 2 million due to your utter negligance, you still come out pretty ahead.

On an unrelated note, I notice that Final Fantasy 14 continues to defy everything I know about the MMORPG genre by continue to exist. I mean, it's not a horrible game, but it seems to defy everything that'd go into making a MMORPG successful but they released a new expansion recently so I guess it must not be doing too horribly. I did notice that FF14 seems to be very persistent and just keeps on pump out content no matter how bad it is, and I do respect them for that compared to the usual 'please send money while we're doing absolutely nothing'. Sure a lot of the new content would be stuff that makes you why you're still playing this game, but if you'd quit over stuff like that, you certainly wouldn't continue to pay for nothing new anyway. There's even a chance some of this stuff might turn out to accidentally not suck. For example there was a Lightning Returns event that runs on the FF14's FATE system, which totally sucks and Lightning totally sucks too, but you know what, it doesn't suck any more than the usual FATEs you have to do while leveling so either you should've already quit the game from how dumb it is, or that the stupid Lightning FATEs are likely slightly less dumb than what you had to do otherwise (you get some weapons and stuff that actually looks kind of cool).

[Replay]

I have to wish Star Citizen the best. It's the largest Kickstarter in history - the greatest crowdfunded experiment of all time - and no one disputes that Chris Roberts has the bonafides. I still consider Wing Commander: Privateer one of the finest games I ever played.

[Don]

I barely played Wing Commander series, probably because I played TIE Fighter first. It sounds like it's one of those games that claims to deliver things that have never been done and it's either not going to be done or there would have to be significant reduction in scope. It seems to me at this rate they will definitely run out of money first.

[Shrinweck]

I bought the.. I think $45 pack for Star Citizen a little after the Kickstarter ended so I got grandfathered into a lot of the stuff for 'free', but I find the practice of them selling ships for thousands of dollars to be pretty shit. I wanted in on the crazy train but I don't even know what the fuck any more. At one point I futzed about on their website for a couple hours to look at the neat ships and found a couple ships I was interested in. I think I needed to give them $15,000 for one and $35,000 for the other. It's sick.

[Zeus]

I bought the.. I think $45 pack for Star Citizen a little after the Kickstarter ended so I got grandfathered into a lot of the stuff for 'free', but I find the practice of them selling ships for thousands of dollars to be pretty shit. I wanted in on the crazy train but I don't even know what the fuck any more. At one point I futzed about on their website for a couple hours to look at the neat ships and found a couple ships I was interested in. I think I needed to give them $15,000 for one and $35,000 for the other. It's sick.

People keep throwing money at them, can't blame them really

[Don]

But this is like stuff that you don't necessarily even know if it exists. I mean if Capcom wants you to pay $1K so that you can use Shin Akuma and totally dominate everyone else who doesn't have him, we as players generally knows what Shin Akuma is capable of so you know you'll be delivering some total beatdowns for your $1K. For a game like Star Citizen I don't think they even have a playable version for anyone not in the company, so it's just asking you to spend a lot of money for something that may or may not exist doing things you may or may not know about. That's just crazy. It seems like it's not unusual to put in $100 for the game for people who aren't even necessarily whales. $100 is almost enough for Nobunaga's Ambition 12 & 13 on Steam, and that's about as fringe as any game from Japanese get that is still a quality game. There might be a market of less than 1000 players who don't live in Asia that's interested in a period where the highlight is knowing how often people change their names, and for $100 you still can get the 2 of the game that's the best there is in this very obscure genre. The fact that this game is on Steam means your $55 obviously does matter.

I think part of the problem with the F2P is a lot of people have been brainwashed into thinking their money doesn't matter because whales exist. As pointed out in an article I've seen before, there are only so many rich guys with a ton of money to spend, and they're generally already locked into the game of their choice so it's not like you can easily convince a lot of them to join yours. Yes whales do make a huge amount of your total revenue, but it's like gamers themselves have signed away their rights because they're not a whale. No you shouldn't expect a developer to bow down to you for your $50, but that $50 isn't trivial either, especially since whatever bothers you might also likewise bother other people and it adds up to a considerable influence.

[kali o.]

Gotta admit, I have lost almost all interest in the game. The only news stories I see are those highlighting "meh" gameplay and offensive fundraising/p2p schemes...at this point, i think they are victims of their own success and its the latter (fund raising schemes) that are getting all the creativity and effort.

We will see.

[Julius Seeker]

I wonder how many people are consciously and subconsciously assuming that the 80 million dollars funded to the project means that the game is going to be the equivalent of a game developed for 80 million dollars?

In a similar way to paying 400,000 dollars to a great sculpter to produce a marble replica of La Pieta, but then increasing the budget to 15 million to improve it, but without starting an entirely new project, and assuming it will be roughly 30-35 times better; rather than just dumping piles of money on this sculptors money mountain for no significant gain.

[Replay]

Have to say I've changed my mind on this. Any game that raised 80 million for development shouldn't have to resort to pay to play.

And honestly? Speaking as a developer? Space shooters of any dimension or kind are NOT hard from a coding standpoint, not compared to just about any other genre out there. The hitboxes and collision detection are easy and free of the multitude of special cases introduced by high-speed planetary gravity...the art in space for planets, ships, and explosions also relatively simple compared to any modeling of humans or cities or naturalistic landscapes. (There's a reason Asteroids and Space Invaders were among the first games ever made.)

They're doing something wrong if this is bogging down.

[Don]

It's not even a P2W issue. I've seen plenty of P2W games and at least you can see the game is there and paying X amount of dollars lets you stomp your hapless victims. Whether that's fair or not, you know the game and the benefits are there. Even the pre order P2W stuff is stuff you have reasonable confidence. For example maybe collector's edition of some MMORPG comes with a 80 slot bag. You can be reasonably confident that having a huge bag is always useful in a MMORPG and that there are indications that this game will actually exist in a playable format (you'll usually already have access if you bought the collector's edition anyway). But here they're asking for P2W purchases even though I don't think anyone on the outside has a playable version of the game. I see Star Citizen's P2W stuff is said 'you can get them normally in the game' without any qualifier, so I assume this is like 'you can normally get those goods after a few hundred years' given they've huge P2W big ticket items in terms of cost. That'd be like me trying to sell you Don's totally awesome game for various upgrade packages that you don't know what they do or even if the game exists!

I think the problem with the industry is that a lot of people are apparently willing to sign away their money for next to nothing. It's almost like the counterpart to the piraters. You can't develop a game for someone who never pays, but on the other hand it's almost equally bad to try to develop a game for the guys who are willing to throw away money for literally nothing. It means you're likely to get ridiuclously bloated and make huge mistakes and you won't care because people are still giving you money. As a programmer I know stuff are usually harder than it appears on the outside but it's also not as impossible as we'd like you to think it is when we're missing our deadline.

[Julius Seeker]

Somehow, this game entered my mind. I hadn't thought about it in years.

Is this the second coming of Duke Nukem Forever?

[Don]

I haven't followed the game for a while now but from what I know the game actually exists now and is in a playable format. Of course it's nothing you'd expect for something that spent $300 million or whatever the game spent but if you keep sending $300 more million dollars all the stuff they say will be in the game might eventually make it there someday.

I guess a lot of people have a dream of playing some kind of awesome space game and is willing to spend a lot of money on hope. I follow a lot of fringe franchises and I kind of understand that since I support overpriced and relatively bad game if they cater to one of my interests. However generally speaking even diehard fans for exotic genres do expect some minimum semblance of a quality product for what they pay for. Apparently Star Citizen doesn't have that problem from their supporters.

[Eric]

It's pretty much the most expensive video game ever made.

The single player beta keeps getting pushed back.