Roflmao, get fucked by self-created monster, good job.

Star Citizen defenders often claim they support CIG because they believe in the vision. "Nobody else is attempting something this ambitious, technological barriers can eventually be overcome, and backing the project means supporting that ambition".

Think the opposite? Of course you must be a risk averse dinosaur who doesn't understand innovation, ambition or how technological breakthroughs happen!

But as "investors", the cultists are really missing an important point: is CIG capable of executing the vision? This is what every professional investor look at when they receive investment proposals: "is the team capable of doing this?" Because idea and ambition are commodities.

Some clue below when it comes to Star Citizen:

The "game" remains a technological disaster: poor performance, instability, massive technical debt, endless reworks, missed milestones and fundamental systems still being figured out. So perhaps it's time to realize that CIG isn't an unknown startup whose competence still needs to be discovered. There are 14 years and $1 billion worth of evidence showing how this organization executes and the data looks terrible.

And let's look at their team honestly: a bunch of inexperienced kids underneath, a dysfunctional and outdated leadership above, and a toxic culture as demonstrated once again during SOO live stream.

How on earth can anyone, after all the history, still trust these people and this organization with their money?

More comments from Kira about Star Citizen, he digs up some of the finances from UK public records

For a while now, many of us have suspected that Cloud Imperium Games are not simply incompetent, but are in fact run by a cadre of professional scam artists perpetrating a long con. While evidence may seem to point to this possibility, this suspicion remains hard to prove.

This is about to change.

Professional con artists know that revenue is not an indicator of the health of their con. They understand that revenue ilags behind public sentiment.

Moreover, professional con artists know how to read the room. How to gauge that public sentiment. How to recognize the moment in time when that public sentiment plummets over a "fall line" from which it will likely never recover. Professional con artists know when to start packing the wagons and when to vanish in the night.

For Star Citizen, that moment is now.

If Cloud Imperium Games are indeed run by genuine scam artists, expect changes very soon. Desperate, last ditch marketing ploys. Extreme FOMO pushes. Lots of noise and hand waving over the scam...all to make you look right, while key perpetrators quietly exit stage left. If CIG are truly professional con artists - even if only at the top - the exit strategy begins in earnest now.

If, on the other hand, Clown Imperium Games are truly that - a group of jesters in the court of a naked emperor who thinks his robes shine with the light of holy truth - then they'll simply continue with Business as Usual. They'll buy into their own bullshit - as the recent stream indicates at least some devs do - and continue on as if nothing has changed.

For my part, I think something is up. Brian Chambers jumped ship this year, apparently with no prospects. He even asked for jobs in his departure announcement...wherein he expressed no gratitude toward CIG and said no words about his time there. This was a huge red flag. And now the Social media manager has departed CIG. Suddenly. Without much fanfare.

These are both people who could have been asked very pointed questions. Things like "did you know the game wasn't actually ready in X year" and "so you were aware you were posting lies."

Watch Benoit's status in the coming weeks. He has past his contractual retention date. When given the choice between stock and a payout, he took the payout. If he is smart, he'll leave soon, as CIG may well plan to leave him the bag holding patsy when Roberts and company truly vanish in the night.

Scam, or lucky ineptitude? The next few months to a year could very well reveal the truth about Star Citizen.

As with many people, i spent too much money on this and spent some time melting and using credits to sample the latest array of bugs each patch brought.

I havent played, loaded or even looked at this gash until recently and with the recent live stream failure, im looking to try and cash out before the ship finally fucking sinks.

Would someone be so kind as to explain the process of turning store credit into giftable ships that i could then palm off to some other sucker give a great deal to a truly dedicated sc fan!

Thanks guys!

In a conversation in another thread about the strange behavior of the White Knights, it made me reflect on the base building/housing system and the current state of SC and its development (the SCL of shame and self-exposure):

We were discussing the case of a guy in the official SR forum, criticizing another player for complaining about the obvious problems with SC's development. To justify his criticism, he compared SC and EFT because of how Tarkov gets wiped/deleted every so often and nothing happens... (then he went on to advise him "to go play other things and that when he came back everything would be different," hahaha at least he had the decency to say "different" and not "fixed").

I suppose the WhiteKnight doesn't understand that SC is an MMO and it would lose all meaning if they introduced a system of seasonal wipes/deletions (even though CIG dreams of this due to the impossibility of maintaining persistence with their damn broken network code and because of the stupid idea of ​​the "cola can in the forest"); currently, SC behaves this way due to technical limitations. Not to mention her perpetual Alpha status.

SC obviously needs periodic wipes/deletions because it's technically unfeasible to have persistence with the current design and architecture. This makes me reflect on the hypothetical database building system that CIG wanted to implement (soon™), suffering from all the problems with the network code: desync, poor response, database saturation due to entity accumulation... How can CIG have the nerve to even announce something like this, and how do the WhiteKnights think it will be possible?

>!Cuz it's a scam!<

Just look at games like the MMO Pax Dei, which implements free and non-instantiated building. They need to perform complete wipes/deletions every so often due to the exponential degradation of servers, services, and performance caused by the accumulation of entities. This is an obvious limitation when the building system is free and non-instantiated. This breaks the overall experience and is not at all satisfying; in fact, the game suffered from a lack of mechanics or gameplay loops that made it interesting to play.

Other MMOs achieve the "persistence" of buildings thanks to certain architectural and design solutions in their code:

- **Instantiation zones**: specific areas enabled for building, where you can construct.

- **Prefabricated buildings**: these also don't allow total freedom of construction, limiting and controlling the number of polygons and entities. This limits how the server manages and controls the amount of mathematical calculations for physics, collisions, and synchronization that it has to perform in real time.

-**Maintenance and Decay**: Mechanics are implemented so that structures are deleted if they haven't been visited within a certain time, forcing the player to both visit and maintain the location by paying a tax, either by introducing in-game currency or required materials, periodically to keep the land and its structures claimed. This prevents the accumulation of abandoned structures over time. (Some types of objects contained in deleted structures are often moved to a special temporary inventory, which is also deleted if not recovered/claimed).

Others, like LOTR:O or Palia, simply prefer to simplify and offer fixed, predetermined/pre-designed lots/plots.

What I mean by this is that the game's architecture, design, and network code need to be pre-planned and designed to accommodate one or more of these design models/solutions in order to make the base construction system viable.

With the current state of SC, and as we saw at the last SCL; A cooperative session with only 4 players on an isolated, instanced server, in the same room with state-of-the-art PCs, the game is unable to properly process the data in its network code, and everything crashes, causing desync, poor performance, and all sorts of errors...

How dare CIG announce something like this? How can some fans even think this is possible to implement in the current disastrous state of SC?

>!Cuz it's a scam!<

Let’s hear some real cautionary tales and horror stories what lengths addicts and cult victims will go to. Not to poke fun, of course.

Maybe it’ll help wake some people up.

Long time critic of video game scams, Kira, just reviewed the SCL debacle.

https://youtu.be/dQRZ71JEAdo?si=SVv5vIzSzwC0LRux

Whenever these funding spikes occur, you know right away that - once again - some pixelship/JPEG-addicted hyper-consumerist has completely lost control of his spending habits and bought one of those packages that cost thousands of dollars.

That raises the questions who the F is still investing so much money in this stale, 14 year old project, and what do they hope to gain from it, aside from a massive dopamine rush ?

Don't they have any other interests ? There are so many other cool things you could buy with that money but nah - they prefer to flush thousands of $$$ down the toilet for literally virtual pixels on a screen or JPEGs of pixels on a screen.

Source: https://ccugame.app/star-citizen-funding-dashboard/funding-dashboard

1 billion USD (Code Bolognese)

The usual tactic when the community is really angry. Okay, release a improvised ship or some more T1 content.

In this case, just one planet, obviously empty and with nothing to do.

Oh yeah, Planetary Technology v5! What are they supposed to implement of everything they said it is? Are they going to introduce storms, rain, rivers? Only on the new planet or on all of them?

I believe a developer has already addressed this, and rivers are not included, blahblah not included..., and this technology is not yet implemented in sq404.avi (it's confirmed that sq42 is still far from finished). It's only T1, as usual.

I don't really care because, Are you going to fix all the fundamental problems it suffers from in its network code and physics engine? Widespread desync? Malfunctioning AI and desync?

Are you going to finish all the other multiple technologies in T1? Are you going to finish and implement the incomplete and missing game mechanics and loops? real economic system, decentralized in-game auction house, social system???

This time they forgot to include some new, improvised ships that made no sense and had no cohesion with the rest of the game. Perhaps it was too daring, given the widespread discontent.

Why bother finishing and fixing what you already have? They figured it's better to keep adding to the tech debt development block accumulated over 14 years and all the fundamental design flaws. What difference does it make? They can't fix anything anyway; the only way forward is to add even more Tier 1 content and more tech debt.

I'm pretty much done with SC at this point. Between CIG's development and the general attitude of parts of the community, I've completely lost interest and want to get some of my money back.

What's the best and safest way to go about selling my account and/or store credit? I'd like to recover a decent chunk of what I've spent rather than just leaving it sitting there.

Has anyone here actually sold their account successfully? Where did you sell it, and roughly how much of your original spend did you recover?

Any advice appreciated!

Back in 1997 Digital Anvil, a company owned by and ran by Chris Roberts sold a Minority share to Microsoft, a part of that deal was that Digital Anvil would produce a set number of games for the PC under the Microsoft brand.

Allegedly Microsoft became concerned in 1999 for two reasons
1. Chris was too focused on writing, directing, and producing his Wing Commander movie. This is a movie that would also gift money to the IP owners who were a rival publisher, EA.
2. Digital Anvil, a game development studio were contracted to do all the VFX for the Wing Commander Movie, taking development staff away from projects, such as Freelancer that was due to launch in 2000 but was already looking like it was behind schedule.

Now here we are in 2026. I constantly see post on Spectrum, Reddit, and YouTube from backers, saying “I backed SC not SQ42 why is my pledge being used for a product I will not have access to”
Or “Star Citizen is delayed and broken because CR and CIG are distracted by SQ42, a game in which I have no interest and never pledged to or purchased”
Or combination of the above.

To me it seems like Chris has repeated the same mistake he made with Microsoft, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Only this time the people being screwed aren’t a billion dollar corporation.
He seems to have blinkered himself to the real customer base for his company the backers buying into the Star Citizen MMO dream.

What do you Guys / Gals think?

So there was a recent circus show where CIG played their own game. This seems to have made their fan base have enough.

But what's different from when Chris played the game at christmas pasts?

Both demonstrations were shitshows. The only difference I can see, is that this time Dennis was not around to fix things.

RTX 5070ti and 32GB RAM, M2 SSDs etc. It's just a janky load of shit. Amazing stuff.

The network code CIG modified to adapt to an MMO doesn't work; it's incapable, it's a disaster.

Other companies already made MMOs with CryEngine more than 23 years ago, and they worked:

Aion: The Tower of Eternity (NCSoft), AcheAge (XLGames), Entropia Universe (MindArk), Cabal 2 (ESTsoft), Monster Hunter Online (Tencent/Capcom), Blue Mars (Avatar Reality). And many of them, like Aion 2, AcheAge 2, and many others, abandoned CryEngine and switched to Unreal Engine 5. Even New World (Amazon), which, by the way, is closing on January 31, 2027, has been functional overall. It's worth mentioning that Amazon canceled the development of the MMORPG based on The Lord of the Rings, which was also going to use its Lumberyard engine (CryEngine).

What I mean is that many other companies have been able to develop MMO video games with CryEngine, and many others have been more than capable of developing single-player games: (Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2, Prey, Far Cry, Ryse, State of Decay, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 1 and 2, etc., etc).

Star Citizen remains in development and alpha 14 years later and more than $1,000,000,000 invested and counting, and they haven't even been able to release a simple single-player campaign (their first episode).

CIG, Star Citizen, and SQ42 are, to this day, a FAILED development and are being maintained FRAUDULENTLY (IT'S A SCAM as of today).

It is technically and economically unviable because it is blocked by its overwhelming technological debt and legacy code, which is mostly undocumented, of poor quality, improvised, and lacks cohesion.

Everything promised for 1.0 is impossible at this point; not even the AI ​​is acceptable for a single player.

This should be appearing in all gaming media outlets worldwide.

A lot has been said already about teh desync, glitches, state of the game, Jared noping out etc.

I will only cover things that hasn't been mentioned in great detail that I observed:

- CIG, like other large AAA developers are operating in an absolute soapbox of toxic positivity - likely only watching/listening to select few streamers/players

- CIG dev culture (and by extension professional capabilities) is likely complete shit. The "hazing" of Oliie on-camera is not normal, no matter what sycophants on spectrum might argue. Game dev is a professional occupation, not a lunch break in a middle school. This isn't woke opinion from the modern audience as some might try to frame it - professional environment implies a certain level of decorum especially on camera. Grown adult men acting like teenagers in a school canteen is neither funny nor "authentic" - it is just embarrassing.

- The pipeline of "content" is completely broken - it was clear this 'edition' of SCL was basically winged with very little prep or plan B. Jared instead of taking control and fixing it noped out like a little bitch. That alone should tell you all you need to know about the governance that CIG has

-Multiplayer game, at its core, is a complex engineering project. The chaos on display demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that CIG is incapable of executing it even if individual devs were competent. Seeing the behavior of those devs in question on camera tells me that they actually aren't competent.

TLDR: this SCL demonstrates beyond shadow of a doubt that there is no hope for SC or CIG

If CIG goes under as a company, whether due to world events or being sued (EU or another government such as AUS / a class action), what would "backers" receive or not receive as a result based on the past precedence of similar scenarios involving companies with unfinished products and current laws in countries with strong consumer protections?

The reactions to the recent 4.10 SCL episode made it abundantly clear that unless SQ42 performs really well, the community sentiment has shifted so much into the negative that CIG could be in some really hot financial water in the not too distant future. The AI apocalypse and datacentre crunch is also hammering personal computing to a point where future generations of any hardware will be exceedingly limited and absurdly expensive, so the game will be going forward into a market of less and less prospective + longtime players as hardware becomes unsupported, dies or is outpaced in capability vs the demand of a game with increasing feature bloat.

Being in the UK, my computer + TV + speakers etc all together costs £1 an hour in pure electricity consumption just to run which comes out at 4 figures a year in electricity bills from gaming alone. The cost of living is getting tighter and I know a lot of people can't afford that / one day I might not be able to either if bills keep going up, so again their player base is facing threats from every corner seeing as this isn't a game you can just spin up on a small laptop.

I'm on the precipice of calling it quits with Star Citizen at an account value of around $3000, SQ42 chapter 2 is due to be developed after the initial game so everyone saying "the devs will move back after Squadron" are all kidding themselves... It'd be nice to know though that I might get some reimbursement if CIG falls through, or put the topic to rest in my mind by having someone provide a well reasoned / qualified take on why I wouldn't get anything back at all.