I think I paid $80 in the original kickstarter. I've spent maybe a total of two hours playing the game, but the entertainment I've got out of the development has been well worth the money.
I have actually had a fair amount of fun playing Star Citizen. To my knowledge it's the only game you can actually mess about with friends on spaceships where you aren't limited to merely controlling the ship (i.e. Elite Dangerous).
That said, it's clearly well out of proportion to their funding. Some of the feature creep implies such horrible judgement by experienced game designers it would have been hard to predict.
I know it's an outside view, but at this point the Star Citizen things feels more like a cult than an actual game. Some of my friends have sunk over a hundred dollars on ships they can't fly yet seem to be so deep in their sunk-cost fallacy that they keep saying that the release is soon and sending me YouTube videos of "next-generation" gameplay to try and get me hyped up.
Yes I know about the beta, but it still seems like an extreme opposite version of the "no pre-order" movements.
edit: Well, I could have just checked the site, so I did. In case others are wondering the same thing,
While Star Citizen is currently in the Alpha stage
of development, it is playable now. New content,
features, and fixes are consistently added as
development continues, with a major patch released
each quarter.
As somebody waaaaaaay on the outside, I kind of get it. I would hope that most people buying in in the last N years fully understand that this thing is going to be in more or less perpetual alpha for any forseeable future.
It sounds like the definitions of "playable" and "alpha" really matter here.
When I funded the original Kickstarter, there was a pretty clear delineation between "released" and not-"released". And not-"released" generally meant that only a limited pool of outsiders (i.e., beta-testers) could even use the software.
I get the impression that "StarCitizen" is benefiting from the modern fuzziness of this concept. I don't know if they're intentionally equivocating to give themselves the best of both worlds, or if they're just a happy beneficiary of a customer base that thinks in these terms.
From my own personal perspective, Chris Roberts defrauded me by taking my money but not even trying to deliver the product in the timeframe we Kickfunders reasonably assumed.
Chris Roberts discovered Steam-by-another-name: it's more profitable to make hats than games.
And in a world with NFTs and crypto being shilled to sports fans, it seems quaint to berate someone for building virtual dollhouses and overpromising to their buyers. It's a lie, but it's not nothing, and is less egregious than other modern lies.
It really is an interesting phenomenon. The game has released several versions. A game that rolled out at a similar time, Elite Dangerous, declared itself released a ways back, with a drastically narrower feature set, and since then has constantly moved towards adding what Star Citizen claims to be. In theory, if both continue to develop in perpetuity, their feature set will eventually be pretty aligned, but one calls itself pre-release and one calls itself receiving updates.
I am not sure there is a lot of difference besides the certain expectation of polish.
There are parts of Star Citizen which, if released standalone, would be indistinguishable from release-grade games. Arena Commander is excellent, and plenty of full games are comparable to this sub-feature of Star Citizen, and Star Marine, the built-in FPS probably only really lacks in terms of playerbase: It's excellent and the touches in it's game mechanics are amazing.
I think your'e mistaken, In my mind its unlikely that Elite will ever get a new expansion again? The last one was not.. lets say enthusiastically received.
Also Elite is built in a way where they have a lot of parallell systems that _do not interact_. This makes the game very shallow with a few gameplay loops, but they are really more akin to mini-games with the universe as background, than real proper games. And I don't see how they could ever make the universe more realistic without having interactions that was never foreseen, and prboably cant be fixed. For example the economy is all fake, its not based (much at all) on what users do. "Powerplay" is a totally separate game system that I at first thought was connected in some way to the rest of the game, but no. You can rank up inside separate factions, and sure it does affect some things such as which ships you can buy, but its all still very shallow. A lot of things is not interchangeable using money, which in reality almost everything is. You can't transfer wealth between players etc.
The sad thing about Elite Dangerous is that its still a totally fun game with other players providing some content, but the netcode is just not made for "massive" multiplayer but instead sort of randomly caps out at a few players interacting at the same time, with no fix likely ever coming.
It's playable, but it's nowhere close to being a complete game. It seems like most of the value people get out of it at this point is fucking around with its half-broken systems.
Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s a mess. My big issue with playing regularly is that it’s better with friends but as you add people the odds that one of you is experiencing issues at any given time approaches 100%. So you’re trying to group up, but first you fall down the stairs and die, then your friends ship spawns with its landing gear in the floor, does a few flips and explodes. When he replaces it, the engines are missing, so your other friend goes to pick him up instead. But they fly too close to the moving space station rings that are out of sync between the client and the server, and now their ship blows up too. Meanwhile you finally get you ship into space, and one of your friends respawns, falls down the stairs, and dies.
I hope they finish it, and I feel like I’ve gotten my relatively small amount of money’s worth out of it. But if I were one of the people who’s bought in for thousands of dollars I’d definitely be worried.
I’d say both yes and no. Some aspects, like a trip to Security Post Kareah to hack off a crime stat, are definitely more amazing as a new player from that story compared to someone who’s been playing for a while. It’s a chore, half the time you have a crime stat it’s because of a bug, and if a bounty hunter gets you during this process you wake up in jail. Neat the first time, could do without it after that.
Other parts you’ve done before but still enjoy because it’s a part of the game that you like. Box delivery missions are relaxing sci-fi sightseeing to me, and that’s only going to get better as the universe expands. The places we already have in the game are pretty amazing and a lot more is planned. I’m not into truck simulator games, but put it in space and heck yeah I’ll fly boxes around.
And then the third category is stuff that we’re not playing at all yet because it keeps getting delayed. So that’ll be a new experience even if I’ve been playing Star Citizen on and off since it hit alpha. Salvaging is the running joke here, but even that is kind of an ongoing distraction from the many professions that are supposed to come after it. https://reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/ngke3m/salvage_soo...
For some reason SC seems to have nailed the crimes and punishment which sadly is not working as well in Elite, which in turn really needs it due to some obnoxious ganking.
I pre order board games. I’m looking forward to ISS vanguard and have been doing so for over a year. I wouldn’t do so with video games.
Board games are easier to understand the whole system from early design docs. Video games are more like “wouldn’t it be cool if you could do X”? And sometimes the answer turns out to be “no” when it’s actually implemented, or the actual implementation is just way watered down from your imagination. Backing something like star citizen seems like it’s begging for disappointment.
What happened there? From the outside I thought it was pretty smooth and successful. Delivered what was promised and only a couple months late.
I think the worst I've seen is people realizing it was never all that good to begin with, and being disappointed a reprint of a 35 year old game doesn't really stack up in the modern era.
But that’s what I enjoy these platforms for: I want to precommit some small sum of money and if lots of us do it this guy is going to take an honest shot at it.
Since it’s so little, I get no equity and I just get one unit of product. Fair deal to me.
Disappointment isn’t that they tried and it sucked. It’s only if they don’t try. But to be honest, I don’t even feel disappointed then because I usually make a satisfactory judgment as to the likelihood of success so if it fails, that’s just a failed bet. And nothing wrong with failing on a bet.
There's some really bizarre tribalism that develops in the Kickstarter/preorder realm. I back a fair number of board games and see the same thing there.
Its like the people who get in that early feel like they are part of the development team and make it their mission to support the game at all costs. Any dissension among the ranks (delays, scope changes, cost increases) are violently shouted down as ITS BETTER FOR THE GAME!!!!!. Organized brigading is really common as well, even before there's an alpha release but they go around trying to force it into every "Best Of" type list out there.
I've gotten some great games out of it but avoid the comment sections at all costs.
I think thats human nature to some extent. Some people really don't like being wrong/disapointed. Especially after spending money. So narrative to make it alright.
Someone once said "I was wrong about this. I've been wrong before. I just try not to dwell on it..". I'm wrong often too.
the game gets shit on a lot but for better or worse they are genuinely trying a lot of things that nobody else tries and is probably ever going to try again. the depth of simulation they have going on is insane, unsurprisingly the resulting dev difficulties are also insane. and likely to make the project fail. but I still want them to try for the sliver of a chance that they can actually pull it off after 20 years.
at the very least I think the idea that star citizen is some kind of intentional scam where they intentionally don't want to get the game done because the can keep their current monetization running is extremely stupid to say the least.
even if chris roberts and the leadership are mustache twirling monocle wearing capitalist masterminds with no interest in actually making a game like this (they are not), they wouldn't be able to systematically control literally hundreds of engineers without anyone noticing what's going on.
The scale of the planets and the kind of environments they can have is genuinely impressive. It doesn't look like procedural generation like No Man's Sky. The cities and environments can be placed and this allows for actual planetary scale with multiple biomes which has never been done before
Of course this also causes lots of difficulties in dev since it's a ridiculous scale and being multiplayer, there's even more complexity. Plus the performance seems to be terrible sometimes
Well. Last time i played I finally had my first flight. It’s been possible for a while now to visit different planets, space stations and so on. But I have not tried before now. They have focused a lot on details and realism. When I opened the ramp to my ship and walked in it felt like i was there. I walked through the door to the cockpit and entered the pilot seat. Then I powered up the ship. A voice spoke and informed me the ship was online and a flurry of hud elements gave me a disorienting amount of information about fuel, elevation, ammo, comm channels and so on. After fiddling for a while I figured out how to ask for launch permission and clumsily took off. I barely managed to float up and out of the spaceport hangar I was in. You have supreme control of your ship and can rotate and tilt any which way. After getting used to the controls I used the star map to select a destination and began the quantum jump. It takes several minutes to to this. When I arrived I was on the wrong side of the planet, and so I had to do a second smaller jump to correct this. The view was something else. You really feel like you are floating far above a planet. I then got out of the pilot seat, opened one of ships bay doors and just stood there looking down on the planet below me. After a while I flew down looking for a landing place. I could not find it so I landed on a high rise building and left the ship. I then got stuck and had to kill myself to get sent back to my starting point.
Ambitious games have so many points of failure. If you made. A perfect living replica of the Star Wars universe but the controls were kind of meh or the pacing of progress was too slow, or the difficulty is off it might still come off as a bad game. Or any universe. But the point being that nailing the complexity of your ambitions is very hard but also just a small piece of it.
Releasing a playable MVP and adding features would be preferable to a big bang with the kitchen sink. I had already abandoned my investment in this product. "Best is the enemy of good."
For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff.
I don’t think reductionist arguments are terribly useful for real things.
> For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff.
It sounds like you just don't understand the statement. It's not a binary assessment, it's an observation: if you set your bar too high, you simply may never get there and have nothing to show for it, thus by "lowering the bar" you may actually deliver a better product (you know, because it actually got delivered, and not canceled).
That’s my understanding of the statement. The reason I’m irked is that you simply may never get there by not implementing features or fixing bugs (you know, because it got cancelled due to never being useful enough to make it).
Its not binary but by setting the bar too low, you never get their either.
My irk is that the premise is that anything not chosen is too “perfect.” Also annoying is having “minimum viable products” that aren’t actually viable.
Is this game actually legit or just a scam as is popularly understood? I saw there is an alpha, but it's tough to separate fact from fiction on this game, would love to hear the perspective of some HNers.
I dont think its a scam but I think its planned to never finish. It's a well funded job for a bunch of people. I think it is finished and will just receive updates as-is for years.
Legit, mostly. I’ve recently purchased the game and it is stunning and rather awe-inspiring, with some solid gameplay loops. But, the bugs are heartbreaking. I’m not prepared to invest 100s of hours learning/playing the game with immersion breaking bugs. So I’ve shelved it for now.
The scam IMO is continuing to work on anything other than fixing the bugs.
As someone who hasn't played this, 5 years ago when I looked at videos, the UI seemed comically bad. Interacting with something brings up some flying UI text that gives in front of you until you disengage or select something. Recent videos show that same UI. Is that UI actually usable? Sometimes the text seems to blend into the background and I'm not sure of the purpose behind the weird flying animations they have
It has embezzled hundreds of millions, yet does not even have a fully playable product after a decade, and seemingly exists only to exploit whales with more money than sense who'll buy new ships. You be the judge.
The first and last time I pre-ordered a game was for MOO3.
I won't ever be fooled again. Besides now that i've gotten older I don't care as much. I can wait.
I was just going to comment, the real game seems to be the development of the game, (pre)ordering and outfitting your ship and gear, etc. It will no longer be a game, once the game is finished.
“After a time, you may find that ‘having’ is not so pleasing a thing after all as ‘wanting.’ It is not logical, but it is often true.”
I like this take. There's a book called "Games people play" by E. Berne that changed how I think about things like this. It talks about how people on a biological level need to interact with others and how they'll unconsciously repeat a script (game) with predictable roles and results to accomplish that. The main insight is that these games don't necessarily need to have a positive outcome - people still get something out of it. So it gets repeated, to the puzzlement of any observers and sometimes even the participants.
For sure. I feel like I've gotten my $25 worth of entertainment just from following all the drama for over a decade. If you have a few hours to kill, Sunk Cost Galaxy is a great rundown of how SC got to where it is today. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7SIP0NDfM2yyHKfRmCAociCc...
This is really true for Elite though, join an active squadron and the universe get a _lot_ more interesting! But a lot of the stuff is outside the game then.
I bought in back in the early days when it was supposed to be a new single player game with optional multiplayer. By now, the whole thing is more like an unplayable buggy mess of a failed MMORPG. And no single player yet.
EDIT: Also it says a lot that my account got deactivated for inactivity while I was waiting for them to release something playable...
It seems intentional. Possibly in order to continue the collection of money from people thinking they need people to keep investing. As soon as they release an actual game and development can come to an end then they can't profit much its continued dependance on investment money.
Do you have evidence of this? I personally try to give people the benefit of the doubt in terms of their intentions.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
- Hanlon’s razor
Of course, that doesn’t absolve the developers of guilt here. They are at the very least guilty of failing to build a successful game with all the money they’ve raised, and nobody should ever trust them with their money again.
All I want are for the lodging elevators and subway stops to reliably appear, and to not get booted right when I'm at my destination outpost/planet without lodging.
Loading the game takes 10 min at best, and to wait that long only to see the one and only elevator out not rendering (requiring reloading the game) is beyond frustrating. I can deal with lag here and there, but this literally makes the game unplayable.
To clarify, based on my reading of the article: CIG is not reducing the scope of their planned deliverables^[1] for a v1.0 release. Rather, they are going to reduce the granularity of the roadmap info they share with the public so that people will complain less.
^[1] For a game that has been in development for a decade and blown past every planned release date by a comical margin.
I had a heated discussion with a friend in 2013 about StarCitizen and that it was a scam. They believed it was real and that their early investments would pay off. They bought stuff multiple times and were very mad that I would insult what would be such an awesome game.
It was so curious to me back then. I need to ask them about this as I can’t believe people still pay any attention to this as I think it will never happen.
I think there are some pretty solid reasons why certain types of people remain very interested in it. If you're a space sim nerd then it ticks a lot of boxes. I played it about a month ago for the first time, after a decade or so of mocking it every chance I got for all the usual reasons. I was looking for something new and saw enough videos that seemed to suggest it had reached a point of being interesting to me. My space nerd creds go back a long way: wing commander at release, freelancer, eve, various flavors of X3, elite, ten minutes in no man's sky, etc. I'm one of those people who wants to immerse into a game world where I can do all the things CIG promises. So I dove in.
What you can do is impressive. I'm not going into a detailed depiction, but people who've played the SC persistent universe know what I mean. It's somewhat mind blowing in scope. It's also heartbreaking because it's utterly broken in so many ways that no AAA studio that actually needed to sell new copies to new people would ever tolerate. I keep a list of the most egregious/humorous things that have happened to me from spawning in the middle of the sun for no reason, to having my ship blow away on the surface of a planet.
I think there are a lot of possible explanations for this, but I suspect the main ones combine scope creep, constant tech stack changes over a really long dev cycle, and not having to make a playable game to be rewarded financially. I hope some day it becomes playable, because it's really a neat platform, but I sort of doubt it ever will.
I think they will eventually ship. Just not soon like DN4. I am not spending a dime on it before then. Even then it may not be a game I am interested in anymore.
I learned my lesson years ago with Chris Roberts games. Do not bother thinking about them until they ship. Strike Commander was my antidote for him. Overpromised, under delivered. He has been trying to make 'privateer' for 2+ decades at this point. He has shipped several iterations at this point 2 priv games and 2 others. This is number 5. That is what is kind of frustrating about it. He can ship games, and has many under his belt. But this one looks like a death march. Drags on much longer and they will have to do yet another engine switch out to keep the 'look' modern and not dated. Which would probably necessitate touching all the assets again.
As a software project, Star Citizen seems like a complete debacle — a project promising the basically impossible (tens of thousands of players on a single server/shard) and yet failing so far to deliver even the feasible-but-difficult (rudimentary AI crew, ~100 star systems). But as a marketing campaign, it feels like an astounding success to attract record-breaking fundraising year-over-year despite diminishing development milestones.
All the while, I have been enjoying Elite Dangerous, which ticks a lot of boxes. Frontier Development is building from the ground up, and even though it’s not without problems (they just had a year of fixing their bodged Odyssey release) , they seem to have a running space simulation.
I am not going to touch StarCitizen unless its a positively reviewed 1.0.
I have dreams where I'm alone on a spaceship hauling cargo, so I was really hopeful when I started playing Elite. But it just bored the stuffing out of me. I guess it's a temperament thing.
It has problems with events, although they are reworking the event system so it can branch more. The problem with Elite is that they tend to make a great functionality, but then stop developing the content for it.
Playing it in VR, I get a ton of enjoyment from the ship interfaces. (I wish it supported hands for pretty much that reason). It's a beautiful exploration of how this kind of sci-fi FTL travel would work from a UX perspective. Assuming, of course, ships are the equivalent of racing cars and will gleefully sail into the nearest sun if you look away from the controls.
The way your ship warns you if you're doing something foolish, and you need to plot your route in advance and filter through mountains of data in order to park your ship, is extremely neat to me. It's a perfect "tinkering with toys I don't fully understand" game.
I want a game like Elite with the depth of MSFS. Aviation is decade upon decade of old systems built on the shoulders of the previous ones. Aviation is _hard_.
Space travel should be similar, with the appropriate help of computers.
I adore flying in Elite Dangerous, but holy shit it's such a grindfest I feel like I'm playing a free to play game.
I shouldn't have to minmax some community derived mining plan just to get a ship worth playing in.
It seems like they developed the grindyness of the economy back when there was very little content in the game in order to artificially increase playtime, and haven't fixed it now that there is a lot more content.
Their goals were ambitious, but hardly impossible.
It's not realistic to handle an arbitrary number of players interacting within a small space, sure. That limit is probably in the hundreds. But a zillion players all within the same game world? Yeah, why not? That's really easy if you're talking about a big universe that doesn't have the entire population congregating in the same place.
Especially in a unicast environment. There are ways to handle it though, like let only a limited number of people land or enter a given stations.
The real world has capacity limits, both physical and rule-based (fire-codes). Implementing these shouldn't be very hard and wouldn't necessarily break immersion.
Lots of ships congregating at a random point in space could be a bigger issue though.
Why? The networking code is entirely on them to get right. What does Cryengine have to do with efficiently updating a giant number of players with movement / action information?
It's higher than hundreds. I had 150+ player raids on a private L2 server I hosted back in the day on an Athlon X2 with 4gb of ram. I had 50 player raids when that server was hosted on a spare P3 800mhz 512mb ram box I had in the closet.
This was not efficient software, l2j had so many issues I recognize now that I've worked a decade in the software industry, but it worked!
To be honest I understand perfectly well why it exists.
These days I played "Everspace 2" and it felt great, controls-wise, the physics are not that good though. And I wanted a more simulator thing.
I then tired up all space simulators I could, played a little, tried to see if any scratch a specific itch, and found out the only ones that DOES scratch that itch, are ancient games, some that had Roberts involved.
The reason people is plunking money in Star Citizen is that people want a game that basically doesn't exist, and Star Citizen promises to be that game. (if it will actually pull that off is another story...).
Elite could have done it, but they didn't, their controls aren't that interesting and the entire series has the same repeating issues (of course, open source clones have the same issues).
X series are basically an RTS with first person controls, another genre entirely.
Evochron I didn't tried, but heard the controls are batshit insane and the interface is bizarre, the game is good but hard to understand.
Among open source stuff, the one that came closest to what I want is clones of Chris Roberts games (for example games using Vega Strike engine).
Freespace could work, but the contols of that game is really wonky, I couldn't get used to it or make it work with my mouse, and I don't own a joystick.
Now if you are willing to go 2D there are more options, sadly some of them are trying to screw themselves too (looking at you "Celestial Command" that started as a 2D realistic physics game and is now a 3D game with crap physics because they couldn't make the AI work properly).
Don't expect Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen... but it's made by just one developer.
For that it's amazing, and honestly, for me it's come closest to capturing what I want out of an Elite-style game, even though it's still got a long way to go to meeting its potential.
I really like the basic concepts of Astrox Imperium, but the fact that almost the entire game revolves around getting from station to station in a desperate attempt not to run out of air was a big turndown for me.
It eventually made the game unplayable for me, as I found myself in a savegame where no matter which direction I went, there simply wasn't a single station closeby enough that provided air, so I was essentially stuck and had to start a new campaign.
"almost the entire game revolves around getting from station to station in a desperate attempt not to run out of air was a big turndown for me"
That's not been my experience at all.
Just invest in buying life support equipment upgrades whenever you find them and you won't have any problem surviving your trips from station to station, even in the most hazardous star systems.
Also, don't go in to hazardous star systems unless you're sure you have the necessary life support equipment to survive there and get back.
There is a timer at the bottom of the screen (if I remember right), which tells you how long your life support will last inside the star system you're in, and if you see it very low when you enter a new system just go right back out.
To me it sounds like you either ignored that warning, didn't notice it, or thought you could get away with surviving in a very hazardous system without enough life support, but turned out to be wrong. Just don't do that and buy life support upgrades whenever you can and you'll be fine.
I did play the game in october 2020, and from I remember there were no life support upgrades back then. And back then I don't think there were "hazardous systems": it was just that some systems were completely empty (no stations at all), while others were not, and the only way to know was to actually go there. So you might not realize you were without air until you're 3-4 systems away.
Well, the game has certainly changed a lot since then, as it's under very active development: see the latest dev log from Jan 18, 2022: [1] More here: [2]
Now the game has not just life support, but four different life support systems. You will need one or the other of them when you're doing different things.
I just get all four of them upgraded as much as possible whenever I can, and don't really worry about which one is for which as I pretty much always have enough no matter what I am doing.
Though, whether you actually have to worry about a particular life support system will depend on how you play. For example, if you wanted to go mining for fuel from a star early on, or you happened to go in to particularly hazardous star systems early on, then you'd definitely feel your lack of a particular type (or multiple types) of life support.
The way I played last time (where I got far enough that the game basically stopped being a challenge to me) was that I'd stayed within safe star systems and just upgraded my ship as much as possible, focusing on mining at first, then combat and that let me upgrade pretty much everything to max and buy the most expensive star ships.
I didn't get in to having multiple ships and mercs, nor in building structures or manufacturing or refining, so there was still a lot more to do when I got bored, but that was after dozens of hours and lots of fun up to that point... and by the time I got done I could go in to the most hazardous star systems (or even up to stars to mine their fuel) without worry about my life support.
If anything, survival is a little too easy and mechanical in this game.
Also Angels Fall First, a FPS where you can also command/board capital ships, fly fighters, invade planets, etc. Unfortunately the dev has disappeared recently.
Not trying to gate keep or anything but if you go into a space sim, or really any kind of simulator genre with just a KBM and not the appropriate controller you are going to think the controls are bad and insane. KBM works great for some types of games but sims are not one of them. I couldn't imagine DCS without a stick or iRacing without a wheel and pedals. Its simply a suboptimal experience and one the developers will never put all the much time in to because full fledged simulations cater to the type of player who is willing and able to invest in a specialty control setup.
> Freespace could work, but the contols of that game is really wonky
To each his own, but I would kill for a modern expansion remake of Privateer with FreeSpace controls and physics.
And you don't really need a joystick for it, but finding a comfortable configuration scheme... takes time.
Easiest would be to have the ship movement on the /keypad/ cursor keys for a coarse directioning and mouse for a fine targeting.
That would give you 13 additional keys for the most often used functions:
target next
target in the reticle
target next missile
target subsystem in the reticle
afterburner (KP_INS)
countermeasures (KP_DEL)
match speed (KP_STAR)
full speed (KP_SLASH)
have a power management nearby (INS through PgDown block) and shield management on the regular cursors.
/Not that hard after all.../
Also FreeSpace is a space /fighter/ sim, it is somewhat another subgenre of spacesims with it's own peculiarities.
Speaking about Roberts - take a look at Rebel Galaxy Outlaw [0], even by the video you will see what it is clearly a modern Privateer in everything except setting/license.
Have you played Elite Dangerous recently? They made a misstep with space legs (bowing to public pressure from a public who aren't game designers), but other than that it's pretty darn solid.
Planetside 2 was able to handle hundreds of players in the same location as a first person shooter without issues. That was almost a decade ago. No reason to believe with new advances in CPU single core perf, lockfree concurrency techniques, vectorization, etc. that 1k players wouldn't be possible.
It seems quaint now to be upset about Star Citizen. There are so many "games" being promised now to people buying NFTs that don't even seem to be trying to be plausible. Like: No one working on our team has ever really made a game before but we plan to make a revolutionary one before the end of the year. Sure. At least Roberts Industries is trying.
True if you consider only consumer money. But if you consider investors that is not true. There are NFT "games" that have raised a lot. I don't know if they would define themselves as games, but functionally they all look like they are trying to be an MMO or Roblox.
A Reddit discussion highlighted one important way Star Citizen is not like an NFT; there's no supported resale of the virtual assets. If you want to buy a fancy spaceship to stare at in your hangar you pretty much have to buy it from Star Citizen and the revenue goes to them. (There is some third party trading but it looks pretty minor.)
At this point, the average wacko NFT-based game probably has a greater chance of success than Star Citizen. Although you'd probably have to use to some advanced mathematics to determine the difference between these two extremely-close-to-zero chances.
I'd say that Star Citizen and video game NFTs are both on par with being all promise and no meaningful delivery (yet) though. I could see both Ubi restricting sales of their "NFTs" and Star Citizen adding resale features later. That's how nebulous both are.
Star Citizen is a topic I sink a bit of time into every year or so, because I find the whole phenomenon incredibly curious and somewhat unique to our times.
They've spent more time & money than any other game development studio for a single project, broken promises, and delivered nothing that resembles what most people would qualify as a playable game. They've only given evidence that they will continue wasting resources.
For some really entertaining coverage, I'd highly recommend:
"Sunk Cost Galaxy", an amateur YouTube series made by former fan/investor/associate/!?: https://youtu.be/gU3uEBUBIEA
And LTT's more recent feature, which definitely pokes fun but is still overly generous IMO: https://youtu.be/bYs_zn2pTZo
Ehhh that list of game dev costs seems really suspect; Star Citizen is only notable because they released dev costs when everyone else holds them tight to the chest. Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie. AAA video games over the last 10 years typically have as much if not more budget than tentpole movies (and corresponding revenue draw).
However, even if you just adjusted all the other dev costs in that list by a factor of two or three - Star Citizen would still easily remain in the top five.
My point was mainly- Compare CIG's efforts to other studios that have spent hundreds, or even just tens of millions!
"Personnel counts have ballooned in the era of motion capture and full voice acting; you’re often doing a whole lot more movie things like mocap, script writing, juggling a bunch of actors, etc. in a game than for a movie."
Are voice acting costs that huge?
It's not like video games have to shell out millions to get name-brand actors to star in their cut scenes. It's usually unknowns or has-beens who stoop to doing video game work. How expensive can that be?
Not the good ones. There are definitely top-tier voice actors out there who command good salaries. The ones on fivr are for like, recording audio books or radio commercials.
From what I know, talent is usually cheap enough relative to the total cost of a game, it's the whole pipeline around integrating voice acting and motion capture into a game that's really expensive. In this[1] episode of that podcast they talk a bit about the costs around that. If you decide to do voice acting and motion capture you also have to adapt the whole game and writing around that decision, which balloons costs a lot since you've decided you want _that kind of game_.
[1]: https://youtu.be/cTejdjnf-jI with Mike Bithel dev of "Thomas was Alone", Troy Baker celebrity video game voice actor, Austin Wintory composer (Journey), Alanah Pearce writer
Yes, but never at the level of detail that is being discussed here. You won't see the costs for the latest WoW expansion broken out in the R&D line items in Activision-Blizzard's financial statements.
From Wikipedia: "[World of Warcraft] has grossed $9.23 billion in revenue, making it one of the highest-grossing video games of all time, along with Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Street Fighter II."
Yes, that's revenue. Parent's post neither claims WoW is a failure nor that WoW has taken in/made lots of money-- just that they've probably spent a lot of money and no one knows how much.
I don't think MMOs should be counted as a single project. Each expansion should be counted separately, at the very least.
Star Citizen hasn't even released the base game, and the fact that they haven't segmented off any of their feature creep into future expansions is itself a story of project mismanagement. Part of a successful project is knowing how to divide it into multiple sequential projects.
I wouldn't be surprised if WoW has spent more money by now than Star Citizen has, but WoW was announced in 2001 and shipped a release version in 2004. The added expenditures are all game updates, new campaigns, and general recurring expenses from running arguably the most successful MMO of all time.
Star Citizen, by contrast, was announced over a decade later in 2012, and has gone through its hundreds of million dollars without shipping a release version, or even a beta version (they dub what's currently shipping an alpha). So it seems reasonable to hold them to a different standard.
(Granted, it's not impossible Star Citizen is also profitable, all things considered, but that just raises more questions.)
Wow, that's been ten years already. If that 339M USD figure is accurate, they could have partnered with a few companies to launch a real space ship. Shades of the never-ending train of hype and mostly lies that was Battlecruiser 3000 two decades earlier. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD )
There is a clearly a giant wad of latent demand-money sitting around waiting for someone to deliver on the concept, would be interesting if some studio with more traditional funding makes a go of it.
Going from "we're going to make a game about space ships" to "we're going to launch a real space ship" would be a feature creep deserving of a monument.
That "Sunk Cost Galaxy" series is quite good. I didn't know much about this before.
It really feels like cashing in on nostalgia, put something barely playable together and keep cashing in. The fact that a lot of the development was outsourced.....
I went to jail in 2013, not long after I donated to the Kickstarter. I recently got out - hoping an old game like Star Citizen would still be playable. Found out it wasn't even released yet o_O.
For real? Is that by design? In elite jail is at least just an instantaneous transfer and an financial transaction, which is maybe one reason why the justice in elite doesn't really work.
If Cloud Imperium Games thinks the answer is limiting what parts of their roadmap to share with the public is the answer, they are sadly mistaken. At this point, this is not a unrealistic expectation of their user problem, it is a CIG can't develop a game problem.
The team itself needs to ruthlessly cut features and develop a MVP game concept and execute it. At this point Star Citizen is already the next Duke Nuke'em forever, and it is now well on it's way to creating a class of it's own in the over-hyped gaming vapor-wear category.
Frankly, this type of conflict with and blaming of their own fans is a portent of the beginning of the end.
it occurred to me many years ago that star citizen is a meta game. the game is watching a game come together. plenty of people get a kick out of all that this encompasses. unfortunately, it wasn't sold this way but maybe out of necessity. furthermore, i'm not even convinced that they anticipated this.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadThat said, it's clearly well out of proportion to their funding. Some of the feature creep implies such horrible judgement by experienced game designers it would have been hard to predict.
Yes I know about the beta, but it still seems like an extreme opposite version of the "no pre-order" movements.
edit: Well, I could have just checked the site, so I did. In case others are wondering the same thing,
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/star-citizen/play-nowAs somebody waaaaaaay on the outside, I kind of get it. I would hope that most people buying in in the last N years fully understand that this thing is going to be in more or less perpetual alpha for any forseeable future.
When I funded the original Kickstarter, there was a pretty clear delineation between "released" and not-"released". And not-"released" generally meant that only a limited pool of outsiders (i.e., beta-testers) could even use the software.
I get the impression that "StarCitizen" is benefiting from the modern fuzziness of this concept. I don't know if they're intentionally equivocating to give themselves the best of both worlds, or if they're just a happy beneficiary of a customer base that thinks in these terms.
From my own personal perspective, Chris Roberts defrauded me by taking my money but not even trying to deliver the product in the timeframe we Kickfunders reasonably assumed.
And in a world with NFTs and crypto being shilled to sports fans, it seems quaint to berate someone for building virtual dollhouses and overpromising to their buyers. It's a lie, but it's not nothing, and is less egregious than other modern lies.
I admit there's a subjective aspect regarding what's worth calling out.
Personally, I judge Chris's actions to be worth calling out.
I am not sure there is a lot of difference besides the certain expectation of polish.
There are parts of Star Citizen which, if released standalone, would be indistinguishable from release-grade games. Arena Commander is excellent, and plenty of full games are comparable to this sub-feature of Star Citizen, and Star Marine, the built-in FPS probably only really lacks in terms of playerbase: It's excellent and the touches in it's game mechanics are amazing.
Also Elite is built in a way where they have a lot of parallell systems that _do not interact_. This makes the game very shallow with a few gameplay loops, but they are really more akin to mini-games with the universe as background, than real proper games. And I don't see how they could ever make the universe more realistic without having interactions that was never foreseen, and prboably cant be fixed. For example the economy is all fake, its not based (much at all) on what users do. "Powerplay" is a totally separate game system that I at first thought was connected in some way to the rest of the game, but no. You can rank up inside separate factions, and sure it does affect some things such as which ships you can buy, but its all still very shallow. A lot of things is not interchangeable using money, which in reality almost everything is. You can't transfer wealth between players etc.
The sad thing about Elite Dangerous is that its still a totally fun game with other players providing some content, but the netcode is just not made for "massive" multiplayer but instead sort of randomly caps out at a few players interacting at the same time, with no fix likely ever coming.
But then you also have moments like these when the game is pretty cool: https://reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/s7y1wk/last_night_...
I hope they finish it, and I feel like I’ve gotten my relatively small amount of money’s worth out of it. But if I were one of the people who’s bought in for thousands of dollars I’d definitely be worried.
I can't imagine in-house beta testers really have fun playing the games they've helped to shepherd to release once they finally ship...
Other parts you’ve done before but still enjoy because it’s a part of the game that you like. Box delivery missions are relaxing sci-fi sightseeing to me, and that’s only going to get better as the universe expands. The places we already have in the game are pretty amazing and a lot more is planned. I’m not into truck simulator games, but put it in space and heck yeah I’ll fly boxes around.
And then the third category is stuff that we’re not playing at all yet because it keeps getting delayed. So that’ll be a new experience even if I’ve been playing Star Citizen on and off since it hit alpha. Salvaging is the running joke here, but even that is kind of an ongoing distraction from the many professions that are supposed to come after it. https://reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/ngke3m/salvage_soo...
Board games are easier to understand the whole system from early design docs. Video games are more like “wouldn’t it be cool if you could do X”? And sometimes the answer turns out to be “no” when it’s actually implemented, or the actual implementation is just way watered down from your imagination. Backing something like star citizen seems like it’s begging for disappointment.
That doesn't make them any more reliable. Check the disaster it was the crowdfunding of "HeroQuest 25 anniversary".
I think the worst I've seen is people realizing it was never all that good to begin with, and being disappointed a reprint of a 35 year old game doesn't really stack up in the modern era.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/Heroquest/comments/ixwdog/comment/g...
[1]https://www.xataka.com/literatura-comics-y-juegos/heroquest-...
As far as I'm aware, the official Hasbro one went quite well: https://hasbropulse.com/products/heroquest-game-system
Since it’s so little, I get no equity and I just get one unit of product. Fair deal to me.
Disappointment isn’t that they tried and it sucked. It’s only if they don’t try. But to be honest, I don’t even feel disappointed then because I usually make a satisfactory judgment as to the likelihood of success so if it fails, that’s just a failed bet. And nothing wrong with failing on a bet.
Its like the people who get in that early feel like they are part of the development team and make it their mission to support the game at all costs. Any dissension among the ranks (delays, scope changes, cost increases) are violently shouted down as ITS BETTER FOR THE GAME!!!!!. Organized brigading is really common as well, even before there's an alpha release but they go around trying to force it into every "Best Of" type list out there.
I've gotten some great games out of it but avoid the comment sections at all costs.
Someone once said "I was wrong about this. I've been wrong before. I just try not to dwell on it..". I'm wrong often too.
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20060703160929/http://archive.ga...
at the very least I think the idea that star citizen is some kind of intentional scam where they intentionally don't want to get the game done because the can keep their current monetization running is extremely stupid to say the least.
even if chris roberts and the leadership are mustache twirling monocle wearing capitalist masterminds with no interest in actually making a game like this (they are not), they wouldn't be able to systematically control literally hundreds of engineers without anyone noticing what's going on.
Serious question, like what?
Of course this also causes lots of difficulties in dev since it's a ridiculous scale and being multiplayer, there's even more complexity. Plus the performance seems to be terrible sometimes
cough Theranos cough
“Good is the enemy of terrible.”
For some reason, I get irked when people bring up the “Perfect is the enemy of good” for why something can’t get done. Like there’s only perfect and good. There’s also bad, terrible, non-functional and lots of other stuff.
I don’t think reductionist arguments are terribly useful for real things.
"Minimally viable is the enemy of class action."
It sounds like you just don't understand the statement. It's not a binary assessment, it's an observation: if you set your bar too high, you simply may never get there and have nothing to show for it, thus by "lowering the bar" you may actually deliver a better product (you know, because it actually got delivered, and not canceled).
Its not binary but by setting the bar too low, you never get their either.
My irk is that the premise is that anything not chosen is too “perfect.” Also annoying is having “minimum viable products” that aren’t actually viable.
It in no way implies that.
The scam IMO is continuing to work on anything other than fixing the bugs.
https://massivelyop.com/2021/10/17/star-citizen-financial-re...
“After a time, you may find that ‘having’ is not so pleasing a thing after all as ‘wanting.’ It is not logical, but it is often true.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_People_Play_(book)
EDIT: Also it says a lot that my account got deactivated for inactivity while I was waiting for them to release something playable...
I doubt you’d have a case, since there is clearly a game being built, it’s just that the developers have done a terrible job finishing it.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
- Hanlon’s razor
Of course, that doesn’t absolve the developers of guilt here. They are at the very least guilty of failing to build a successful game with all the money they’ve raised, and nobody should ever trust them with their money again.
Loading the game takes 10 min at best, and to wait that long only to see the one and only elevator out not rendering (requiring reloading the game) is beyond frustrating. I can deal with lag here and there, but this literally makes the game unplayable.
*yes, my primary residence is in New Babbage
^[1] For a game that has been in development for a decade and blown past every planned release date by a comical margin.
It was so curious to me back then. I need to ask them about this as I can’t believe people still pay any attention to this as I think it will never happen.
Someone monetarily buying into an idea + in communication with a large community who has also bought in + future promises = cult
It may be a productive cult, but it's still a cult. And has all of a cult's reality distortion effects on its members.
What you can do is impressive. I'm not going into a detailed depiction, but people who've played the SC persistent universe know what I mean. It's somewhat mind blowing in scope. It's also heartbreaking because it's utterly broken in so many ways that no AAA studio that actually needed to sell new copies to new people would ever tolerate. I keep a list of the most egregious/humorous things that have happened to me from spawning in the middle of the sun for no reason, to having my ship blow away on the surface of a planet.
I think there are a lot of possible explanations for this, but I suspect the main ones combine scope creep, constant tech stack changes over a really long dev cycle, and not having to make a playable game to be rewarded financially. I hope some day it becomes playable, because it's really a neat platform, but I sort of doubt it ever will.
I learned my lesson years ago with Chris Roberts games. Do not bother thinking about them until they ship. Strike Commander was my antidote for him. Overpromised, under delivered. He has been trying to make 'privateer' for 2+ decades at this point. He has shipped several iterations at this point 2 priv games and 2 others. This is number 5. That is what is kind of frustrating about it. He can ship games, and has many under his belt. But this one looks like a death march. Drags on much longer and they will have to do yet another engine switch out to keep the 'look' modern and not dated. Which would probably necessitate touching all the assets again.
But the worst that happens is you never actually get your ship, versus getting incorrect results and falling ill
https://twinfinite.net/2022/01/star-citizen-crowdfunding-rec...
I am not going to touch StarCitizen unless its a positively reviewed 1.0.
(I love both games, but yes).
The way your ship warns you if you're doing something foolish, and you need to plot your route in advance and filter through mountains of data in order to park your ship, is extremely neat to me. It's a perfect "tinkering with toys I don't fully understand" game.
Space travel should be similar, with the appropriate help of computers.
I shouldn't have to minmax some community derived mining plan just to get a ship worth playing in.
It seems like they developed the grindyness of the economy back when there was very little content in the game in order to artificially increase playtime, and haven't fixed it now that there is a lot more content.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18...
It's not realistic to handle an arbitrary number of players interacting within a small space, sure. That limit is probably in the hundreds. But a zillion players all within the same game world? Yeah, why not? That's really easy if you're talking about a big universe that doesn't have the entire population congregating in the same place.
The real world has capacity limits, both physical and rule-based (fire-codes). Implementing these shouldn't be very hard and wouldn't necessarily break immersion.
Lots of ships congregating at a random point in space could be a bigger issue though.
This was not efficient software, l2j had so many issues I recognize now that I've worked a decade in the software industry, but it worked!
These days I played "Everspace 2" and it felt great, controls-wise, the physics are not that good though. And I wanted a more simulator thing.
I then tired up all space simulators I could, played a little, tried to see if any scratch a specific itch, and found out the only ones that DOES scratch that itch, are ancient games, some that had Roberts involved.
The reason people is plunking money in Star Citizen is that people want a game that basically doesn't exist, and Star Citizen promises to be that game. (if it will actually pull that off is another story...).
Elite could have done it, but they didn't, their controls aren't that interesting and the entire series has the same repeating issues (of course, open source clones have the same issues).
X series are basically an RTS with first person controls, another genre entirely.
Evochron I didn't tried, but heard the controls are batshit insane and the interface is bizarre, the game is good but hard to understand.
Among open source stuff, the one that came closest to what I want is clones of Chris Roberts games (for example games using Vega Strike engine).
Freespace could work, but the contols of that game is really wonky, I couldn't get used to it or make it work with my mouse, and I don't own a joystick.
Now if you are willing to go 2D there are more options, sadly some of them are trying to screw themselves too (looking at you "Celestial Command" that started as a 2D realistic physics game and is now a 3D game with crap physics because they couldn't make the AI work properly).
Don't expect Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen... but it's made by just one developer.
For that it's amazing, and honestly, for me it's come closest to capturing what I want out of an Elite-style game, even though it's still got a long way to go to meeting its potential.
It eventually made the game unplayable for me, as I found myself in a savegame where no matter which direction I went, there simply wasn't a single station closeby enough that provided air, so I was essentially stuck and had to start a new campaign.
That's not been my experience at all.
Just invest in buying life support equipment upgrades whenever you find them and you won't have any problem surviving your trips from station to station, even in the most hazardous star systems.
Also, don't go in to hazardous star systems unless you're sure you have the necessary life support equipment to survive there and get back.
There is a timer at the bottom of the screen (if I remember right), which tells you how long your life support will last inside the star system you're in, and if you see it very low when you enter a new system just go right back out.
To me it sounds like you either ignored that warning, didn't notice it, or thought you could get away with surviving in a very hazardous system without enough life support, but turned out to be wrong. Just don't do that and buy life support upgrades whenever you can and you'll be fine.
Now the game has not just life support, but four different life support systems. You will need one or the other of them when you're doing different things.
I just get all four of them upgraded as much as possible whenever I can, and don't really worry about which one is for which as I pretty much always have enough no matter what I am doing.
Though, whether you actually have to worry about a particular life support system will depend on how you play. For example, if you wanted to go mining for fuel from a star early on, or you happened to go in to particularly hazardous star systems early on, then you'd definitely feel your lack of a particular type (or multiple types) of life support.
The way I played last time (where I got far enough that the game basically stopped being a challenge to me) was that I'd stayed within safe star systems and just upgraded my ship as much as possible, focusing on mining at first, then combat and that let me upgrade pretty much everything to max and buy the most expensive star ships.
I didn't get in to having multiple ships and mercs, nor in building structures or manufacturing or refining, so there was still a lot more to do when I got bored, but that was after dozens of hours and lots of fun up to that point... and by the time I got done I could go in to the most hazardous star systems (or even up to stars to mine their fuel) without worry about my life support.
If anything, survival is a little too easy and mechanical in this game.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bK5kKaS-ng
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/user/jacemasula/videos
You be with 5 people on ship in star citizen and do different things.
There is no game like this...
None
Also seeing `None` in the last line, on its own, my Rust mind went on and decided your comment must be a function that returns None.
Outer Wilds has fun scaled down space flight.
To each his own, but I would kill for a modern expansion remake of Privateer with FreeSpace controls and physics.
And you don't really need a joystick for it, but finding a comfortable configuration scheme... takes time.
Easiest would be to have the ship movement on the /keypad/ cursor keys for a coarse directioning and mouse for a fine targeting.
That would give you 13 additional keys for the most often used functions:
have a power management nearby (INS through PgDown block) and shield management on the regular cursors./Not that hard after all.../
Also FreeSpace is a space /fighter/ sim, it is somewhat another subgenre of spacesims with it's own peculiarities.
Speaking about Roberts - take a look at Rebel Galaxy Outlaw [0], even by the video you will see what it is clearly a modern Privateer in everything except setting/license.
[0] https://youtu.be/wKoJKe_yKQI?t=1786
"Alpha 3.16.1" should never have been a thing for any software project.
But its still kind of scummy imo.
And they haven't had as much time!
Don't be generous to Cloud Imperium Games (CIG).
If I had to present but a single slide:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...
They've spent more time & money than any other game development studio for a single project, broken promises, and delivered nothing that resembles what most people would qualify as a playable game. They've only given evidence that they will continue wasting resources.
For some really entertaining coverage, I'd highly recommend:
"Sunk Cost Galaxy", an amateur YouTube series made by former fan/investor/associate/!?: https://youtu.be/gU3uEBUBIEA
And LTT's more recent feature, which definitely pokes fun but is still overly generous IMO: https://youtu.be/bYs_zn2pTZo
However, even if you just adjusted all the other dev costs in that list by a factor of two or three - Star Citizen would still easily remain in the top five.
My point was mainly- Compare CIG's efforts to other studios that have spent hundreds, or even just tens of millions!
Are voice acting costs that huge?
It's not like video games have to shell out millions to get name-brand actors to star in their cut scenes. It's usually unknowns or has-beens who stoop to doing video game work. How expensive can that be?
[1]: https://youtu.be/cTejdjnf-jI with Mike Bithel dev of "Thomas was Alone", Troy Baker celebrity video game voice actor, Austin Wintory composer (Journey), Alanah Pearce writer
The Wikipedia page states:
"Most game budgets are not disclosed, so this list is not indicative of industry trends."
I would expect ongoing major MMOs to easily exceed that number. For example WoW, but probably even games like EVE online.
Star Citizen hasn't even released the base game, and the fact that they haven't segmented off any of their feature creep into future expansions is itself a story of project mismanagement. Part of a successful project is knowing how to divide it into multiple sequential projects.
4 years of post-launch support ran up costs of $200M.[1]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20060619205201/http://www.digita...
[1] https://www.wired.com/2008/09/total-operating
Star Citizen, by contrast, was announced over a decade later in 2012, and has gone through its hundreds of million dollars without shipping a release version, or even a beta version (they dub what's currently shipping an alpha). So it seems reasonable to hold them to a different standard.
(Granted, it's not impossible Star Citizen is also profitable, all things considered, but that just raises more questions.)
There is a clearly a giant wad of latent demand-money sitting around waiting for someone to deliver on the concept, would be interesting if some studio with more traditional funding makes a go of it.
Cyberpunk is not that far away and it launched probably 2 years too early
It really feels like cashing in on nostalgia, put something barely playable together and keep cashing in. The fact that a lot of the development was outsourced.....
This Star Citizen 2021 video looks nice though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNrU27WMr4E
Why make a game when you can just be a virtual spaceship trading platform.
The team itself needs to ruthlessly cut features and develop a MVP game concept and execute it. At this point Star Citizen is already the next Duke Nuke'em forever, and it is now well on it's way to creating a class of it's own in the over-hyped gaming vapor-wear category.
Frankly, this type of conflict with and blaming of their own fans is a portent of the beginning of the end.