87 points

It’s that that decade long grift disguised as a game?

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70 points

I used to work with a guy who had thrown away upwards of $10,000 at this game. The last time it came up, he told me he had spent over $8,000, and that was several years ago and he didn’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down. When I asked him what he got for that money, he showed me the one ship he has. He had one ship. The rest were still in development and wouldn’t even be released for years.

He spent more than some cars cost, for a handful of digital space ships, 90% of which aren’t even finished. I have no idea how to reason with people who do this sort of thing.

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34 points

People like this get to piss away money while millions go homeless without a meal today.

I don’t understand some people.

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25 points

These people have a mental illness. They’re being taken advantage of by unscrupulous companies. They’re in exactly the same boat as people with gambling addictions. We should feel bad for them, but not (always*) as bad as homeless folks, who are still worse off.

*One of my elementary school teachers was married to a gambling addict. The guy was secretly hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and had stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of heavy construction equipment to pay off some of his loans. The guy ended up in a police chase and took his own life before he could be arrested. His wife, the teacher, was left massively in debt (he had secretly remortgaged the family house to pay for gambling debts) and grieving the loss of her husband but also in shock at discovering the extent of his crimes and debts. Really awful situation and nothing but profits for the casinos!

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0 points

I mean it’s not like any person has ever to decide between “should I buy something fun” (whatever the definition of “fun” is), or rather “should I just go and donate 100$ to a random homeless dude”

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9 points

Bloody hell, I spent a little over two dollars buying Elite: Dangerous (a similar space game) when it was on sale about five years ago and haven’t spent any more money on it since. I can’t even comprehend spending 10,000 dollars on an incomplete game.

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7 points

And even if the game released and was great, what would you do if you already had everything in the game?

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4 points

that should be just the start, there should be something else to do beyond gathering everything you can. I hope they will add something like that.

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2 points

I have a bunch of ships in the game. The most fun I’ve ever had in the game was after a reset I ignored all of the other ships I had and just focused on starting with the cheapest ship in the game and earning my way up. I had a blast.

I haven’t touched the game in probably 3 years, basically just waiting for more things to get finished before jumping back in. But it is hard to get excited for the game with how long it has been and how… not good things have been in the company.

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73 points

Star Citizen

“drying funds”

Have we checked to make sure they don’t have a banana stand nearby? Specifically looked at the walls?

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41 points

What could a Star Citizen cost? Eight hundred million dollars?

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63 points

This game should be one of the most prominent examples of sunk cost fallacy

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34 points

Marketing and sales strategies are excellent for this game. It unifies in game purchases focused on whales like with mobile games and selling early access to an alpha. There’s also an aspect of collectibles and exclusivity like with NFTs. It‘s also cult like in many aspects. An utopian perfectionist vision evangelized by a prophet.

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5 points

Everyone who bought in defending the practices is a perfect example of cultish behaviour and copium.

Heck, I bought in, but I only paid $20. And I never played a minute.

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52 points

Seven hundred million dollars

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9 points

More like 850 at this point

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39 points

Jesus christ. People need to realize that this is a scam. No video game is worth thousands of your dollars, especially a decade old game still in alpha.

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15 points
*

It isn’t a scam, just incredibly mismanaged. Chris Robert’s has a very hard time saying “this is good enough” and that makes the company bleed money as they repeatedly remake things. People then don’t tell Chris no. They weren’t making a good space Sim, they were making the best darn space Sim evah! Their wages aren’t great and now they are trying to push illegal levels of crunch time till they got caught.

They’ve completely redone the flight model several times to various levels of success. Time frames get so damm long that they have to go back and remake huge chunks of the game in order to keep things up to snuff graphically.

I get the feeling that they never felt the need to stress out about timelines as the funding kept rolling in, in fact the funding accelerated over time! The game has 183 different ships all designed down to the tiniest detail in the game right now. That’s a fuck ton of work hours, but ship sales gets the funding rolling so they have to keep cranking out new ships.

I do really like playing the game, but it is really a shitshow for management. There was one point where they had to throw away a massive amount of work because one studio was making things that didn’t fit the metrics for scale and animation of the rest of the game.

Edit: and ships are a dumb thing to buy anyway! You can earn them in game anyway for really not all that much work. It’s the most cost inefficient grind skip I’ve ever seen in a game.

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7 points

this is just a long winded way of saying it’s a scam. if you ask for money promising something and you have no plan of delivering, it’s a scam.

they have to keep developing and redeveloping because they have a bunch of idiots with more money than sense pumping money to them. if they actually finish the game and release it chances are revenue will come crashing down. selling a promise is much better than selling a finished product because people like to wishcast and throw money at their own hopes and imagination. anything missing they fill in the blanks. surely the game will deliver eventually.

It’s a scam.

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8 points

Where does he say “have no plan of delivering”, out of interest? I’ve re read it a few times and can’t find that.

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1 point
*
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