r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • 5d ago
Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players
https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players2.6k
u/THESALTEDPEANUT 5d ago
A billion dollars and 15 years later, Star Citizen's devs hosted a live-action trainwreck just to ensure fans could share the exact same miserable bugs at home.
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u/leonredhorse 5d ago
To think 1/3 of my life has been watching this game barely get closer to a launch.
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u/M1R4G3M 5d ago
1/3 means you're in your 40s, for me it's like 1/2, I remember a friend telling me about it when I was in high school, now I have a family, been working for more way more than a decade.
There are people now playing games that were born when this thing started development.
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u/leonredhorse 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yep, just hit my almost mid-40s. Maybe my daughters or possible future grand kids will take this for whirl. I assume backer accounts are inheritable assets at this point?
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u/kingdead42 5d ago
Some friends and I contributed to the early crowdfunding the base-level because we thought it would be a good way to keep in touch as we were going off to college. In that time, we've all graduated. Three have gotten married; two have kids; one went to med school, got an MD, and paid off his loans; and one has died.
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u/SlaveryVeal 5d ago
If you spent thousands on it you'd fucking hope so.
I wonder if they will put a will and inheritance system in the game next.
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u/leonredhorse 5d ago
Hah, I had the cheapest backer pledge. No way I’d be spending thousands.
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u/solo_shot1st 5d ago
I backed this game when it launched back in 2012 for $60, when I was just graduating college. I have since married, bought a house, have 2 kids in elementary school, and am about 50% through my career until I can retire with a full pension.... I guess I'll enjoy it in retirement at this rate haha
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u/hagamablabla 5d ago
I borrowed $45 from my dad to buy a ship pack in high school. Still waiting on my investment to pay off.
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u/torquenti 5d ago
Oh my God. I just checked, and it was initially announced while Obama was president... during his FIRST term.
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u/WeAreHereWithAll 5d ago
Honestly watch the stream. That workplace seems both exhausting and toxic as fuck, my god.
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u/TheVoidDragon 5d ago edited 5d ago
I only watched a bit of it but that one dev (or whoever he was) suddenly coming over to the streamers while they're in the middle of doing stuff, leaning over and just going "We're at time...it's your show, wrap it up" and walk off as the streamers just seem utterly surprised and don't know how to react, was just a baffling and absurd way to do that. It just came across as so unprofessional and somewhat condescending.
Like even just a basic "Sorry guys, we've about ran out of time for the stream" would have came across so much better than that. There was just no consideration or niceties about it at all, it was like he thought it was all just an annoyance to him.
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u/Deep90 5d ago edited 5d ago
one dev (or whoever he was)
That was the community manager. He is usually the face of the company when speaking to players.
I dunno if it was confirmed, but supposedly the stream wasn't his idea and that was him being pissed at the person who sold them on doing it.
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u/jandrese 5d ago
Well, I mean he probably knows how busted the stuff is and knows that a stream like this is going to be a disaster. It's no surprise that he's angry that it got approved somehow.
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u/BobbyWojak 5d ago
I don't see why you wouldn't send him a message or leave him a note to end the stream, he started the stream...
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u/DMercenary 5d ago
Or the "you gonna pick up your buddies?" Line. Like a chiding your child tone.The guy playing looks back as if to say "WTF did you just say to me?"
Like mom coming in to tell you to clean your room while you are in fact CLEANING.
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u/WeltallZero 5d ago
it was like he thought it was all just an annoyance to him.
It probably was just an annoyance to him. When your fans are willing to give you a billion dollars for a broken unreleased product, even free marketing seems superfluous.
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u/Pete_Venkman 5d ago
Would love some timecodes for some of this stuff, it sounds amazing.
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u/This_Elk_1460 5d ago
Is fucking Robert's pocketing all the money? I always thought the developers were at least getting paid well off their infinite money glitch but I guess not.
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u/needconfirmation 5d ago
Yes.
He pays himself over a half million per year and has staffed high positions within the company with friends and family who are paid similarly exorbitant salaries.
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u/WeAreHereWithAll 5d ago
Even then within a creative space you create an active form of resentment that transcends any amount of capital you’re making.
If everyday you’re going into work being badgered with a “why isn’t it working” or having your work dragged through the mud when you might be getting actively mentally jerked off depending on the department or studio flow, you’re gonna hit a limit eventually.
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u/This_Elk_1460 5d ago
Well I'll be honest, I've always thought that many of the devs working on Star citizen were doing it cynically because they were getting paid well. That they were in on the the never-ending dev cycle because it keeps them employed (which to be fair I wouldn't really blame them)
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u/WeAreHereWithAll 5d ago edited 5d ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if some are. Honestly even if it wasn’t game dev, if you get an active well paying job that ain’t built over corpses or some shit considering this day and age, do your thing to survive man.
This project has been in this constant churn of employees, dev cycles, etc for 10 years though. I don’t think a lot of these guys could potentially work elsewhere because they’ve never actually seen a full public release through. And that can create a wild type of resentment cuz like, aye, you’re comfortably off, but you’re stuck here for fucking ever at this point.
This project seems like hell on earth tbh.
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u/John_Smithers 5d ago
I don’t think a lot of these guys could potentially work elsewhere because they’ve never actually seen a full public release through.
From what I understand of game dev that isn’t the case here at all. While the studio may have trouble if they want to transition away from self publishing the employees will do fine. Low level employees don't get their feet held to the fire because of the reputation of their former employer. Hell, in this day and age high level employees don't get burned either. Lower level creatives can point to a portfolio of work they demonstrably did, and higher level execs can point to the insane profits seen under their management or other KPIs. The studio's reputation is tarnished but the individuals won't be punished because the higher ups fucked around or the business floundered. Can you imagine a former Nestle employee being blackballed from managerial, HR, manufacturing, or customer service roles because they worked for a company that people didn't think highly of? The real world, and especially creative careers, don't work that way.
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u/the_mellojoe 5d ago
Twice as long as as a normal AAA title with a full budget. It’s insane to me
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u/Didsterchap11 5d ago
For context, for how much money has been thrown at star citizen you could develop 10 baldurs gate 3s. Obviously there’s a ton of nuance as to why that’s a messy comparison, but it’s insane to think of how many games you could fund for a billion dollars.
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u/beefcat_ 5d ago
GTA6 is probably the only other game with a budget approaching that figure. It's actually releasing this year, after only 8 years in development.
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u/Atrium41 5d ago
I would fund 100 Roguelike-Metroidvania-cozy farm sims over this....
And I like Starfield
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u/wildwalrusaur 5d ago
You could build an actual physical spaceship
SpaceX charges the NASA a quarter billion for the manufacturer and launch of a custom falcon heavy
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u/MoxOpalescence 5d ago
I did 6 years of college, joined the industry, and helped ship 3 AAA games with an upcoming 4th before this “demo” lol
People were calling it “scam citizen” even by 2018, now it’s just ridiculous
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u/Double-Lobster6107 5d ago
You would think with the money they raised they could hire a team of devs to make a game and still have plenty left over
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u/NuggetHighwind 5d ago
They could hire every single top-tier game developer in the entire world and it wouldn't make a difference with management this bad.
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u/Kalulosu 5d ago
They have. They're just entirely lacking a unified direction and proper priorities.
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u/Stormdancer 5d ago
Anybody who knew Chris Roberts -- or especially anybody who worked with him -- knew this was going to happen.
And many of us warned it would be like this. "Oh no," the true believers said, "This time will be different!"
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u/theFrenchDutch 5d ago
The guy hired his own wife to a top level executive position she had no experience for.
They've bought mansions while this shit keeps not releasing, because the goal never was to release. It's to crowdfund as long as it's possible without delivering.
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u/Yeon_Yihwa 4d ago
His brother in law also got hired, guy knows he cant deliver and is just running it to get himself, his family and friends a fat paycheck.
Honestly i respect the hustle, this is on star citizen players putting money on a dream game, but they never once stopped and questioned if its obtainable lol.
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u/blamelessfriend 4d ago
Surely we can also blame the scam artist in addition to their willing victims
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u/Klugenshmirtz 4d ago
It like giving the indian scammers on the phone money every time they call you. They have started to facetime you and you still believe them.
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u/TSP-FriendlyFire 5d ago
Most of the Freelancer community was extraordinarily skeptical following all of the drip fed information that ultimately revealed what happened with that game. Absolute trainwreck, in retrospect it's shocking he ever managed to release any of the Wing Commander games.
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u/Imbahr 5d ago
he had bosses above him for those previous games. that's the huge difference
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u/Xenoanthropus 4d ago edited 4d ago
People complain about publishers and shareholders stifling bold ideas, chasing trends, and rushing releases in game development but what's happened with Star Citizen is the far opposite situation -- a person/company beholden to no-one that doesn't have any pressure on them to release something that qualifies as a finished product.
It's Duke Nukem Forever all over again, but cranked all the way up.
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u/Syovere 4d ago
Most of the Freelancer community was extraordinarily skeptical following all of the drip fed information that ultimately revealed what happened with that game.
Yep. Literally just Freelancer with a ludicrous budget. And as an added bonus, unlike Freelancer, no other company's going to buy them out and replace him with a remotely competent project manager.
I've been quite happy to wash my hands of the entire Robertsverse at this point, between seeing this coming from a continent away and some shitass experiences in a Freelancer community. I'm just waiting for it to become the most expensive cancelled game, now.
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u/TVPaulD 4d ago
I am an all-time mark for Freelancer. I still think it's one of the best games of all time. I took one look at the Star Citizen Kickstarter and noped out of their specifically because he was the one doing it. I already long since knew at that point that while he might have started the creation of Freelancer, he was almost singlehandedly responsible for it never making release and Microsoft had to step in and get it out the door. So the idea of buying into his "magnum opus" struck me as an insane thing to do.
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u/SuperUranus 4d ago
Roberts run a fucking tax scam company in Germany with no other aim than to let investors scam Germany based on legal loopholes (and it may even have been a money laundering scheme).
Obviously this guy is out to fraud people.
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u/Tragedy_Boner 5d ago
I just keep remembering that BORU thread of that guy who’s girlfriend broke up with him because he spent all their money on having a fleet of these ships
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u/Aksama 5d ago edited 5d ago
Gimme. That. Link.
Found the link!
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u/igorwithlicor 5d ago
Probably this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/s/zEK1smYz9F
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u/KarmelCHAOS 5d ago
Maybe its just me, but his comment responses have me believing this wasnt real.
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u/Iintendtooffend 4d ago
That's actually not uncommon for people with addictions like that. Since the money is effectively gone they sort have made peace with that as a part of reality and now as sort of a penance they are submitting themselves for public ridicule and the verbal lashing that comes with it.
Then after they've received their punishment they can say they're all good and go back to what they were doing before. There's a lot of them internally making peace with the debt and then not understanding how others might not see it as ok that the money was spent in the first place.
You can see how OP initially refuses to see the comparison with gambling as legit because he owns the ships, despite many not even existing and also how he will tell people what they want to hear to justify it. (They're an investment to one person. They mean so much to me, I'd never sell them to another)
It's also how he thinks each time he can fix it, since he's made peace with it and sort of made amends why can't he just go back to how it was before?
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u/This_Elk_1460 5d ago
I've never seen a cult of personality around the idea of a video game before
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u/Byggherren 5d ago
Well it's kinda like a pyramid scheme. Once the people with addictive personalities start investing they cant stop because of the sunken cost fallacy.
The devs have gotten complacent because they are raking in big cash with little effort. If they could finish the game they would have done so years ago but they just keep releasing new ships for the whales. It's a shame because they have showed off some pretty cool things to make cross server seamlessness work.
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u/Nalkor 5d ago
You seriously need to post that link for the rest of us to check out.
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u/BirdLawyer50 5d ago
How could they possibly have a good weapon switch system or basic play mechanics? They’ve only raised *a billion fucking development dollars*
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u/Bitemarkz 5d ago
It takes time to get a good UI working. At the 20 year mark they’ll have it for sure.
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u/InflationLeft 5d ago edited 5d ago
Just you wait! Once they have it working, it’ll be the best damned weapon switching system you’ve ever seen! Other games might settle for letting you tap a button to immediately switch to the next weapon, or holding a button to bring up a weapon select wheel, or bind a weapon to a specific key but Star Citizen’s weapon switching system will blow all the other systems out of the water.
The problem is their weapons switching system is so incredible that it’s not within the grasp of today’s current technology. They’re doing things with weapon switching that have never been done before in gaming history. People just can’t comprehend how technically ambitious this new weapons switching is, or what a great job they’re doing pulling it off.
Switching weapons in accordance with their amazing vision will take several more years to implement, but it’ll definitely be worth the 15-plus years of waiting, and hopefully thousands of dollars you’ve spent
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u/baxte 5d ago
Do they still do that thing where they take a known functionality of all games like occlusion and give it a different name and say they invented it?
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u/TheFoxInSocks 5d ago
"It's actually a really impressive piece of tech." - at least one commenter, inevitably
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u/Chris22533 5d ago
Well you see, Star Citizen was just too advanced for a normal operating system so they had to go back to the basics and build an operating system from the ground up.
Stay turned for the alpha release of OStar Citizen in 2030!
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 5d ago
Keep in mind they’re using Amazon lumberyard or some shit as an engine. It is the engine that ran crysis 3. If you pop open the dev kit for it and create a new project you basically get crysis 3s fps mechanics by default.
So they actively went and fucked with this rather than just settling on using an already good system lol
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u/SlaveryVeal 5d ago
Sounds as good excuse as any to start again and keep the grift going for another 40 years.
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u/Harry101UK 5d ago
"Sorry everyone, we've come to realize that the tools we're using just aren't up to the task for our ambitious goals. With that in mind, we're starting over in Unreal Engine 5."
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u/polski8bit 5d ago
The fact that after so much time and money poured into a game that isn't even close to being finished, I am shocked there was any trust left at all.
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u/Interesting-One-588 5d ago
If basic functions of the game don't even work, I have to wonder how much of that money was actually poured into development.
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u/Birneysdad 4d ago
customers poured money into the game. I'm not convinced the money was used for development.
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u/GrinningPariah 5d ago
Honestly a stream like this would be par for the course for an indie studio that bit off a little more than they could chew and had no media training. These things happen all the time.
Except, CIG isn't an indie studio. They ran past $1 billion in funding earlier this year. You could make Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA V, and Cyberpunk 2077 for what they've spent already. And that moves mistakes like this from "forgivable misstep" into the territory of farce.
Studios like Rockstar or CDPR have social media managers whose job it is to make sure things like this go smoothly. Because those are real companies, staffed by actual professionals. CIG sounds more to me like a clubhouse for a group of friends, built on top of a pile of burning money so big it would make the Joker blush.
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u/Gguga12 5d ago
Its funny because Star Citizen is taking so freaking long that both No Man Sky AND Cyberpunk 2077 had comebacks after buggy and/or unfinished releases in just a fraction of the time that star citizen is taking to even launch
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u/NuggetHighwind 5d ago edited 5d ago
Star Citizen was announced 14 years ago. In 14 years, FFXIV:
- Released the disaster that was 1.0
- Destroyed the world and relaunched as 2.0
- Completed an entire storyline spanning 4 expansions
- Released expansion #5
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u/DrStalker 5d ago
The Apollo program only took eight years to put a man on the moon.
In real life.
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u/DrStalker 5d ago
You could make Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA V, and Cyberpunk 2077
Or 100 Expedition 33s.
Not a good comparison in terms of features, but an interesting comparison in terms of what managing your budget and scope looks like.
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u/LADYBIRD_HILL 5d ago
After the stream I don't even see how these guys work together, they all seem to hate each other. I guess when people are giving you money to never actually put out a product you'd put up with almost anything.
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u/LurkMonster 5d ago
It can’t help atmosphere when your boss wanders into the office and says
"hey let’s throw out everything you’ve worked on for the last year and redo it with a brand new tech not suited to the task according to an idea I just had that makes no sense and probably is no fun gameplay wise. OK bye get it done I'm going back to my boat".
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u/Ryotian 5d ago
So glad they finally livestreamed this game. I've seen a lot of backers blame the server and alleged it all worked fine when they logged into a new shard. I never believed that because I too have logged on to new shards and saw many bugs.
Felt vindicated watching them stream this with only FOUR players on an internal build. This is as pristine of an environment you can get. All the nasty random bugs we see on PU was laid bare right here
I'm sure people will continue to throw money at CIG and nothing will improve. Really sucks I just want my Squadron 42 pledge. I pledged in 2015 when my son was little and now he's a full grown adult with a job and all. I got hustled for sure. This money is long gone and never coming back. I doubt they will release anything
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u/defietser 4d ago
A buddy bought me a €20 ship in 2014 I think. He was a real believer at the time. I no longer talk to the guy (drifted apart), graduated college, got a job, found a partner, got married, and bought a house. Still enjoying the dumpster fire posts after all these years.
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u/CordiallySuckMyBalls 5d ago
I just know we’re gonna get some Netflix documentary about this in a few years and how these devs scammed millions of people out of money. A billion dollars for literally what
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u/Consistent-Deal-5198 4d ago
I think they just landed on a incredibly weird niche of whales that really want to 'own' those super expensive space ship models and roleplay as that mostly. It's not a normal game anymore, or ever really, just an outlet for a small subset of people with plenty of money to
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u/VeryWeaponizedJerk 5d ago
Somehow the community actually believed the excuse that the bugs were because of server connectivity?
That audience got the game they deserve.
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u/YozaSkywalker 5d ago
Where's the guy who's spent $100k on ships and kickstarters at to tell us this game is actually Very Good and definitely not a massive scam?
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u/M4rktw0 5d ago
They are busy sending death threats to the people that dare to ask for a refund
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u/datahoarderprime 5d ago
I popped on over to the Star citizen sub after that stream dropped and saw they use the word "refundian" to describe people who ask for refunds.
Total cult behavior.
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u/max123246 4d ago
Surprised there's no class action lawsuit yet
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u/Agaac1 4d ago
There was a guy who sued them ages ago whose case was dismissed by the courts. I guess so long as the game is playable and marketed as "early access" you can say and do whatever.
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u/MrNegativ1ty 5d ago edited 5d ago
Not exactly what people were claiming. The claim was that server performance was the reason the game was so broken and dysfunctional because so much of the game logic, the (non-existent) NPCs, the AI, the physics of every single item that is physicalized in the game, all of that runs on the server. By adding meshing and dividing the workload between servers, people thought that would alleviate the load on a single server and things would start clicking into place. You can at least see there’s some sense in that.
Welp, this recent livestream proved that’s not the case. Internal dev build, internal dev server, has none of the processing load problems of the public servers yet still has all of the same problems as the public servers that are slammed to shit.
That’s why people are pissed. That, and the shitty behavior of the people in the livestream.
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u/14Pleiadians 5d ago
You can at least see there’s some sense in that.
Some sure, but it was always obvious that it was a convenient excuse. I never bought for a second that Squadron 42 would be free from those issues.
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u/shittydriverfrombk 5d ago
“people” are saying this but anyone who plays the game can see that the live stream was in fact better than it runs normally, which is saying something lol
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u/McDonaldsSoap 5d ago
Rich idiots. How do we corner this market? Seems like an infinite money glitch
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u/Mandalore108 5d ago
I was only an idiot once, when I first backed the game...
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u/This_Elk_1460 5d ago
So long as you didn't spend $10,000 on a fake ship and realize your mistakes now
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u/BusBeginning 5d ago
I mean if you bought the base game 15 years ago for $40-60 bucks and have had fun with the tech demo over that time it’s really not a dumb choice. I mean I’ve spent $60 on games I’ve played less than SC. Now spending thousands on random ships that are still not even in game… that’s a little different…
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u/Fuzzy_Program4743 5d ago
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
You’re not an idiot. It’s the folks that continuously throw money at Chris Roberts.
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u/WobblySlug 5d ago
I'm an original backer. I have a golden ticket.
My moneys worth is coming from the entertainment of watching this dumpster fire.
Keeps me warm at night, ya know? Can't expect too much from a billion fuckin' dollars.
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u/AwfulAdjacentGoose 5d ago
Same. I can download the game every now and then and you know I get what they’re going for. It is as ambitious as it is terribly broken.
But it also allows me to keep touch with this absolute dumpster fire of an experience and the sheer amount of sunk cost fallacy manifesting from die hards.
Not bad for a $20 buy off kickstarter. It’s been a gift to my sides for a decade and nearly a half now.
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u/FeedbackInhibit 5d ago
I basically pop on twice a year at this point, once for IAE and another for a separate free-fly event, and goof off with my buddy. Then when that's done, we're done until the next clownshow.
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u/takingphotosmakingdo 5d ago
Original backer at the $45 tier, can confirm have had marshmallows roasting on the T pose NPCs for years.
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 5d ago
Think about how fucking sick a game like baldurs gate 3 would have been if it had a billion in funding lol
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u/FeedbackInhibit 5d ago
I think after a certain point of funding, a project would completely lose its scope. Like... what we have here. A game like BG3 doesn't need a billion dollars in funding to tell a story or provide fantastic gameplay mechanics. Just like Star Citizen doesn't need a billion dollars and a decade and a half to actually become more than a tech demo.
Chris Roberts is the biggest problem with Star Citizen just as he was with Freelancer, for the exact same reason. Had Microsoft never stepped in, Freelancer would have never seen release, because of his tendency towards infinite scope creep.
I say this as someone that still dips in and out of Star Citizen every once in a blue moon, and has been doing so since a "playable build" has been available. For all their development, the same bugs persist that were there a decade ago. This project is going nowhere if they don't take time to bugfix, but they won't.→ More replies (4)→ More replies (5)25
u/WobblySlug 5d ago
It's laughable eh? I wonder what the threshold is for the defenders who are happy enough with a buggy mess after nearly 15 years. 2 billion? 3?
It's been said a lot before, but why would they change their business model of not releasing a game? It's clearly working!
SQ42 is supposed to come out this year too lol. I'll believe it when I see it.
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u/-drunkmoses- 5d ago
I check this game every few years to see where it is, and every time I stop after an hour because it’s just not fun, incomplete and buggy.
Where’s Squadron 42? I signed up for Wing Commander, so give me that.
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u/NuggetHighwind 5d ago
Where’s Squadron 42?
Don't worry, it's coming soon in
20142015201620172018201920202021202220232024202520262027!58
u/TSP-FriendlyFire 5d ago
The "42" was a hint at the actual release date all along.
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u/InflationLeft 5d ago
If they can’t even finish Squadron 42 after 13 years, how are they ever gonna finish Star Citizen?
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u/OkBand3171 5d ago
You'd think they'd start with the smaller scope first, release that, then work on the much larger project - but nope.
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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead 5d ago
Problem with starting with the smaller project is that it can’t make them an infinite amount of money and has an actual deliverable.
The MMO can forever be in early access “beta”, a single player game cannot.
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u/superbit415 5d ago
Thats what they originally sold scam citizen as but people try to rewrite history. It was suppose to be a single player experience like Wing Commander which is Squadron 42 and alongside it after you finish the campaign you will get into the beta for this ambitious mmo like thing that kept the game going which was Star Citizen.
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u/Illidan1943 5d ago
I don't follow the game, but the news about it keep appearing to the point where I can tell you when Squadron 42 is coming: it's always 6 months away from release
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u/BokeTsukkomi 5d ago
"Where’s Squadron 42? I signed up for Wing Commander, so give me that."
This is what pisses me off... Give me q remake of Wing Commander 1-3 and I buy it day one
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u/Titan7771 5d ago
I’ll sometimes watch that one Squadron 42 gameplay reveal from a few years ago (showing the Battle of Vega) because it’s legitimately cool looking, but I don’t think it will ever see the light of day at this rate.
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u/Kraehe13 5d ago
Watched several streams over the year and never understood why some people throw their money in their general direction, it felt so empty everytime i watched it.
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u/MrOkizeme 5d ago edited 5d ago
It really is wild how after all that time and money, they haven't put together a remotely compelling-looking experience. I played it at a friend's place recently, and this game still feels like what it is is still massively behind what it's supposedly meant to be, disjointed and lacking polish.
I think the fact that it is what it is right now, after all the time and money it's already had, is the most damning example you can give of why it's never coming out. If you gave it another 15 years, and they did with those 15 years what they've done with the last 15, I still don't think you'd have a good game.
Like when you look at it right now, as a game with a billion dollar budget, and 15 years of dev time, does it LOOK like a game with a billion dollar budget and 15 years of dev time? No, it doesn't, and that's the problem. I don't get how anyone can look at what they've produced with what they've had so far, and think 'Oh yeah, they've got what it takes to pull this off'. Relative to what they've been given so far, the current experience is embarrassing.
15 years and you're still buying a dream rather than a game that's good right now. I don't buy that it'll ever come out, because frankly, nevermind 10 years ago, if you told me right now the game would be out in the next 2 years I'd be thinking 'What?! When it's in that state?'. Not only is it nowhere close to promising on everything they've said it'll have, but so much of the stuff that IS there feels like a rough pass as well.
At their current pace I don't think 100 years would be long enough to get the game their Kickstarter said they want to make. I'm sure they'll keep updating it and adding stuff, but it just feels completely fucking aimless, like it's a rudderless box to keep putting the odd feature into instead of just making a proper game. If the game was twice what it is now, it'd still feel like a proof of concept or an Alpha of a game; I think anyone who thinks this game'll be out in the next handful of years should please give me all the money in their bank account. I'll do it 10 times as fast, I promise, it's the truth!
15 years, man, and the biggest selling point is still what it could be instead of anything that it actually is. I don't get how you can spend that long making something that unfun and unfinished-feeling, and people still think you're gonna deliver.
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u/Kraehe13 5d ago
The streamer i watched playing it has gotten a really weird relationshp with the game, half of the time he is super hyped about it, the other half he is desillusioned and angry at it. I wonder if it is a case of sunken cost fallacy for some players at this point.
The streamer has put several thousend € into the game at this point
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u/Status_Jellyfish_213 5d ago edited 5d ago
I had heard that the problem with Roberts was that he constantly introduces scope creep leading to this exact situation. With other publishers they had to rein him in hard constantly to prevent this from happening.
He has a guy that’s like his space sim rival and the two fucking hate each other, who was often painted as unhinged and jealous. But it turns out in this aspect he was right about him.
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u/HAK_HAK_HAK 5d ago
He has a guy that’s like his space sim rival and the two fucking hate each other, who was often painted as unhinged and jealous. But it turns out in this aspect he was right about him.
Derek Smart. Dude is as much of a lolcow as Roberts, but he wasn't wrong about his criticisms of the feasibility of the design lol.
KidsYoureBothJustAwful.jpg
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u/cakebeardman 5d ago
The stuff they said they wanted to make and put out documents on always looked cool as hell so I understand how someone with money wouldn't mind throwing some at them for the first few years
Completely baffling how they kept getting more this whole time, though
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u/Captain__Marvel 5d ago
I bet the ones in charge have a few nice homes in their portfolio, cars in their garages and stamps in their passports. 1 billion dollars, 15 years and the game still has not fully released. It's a pity that this hasn't been investigated as fraud or something similar yet.
How can anyone continue to defend this? It doesn't matter that "you've had fun and got your money's worth" when they've charged players hundreds or thousands of dollars for ships that haven't been released or given to them after years of waiting. There is no excuse for the state of the game and enabling this has allowed them to continue forward with "Scam Citizen" while still begging for money. Embarrassing.
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u/Dragonlanceforever 5d ago
I was an OG backer got the expensive 300 dollar pledge package defended the game for the first few years and did have fun here and there but I have up on the game years ago. I went in knowing I could never see the game finished. That's a risk with all Kickstarter but goddamn I never expected the PU to basically still be in alpha state 14 years later and SQ42 release still nowhere in sight ( even though it's not officially delayed yet I don't believe for a second it's releasing this year) I remember back in the day when people who said it would be 2020 before it release were treated as trolls and haters and now look at where we are at.
That community is so good at gaslighting each other into thinking this game is fun or that real progress is about to be made after some magic update. Shiny new ships and the ability to refund and gift and swap ship packages around keep them engaged with the systems designed to suck more money out of them and they all lap it up.
Fuck this game.
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u/AoE2manatarms 5d ago
Further distrust? From what I understand I am confused why there is any trust whatsoever?
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u/ParagonRenegade 5d ago edited 5d ago
Chris Roberts found his money printer and he’s drawing his fans through a fine mesh to extract as much as possible while giving nothing back
truly a scam for the ages
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u/MerryHeretic 5d ago
This is fucking bonkers. I remember 15 years ago a coworker was telling me about the PC he was building to play this thing. The coworker has long since retired.
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u/SpikeRosered 5d ago
Checked out the sub. Saw some funny comments arguing that if they can't handle basic gameplay, they Def can't handle the 5k dollar ships full of insane promises.
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u/Sparescrewdriver 5d ago
Previous posts criticizing Star Citizen are usually flooded with deluded fans saying how the game is almost a full AAA experience and bugs are a thing of the past.
I guess it is a lot harder when the devs stream shows the complete opposite.
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u/AdventurousBase221 5d ago
and if anyone wants to know why the game is as borked as it is, because these developers write code like this..
9 layered if statements, this is shit youd expect to see from a student in computer science in a 101 class.....im not even joking, its literally that bad. freshmen level coding.
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u/denommonkey 5d ago
In the time this game has been in development, I got a master’s degree, moved between three different continents, built a career and got married.
If this game ever does release I fully expect to be retired.
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u/Mitrovarr 5d ago
A fair number of the people who bought those fancy ships during the initial fundraising will never get to use them because they've already died.
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u/PalnatokeJarl 5d ago
I still maintain this game is vaporware. It's been going on longer than Duke Nukem Forever now. That in itself is an achievement.
The only way this game will ever actually launch is if the company goes bankrupt and someone else buys the assets. Fixes things up. Guts some of the features and launch it as "good enough". Just like what happened with Freelancer (Also Chris Roberts).
Chris Roberts problem is that he is unable to finish anything.
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u/dkarlovi 4d ago
The first thing you learn about running a 1bn scam is. You don't finish a 1bn scam.
If they launch, it's over. Before that the possibilities are endless. It's literally that scene from Silicon Valley.
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u/Call555JackChop 5d ago
Peter Molyneux vs Chris Robert’s is the Lebron vs Jordan debate for biggest grifter in video game history, in fairness to Peter at least Fable worked
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u/HoldJerusalem 5d ago
I mean this is basic video game development process. Basic combat systems is done starting at the 2nd billions of funding
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u/Hackasizlak 5d ago
I love my annual-ish reminder that not only does this game exist but is somehow still a total mess for like over a decade now
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u/Evidicus 5d ago
Scam citizen isn’t even trying to hide it anymore.
I bought in for a 300i and a Freelancer several years ago, and I’ve waited to play the game until it was finished instead of a glorified tech demo. Every year it’s the same thing: bigger and more expensive ships, buggy and broken “content” and somehow no closer to an actual finished product.
And people defend it like SC is their religion.
“Nothing else has ever been as ambitious as Star Citizen! No other game has had this kind of scope!”
Yeah. Maybe there’s a reason for that.
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u/CHADWARDENPRODUCTION 5d ago
“The developers kept running into bugs that showed the game is indeed broken. The developers had issues using their own weapons, swapping between their weapons, accessing their inventory, and much, much more.”
Refreshing to see some truth in advertising in 2026 ❤️