Star Citizen reminds me very much of that story about the Danish artist who was commissioned by a museum to produce a new piece for $84k and gave them two empty canvases entitled "Take the Money and Run".[0]
Cloud Imperium is, at this point, a modern art studio that is constantly trying to see just how overtly they can make fun of their patrons while still receiving big checks.
At the end of the day Star Citizen isn't a blank canvas. There is a real playable game, not tech demo, right now. Sq42 is a bloody circus, but this pervasive belief that the project is a scam is trivial for anyone to prove false without spending a dime: just wait for the next free fly weekend.
I wouldn't call it playable. It can be played, but the experience is very unstable with game breaking bugs everywhere.
The joke among my friends is never put on a suit you like, because the game is going to crash and you'll lose it.
And 400+ Millon to get to where we are?
I think it's disengenuous to ignore the chronic, glaring deficiencies in planning and execution while pointing to a streaming pile of shit and saying "look, it works".
The biggest point of comparison that I'm making isn't the blank canvas per se, and I'm not calling the project a scam. I'm calling it modern art. I'm saying both types of artists share the constant boundary pushing: how much can we taunt our patrons before they'll give up and leave?
I don't believe that anyone at Cloud Imperium actually cares about bedheets. They simply recognize that Star Citizen is now a work of performance art, and this is the next stage of the performance.
Though many of the patrons still enjoy the various demos, tech reels, and developer videos coming out (ex. the comment below me), so it feels like these are the actual product rather than the game itself.
It’s weird, how you can get so attached to something that you start to forget what really attracted you in the first place.
That's a great point. I hadn't thought of it that way before.
There is a huge audience for gaming videos on YouTube and twitch, and a lot of people in the audience aren't also playing those games. Their enjoyment is just in the story, and the visuals, and the commentary. I always wondered why the money keeps rolling in -- maybe because the anticipation and the imagination are already giving them enjoyment of a not-yet-fully-playable game.
I bought a $45 ship probably 5 years ago, and I just bought another one about a month ago. I've never even downloaded the game, I just love checking in every few months to see the game, and I'm happy to support its development. Seeing Morphologis' architecture reviews of the ships alone has been worth my [what has amounted to] $1.50 per month.
Classical art was sold on the perceived quality of the art. Contemporary art is sold on the notoriety of the artist. A framed copy of what was originally a stencil graffiti was sold for > $1 million because it was Banksy. After being shredded as part of a prank, the then shredded work was resold for > $25 million.
The value of those empty canvases are now likely worth well north of the $84k paid, because wow what art. And yes, /s.
It was a commission. I would expect there would be some form of request or discussion on what was being commissioned. What did they write on the invoice?
I've got to say, I'm a complete outsider when it comes to Star Citizen. In fact, this thread is the very first time I have heard of it. The combative tone of your post made me curious, so I just spent the past few minutes reading through the Wiki page on it [0].
By virtue of my ignorance, I am not "butthurt about it". The Wiki piece doesn't dive too far into the weeds, but how the game's development seems to have been progressing is enough to give any reasonable person a lot of skepticism, so I don't know that the "butthurt" comment is very warranted.
I can’t help but wonder if reducing the possibility space of opinions one might have about Star Citizen’s development process to “sweaty misogynist nerd (the bad kind of nerd)” and “magnanimous rich nerd (the good kind of nerd)” is maybe showing your hand a bit here. This isn’t to say I don’t believe you with respect to the employee death threats, nor do I think they’re a good thing — internet hate machines formed out of the froth of fermented gamer rage are unambiguously bad and steps should always be taken to reduce or eliminate the damage they cause. I also think there’s a pretty wide array of acceptably minimal and non-bigoted ways to express curiosity, scrutiny, or even displeasure with Star Citizen’s development process. Your lumping of that spectrum of thought into a single uncharitable bucket is probably why you’re being read as combative here.
I think you already have made that wager. My downside is $0 and my upside is $0.
Your downside is how much you’ve backed and your upside is the joy you’ll get when released.
But it seems like you’re now just emotionally dug in based on your sunk costs. And you seem like someone who is extolling the praises of a particular horse that hasn’t even started the race.
I’ve bought the most basic package. I think it was $40 or $45
I most definitely got my moneys worth out of that over the course of a few weekends playing the first dogfighting module nearly a decade ago with friends. Arguably within a night, I’ve spent much more just on drinks at a bar in a night.
Also, if it flops - as I’ve stated, oh well.
Still glad to make the wager as you seem to be intent you’ll be winning it.
If you’re talking to me - thank you, that’s definitely what the internet is for sometimes.
Would you like to live in a world without some extremely unhinged people? Sounds like it would become boring quite quickly.
Perhaps you should direct your inferences to those who send death threats to & stalk game developers. You can find their names & contact easily enough by putting “star citizen death threats” into your search engine of choice - & these type of people tend to be the ones unaware that they’re completely unhinged, could perhaps use a reminder unlike myself.
I can also look thru just a small bit of your comment history on here & make somewhat of the same conclusion about you, not that that (especially my opinion) matters in the slightest.
Hmm… I don’t exactly see how but maybe I should specify.
I very much keep up on the development of the game, & I think it’s going great. I think we have another 3-4 years to go before what I’d imagined when I first heard of the game (a few weeks after it’s public announcement) is possible. Server issues are likely to be a bulk of what needs ironed out.
Unfortunately, as for me not personally touching the game - severe physical illness that makes it very hard to be at a computer. I would definitely be playing every major release if I could comfortably do so.
If that still makes your comment correct - in what I’m saying makes the GP seem more valid - I guess I have a misunderstanding.
If SC ends up being a complete flop - it will be unfortunate, but I truly believe a great amount of tech will come out of the disbanding teams. If you think all of their hundreds to thousands of something employees are all in on a grand conman scheme & they’re doing literally nothing but sinking their collective reputations - I’ve got some… lemme see… maybe horse dewormer to sell you, perhaps other things…
The cherry on top for me is the longer it takes to ship (heh) the more likely it is I’ll actually be able to comfortably play the game I’ve dreamt about for some time, definitely before SC was ever announced. Some of my friends who’ve backed are literally going to have become doctors or with kids approaching middle school before 1.0 :)
Star Citizen for me is a recurring reminder that there are probably hundreds of talented game developers either working independently and living in poverty to work on things that they're truly passionate about and that have real thought and craft put into them, or developers working in the triple-A mines making derivative bloated nonsense every year with terrible working conditions, and yet so often the projects with massive amounts of funding and support are things like this or Yandere Simulator or DayZ being made by devs who are either con artists or completely incompetent devs, or both.
It also reminds me why financially prudent overseers and other non tech people are needed in a well working company and are not necessarily as bad as some devs claim (within reason).
Star citizen was the attempt to free development from the shackels of "investor money" and the expectation was that this would remove the need to push out some unfinished product.
Having succeeded in raising enormous funding they instead opted to release...mostly nothing.
No investor would have accepted such a behaviour and at this point in time they seem really lost, working on meaningless details such as bedsheets.
Back in the day I expected one of the typical Kickstarter outcomes: "Great game", "Mediocre game with some innovation", "bad game" or "no game" but never in a million years would I have expected reading this article.
Over the years it has become clear why Chris Roberts was removed by Microsoft. He seems to be a fairly poor Project Manager.
The saddest thing about Star Citizen is that so much money and human effort is being burned for creative development which is almost certainly going to end up buried, unappreciated, in a failed project
This is why I like Elite Dangerous’ model better. They shipped a game and made iterative improvements. It has many flaws, but for most intents and purposes it’s a running space sim.
agreed, ship something and then improve it is a way better approach, then at least we have a game even if the money runs out. star citizen risks never completing, and that's just not something i feel comfortable supporting.
the irony is that i long ignored elite dangerous because its name made me think it's some kind of battle oriented shooter, and not a space simulation.
When I'm making game and I want to finish it fast, I limit myself to "2 of everything". If the game is about maze of rooms, I made 2 rooms (because 2 is minimal amount when you need to implement the switching). When I plan to have hundreds of guns, I make 2 because that's the minimum to test switching. 2 characters. 2 attacks. 2 NPCs. 2 endings. 2 levels. 2 quests... Only when everything is implemented I either release as mvp or start adding more content into otherwise finished game.
So in case of bedsheet deformation, I would make a function that returns deformed bedsheet, but in first release it would simply randomly returned one of 2 premade assets.
If NMS has been honest with what they had vs. what their vision was, they wouldn't even have had to suffer all the negativity.
Imagine if ED had marketed itself around the idea of being able to jump out of your ship and play in first person, people would have been furious.
The fact that NMS managed to come back and actually implement pretty much everything they had originally promised is pretty amazing, but I think it's an anomaly, and most games that suffer from initial disappointment will end up being cancelled.
The problem seems to be that Sean Murray suffered from a case of Peter Molyneux syndrome whenever he got interviewed which was a lot - somehow his future ideas suddenly became a reality when he opened his mouth.
Good to see they made it right and are successful.
I haven’t followed the progress of this game for a long time but it reminds me of the importance of MVPs. If you can’t get something out on the market that is fun within a reasonable time, it likely never will successful.
People rag on about incomplete games a lot but these days games a long past the throw over the wall products they used to be. They are living products designed to last a decade or more. Getting real players on the game and driving the feedback for future development is critical to getting a final product that is perfect.
I guess it depends on the developers' definition of "successful." If the goal was to ship a completed game than Star Citizen is an abject failure. If the goal was to make hundreds of millions of dollars working on an overly ambitious passion project than it has been wildly successful.
Occasionally I fire up Star Citizen, discover the controller support is still awful, and never see all the stuff they have been working on. Having heaps of developers and artists working on fluff is great if you have the money, but you need a solid core.
When did hackernews stop enjoying strange niche software? If people think starcitizen is cool, why do you care if they pay developers to make their weird game? No one is going to come slap league of legends out of your hands and force you to play a space sim. I quite enjoy playing SC, and have spent a grand total of $50 on it 5 years ago, and gotten at least a hundred hours of play time out of it. Am I frustrated by the developers? Absolutely. Do I enjoy the product? Also yes.
I had great experiences with DayZ when it was still an Arma mod. The standalone was very disappointing. On the other hand, the dev of the original mod was the lead on the standalone (for a while) so buying it made me feel like I was contributing more directly to him.
Part of the reason I liked the mod so much was because of how unpolished it felt, the ui sort of stapled on top of the Arma ui, everything a little janky and you're plunged into a hostile zombie world. Funny how something unpolished can feel more appropriate.
The UI in the mod was honestly working better and the mod had more features, better working zombies than the standalone game for a long time. The zombie mechanics was mostly a distraction and what the main draw was the long realistic weather and survival mechanics in a vast well simulated world, with realistic weapons / injury mechanics.
Buying early-access is quite different from kickstarter style financing.
I only buy early access if the product is already worth the money at the time I buy it. For example factorio was already a great game when I bought it, but only hit 1.0 several years later.
It does sound silly the way they present it here, which is intentional. But I recently started Skyrim, and damned if the unrealistic way NPCs sleep IS pretty annoying. They just rotate 90° on their z axis and hover over the bed, stiff as a board, with their eyes open.
If this is something that you might see an NPC do while walking around your ship, that's something that Star Citizen can do to differentiate it from existing space pilot sims, so i don't think it's totally ridiculous. But the more practical approach would have been bunks that close like drawers so you never see them sleeping, or stiff sleep sacks that can simply bulge.
Remember when I was young C programmer out of varsity - immature really.
Wasted a year to port some software over to a new embedded platform but eventually it became a new OS (GOS - named after me obviously) , network stack (RS485 based) with queues , new debugger but it was all so buggy that is crashed more than it ran.
I was so overwhelmed as I kept working on new stuff without fixing existing stuff that eventually a veteran saw me struggling and took me aside and helped me to do a quick and dirty port minus all the crud.
I learned a valuable lesson - yes write good code - but good enough - and know when to STOP and SHIP it.
Put some effort into defining scope and prevent yourself from improving your design as you go. (There may be time for that next time)
Know your platform!
If you know exactly how well the different things you need are going to behave you are free to take every shortcut out there. If you're experienced you'll carve out a space for you to return to if you need. i.e. you make things modular where needed.
The first iteration should be working code and unless there's time to make improvements you don't. You move on to the next thing.
A lot of misinformed comments in this thread, most of which are repeating the “scam” canard. I expected better of HN than the sort of rhetoric that shows up on r/games.
I’m not a backer of the game, but I have been following it with interest over the past several years. The fact is, SC has shipped 17 quarterly releases over the past four years. Each has made demonstratable progress towards the ultimate goal, which is an immersive sim MMO with triple-A production value and real-time action gameplay.
All of these things have been done before, but they’ve never been done all at the same time. (Immersive sims: Deus Ex, System Shock. MMOs: World of Warcraft, Eve. Triple-A action gameplay: Call of Duty, Battlefield.) It’s a lot of work, and the core networking technology required to make it an MMO, server meshing, is yet to be proven out. There’s plenty to criticize.
But the game is very obviously not a scam, nor is it “selling JPEGs.” For $45, you can download and play it right now, access all the content available now and in the future, and never pay another cent. Anyone saying otherwise is lazily repeating Internet memes, and HN deserves better than that.
(If you don’t want to pay $45–and I wouldn’t blame you; I never pay for software based on future potential—you can see its current state very easily with a visit to Twitch or YouTube. There’s plenty of streamers playing it.)
I backed it very early and while not calling it a scam, I moved it from "In development" to "basically failed" in my head because frankly it didn't deliver close to what it promised in a reasonable time.
They are clearly working on something and apparently people are happy with it but I'd be very surprised if they ever deliver what I payed them for: A cinematic ,mediocre to good, single player space shooter to keep me entertained for a few hours.
They seem unable to put a cut in it and just finish this part of the project. It'll probably never live up to their ever increasing expectations.
(Not blaming anyone but me for giving them money. I learned a lot since then)
maybe they'll finally crack the unsolved problem in physics of predicting friction coefficients between arbitrary materials & surfaces. 10 years might be worth the wait!
You may consider Star Citizen a scam, but it's definitely not a Ponzy scheme. In a Ponzy scheme the profits of early "investors" are paid from the money later investors put in.
A few differences between starcitizen and GTA: when GTA started development it was being made by an existing studio, SC when it started was like 5 dudes, so they've had to build the studio at the same time as they're building the game. GTA is an improvement on a previously done format, breaking very little new ground. The SC devs literally had to re-write large parts of the Cryengine to add 64bit support so they could build whole solar systems (at about 1/10th scale, but still quite large). Comparing the two is like saying, Ford was making a million cars a year 20 years ago, Tesla is a scam because they cant make a million cars a year.
I don't think those comparisons are fair to make. GTA V has been developed by an established studio, while CIG has been built up from scratch. Rockstar already had an engine trailered to them ready made with the support from several of their studios. CIG have been running and supporting a live multiplayer environment since 2015.
Also all three of your variables - scope, time and budget - have been dynamic and mostly increasing, while progress has been made. There's obviously a problem with scope and time management, but I don't think criminal levels.
Apples and Oranges (with a development goal of pumpkins)
I’m not sure how they’ve structured the game sales and add ons (ship sales). Over charging people isn’t illegal..it’s a shame though.
But if at some point enough people start asking their credit card companies for charge backs, this won’t go on too much longer. Though I suspect the higher ups have paid themselves well enough, it won’t matter to them.
I suspect the majority to just forget about it, or be too embarrassed to make a fuss and just walk away from the money they’ve spent.
There are a huge amount of slightly older games out there for good prices..,
This is arguably an improvement over their previous focus, adding thousand-dollar consumable ships with the hopes that their high-rolling whales would keep them laughing all the way to the bank.
No different than the bartender AI, defecation, elevator UI, etc. It's a smoke screen to serve as an illusion of "healthy" development. It's a means to sell more ships.
No one will buy ships for a game that will never exist, but they will for a game that they "believe" will eventually exist.
450 million is a ridiculous amount of money for any software product. It breeds internal bureocracy and lost focus. They must have 100 or more C-level people by now.
But maybe I finally got it after all these years. It's not about the software or the playable game. It's about storytelling. That's what the whales are addicted to.
It's "VXJunkies", but with big bucks. I don't blame them. I also find it fascinating to watch and read about the latest technical details about some specific tech that they came up with.
S42 and PU will never happen. But what might happen is, that some of the employees take all that knowledge and skill they've been gathering all these years in CI. They will setup a new indie game studio and will release something actually viable and playable. Maybe a new "No Man's Sky" with a cool tech stack.
I put some decent money into Star Citizen. Then I ended up in jail for over 8 years. I remember thinking, "Well, at least Star Citizen will be finished when I get out..."
They have a publicly available progress tracker* that’s based off of their internal Jira. They only forecast one quarterly release at a time, though, so there’s no ultimate release date. Given the size and complexity of the project, I doubt they would be able to make an accurate forecast.
*I’m on mobile so can’t give you the URL, but searching “star citizen roadmap” should lead you to it.
They had a roadmap for the next three or four quarters, which they initially said they would only add items to they are committing to shipping.
That obviously didn't work out and people were getting pissed because the closer the release date for a feature got, the more likely it was for that feature to get moved back or even removed from the roadmap entirely, not to be seen again for several years.
It goes a bit beyond lack of progress, which is still being made. Mostly bad management.
Cloud Imperium is, at this point, a modern art studio that is constantly trying to see just how overtly they can make fun of their patrons while still receiving big checks.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041492941/jens-haaning-kunst...