• yamanii@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    I’ve genuinely been sat in meetings that got derailed for 30 minutes so that the placement of objects that players are likely never to interact with could be discussed in detail. There’s just no actual focus on getting the game done.

    We have a saying here that translates to something like this: “perfect is the enemy of done”. Getting lost in details like this will always delay things a ton.

    • Fades@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      My boss LOVES to throw that out all the time as a defense for when I inform him that he and mgmt are rushing something out the door that isn’t ready.

      It definitely has wisdom but it’s not something to wave around all the time either.

      Not that that’s the problem here, SC ain’t ever coming out and it’s not because of perfection. It’s because it’s a scam lol

      Read this fucking gofundme trash: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    And then, compare it to No Man’s Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.

    I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man’s Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.

    Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      1 month ago

      NMS certainly evolved a lot, but I wouldn’t call it incredible. Also, despite the game universe being absurdly large, you can see everything there is to see visiting less than 20 star systems

      All the daily quicksilver quests are a fucking chore, too.

    • ms.lane@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Also to be fair (and critical), while Sean lied to both Sony and us about the state of the game-

      They also probably did have most of everything they promised at one point, then the Christmas Flood happened. That’s when the lies started and but those lies were likely more for Sony rather than us, as it’s entirely possible Sony would have outright cancelled the game if they’d known how much was actually lost in the flood.

      Instead they released what they could in the time they had left then just kept plugging away at it post release.

  • Allero@lemmy.today
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    1 month ago

    That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.

    The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.

    Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!

    Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won’t be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.

    • Astronauticaldb@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.

      Edit: clarity and conciseness: added “originally” to the end of the last sentence.

      • Allero@lemmy.today
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        1 month ago

        Yes, if you spend over $1k on the game you gain access to beta-testing etc.

        And the most scary part? Plenty of people do spend this much money - I know many Carrack owners, for example, and this ship costed, when I remember it, $1200. Yes, very real $1200 for an in-game ship, and there’s plenty of buyers.

        Heck, I know a person in Ukraine - not a high-income country by any standards, GDP per capita sitting at ~$5000, vs ~$85000 in the US - who spent about $6000 on the game by hiding huge portion of his income from his family for years. And this is not an exceptional case.

    • SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      One of my ex coworkers has spent somewhere in the ballpark of 12k. He sells, flips and trades rare ships to sell back to people after the exclusivity of the ship has expired. He’s made like 4k. I don’t understand gaming anymore.

      • ours@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        That’s not gaming anymore than people buying toys, leaving them in their boxes as an “investment” are into playing with toys.

        Meanwhile the rest of us are buying games, playing them, enjoying them, moving on to other games and so on.

        • SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          Yea that’s where I’m at. I’m platform agnostic, and the only game I simp for is the original halo trilogy. Microtransactions are dirty. And making digitized items a financial value just to sell them is the same as what you said, like Funko pop collectors.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Lol if that game is ever finished, I bet there’s going to be some people who paid way too much for a ship that turns out to completely suck but seemed ok on paper. Kinda like a PT cruiser, except it looked ok on paper.

        • SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          Lmfao the PT Cruiser! My Grandmother’s new husband has one, and he put flame decals on it as one does…backwards.

          Yes theres a shit ton to balance. Honestly no mans sky seems more appealing now adays. I might go fire that up on my xbone.

    • throbbing_banjo@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      They got my $40 in 2012. I absolutely loved the Wing Commander series; Wing Commander II was an embarrassingly important part of my adolescense, I love space sims, and still had fond enough memories of the name Chris Roberts that I didn’t think he’d blatantly lie and steal from me.

      How people are still giving these clowns money I have no idea.

      • SSTF@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        People are buying the dream. There is personal investment now- this isn’t a game, this is their game. Supporters tend to talk like this is a community project, not a transaction between a customer and a studio.

        Whenever the studio finally folds, I guarantee there will be whales lamenting that if they’d only spent a little more they’d have kept the game afloat.

      • Summzashi@lemmy.one
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        1 month ago

        Same here. It was a much different time. Lots of games that originated in kickstarter became succesful. This just seemed like another one.

        Hindsight is 20/20

    • reksas@sopuli.xyz
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      1 month ago

      i want to fall for it yet i keep waiting for further development, thankfully they occasionally do free flight events so I can actually test the game without having to pay

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netOP
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      1 month ago

      I used to be like you, laughing and enjoying life.

      The new director of technology we just hired a few months ago flexed about how he’s now hit 6-digit donations to Star Citizen. It’s still early and he hasn’t shown any results, but if he’s following the Star Citizen path of growth, my department is fucked.

  • WhyFlip@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Star Citizen sounds right up my alley in terms of game content and play, but I will never touch it due to the business model they’ve chosen.

    • Psythik@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      All I want is a space pirate game that doesn’t require me to quit my job and dedicate my life to it in order to acquire a good enough ship to actually be competitive.

      That, or a street racing MMO with realistic physics and a true-to-life level of customization and tuning, that has a map the size of small country. Like The Crew except no arcade physics and more than 5 players in a server. And also not shit.

      Somebody, please make one of these two games already. I need this so badly in my lifetime before I die.

    • Fades@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Jesus fucking Christ! What a goddamn scam.

      If you donate 65 million dollars worth of stretch goals we’ll make the game! But only if we meet the stretch goals… otherwise go fuck yourself, give us more money!

      That whole page you linked is fucking gross. What kind of morons have dumped 65 million dollars into an unproven fucking kickstarter

      Seriously, I encourage people to read the text for some of these stretch goals of tens of millions of dollars, it’s a goddamn scam

      For reaching 3.5 million in donations, this is the stretch goal reward:

      • Cockpit decorations – Turn your stock cockpit into your home with personalized decorations; amaze your friends with bobbleheads, photographs, dinosaurs, fuzzy dice, nose art, posters and many more cool options!
      • Ship boarding – learn more about how Star Citizen will allow players to conduct boarding operations.

      It sounds like a fucking scam, 3.5 million to be able to place decorations in your ship???

      For 19 million dollars:

      • Know your foe with a Jane’s Fighting Ships style manual free in PDF form to all pledgers.
      • Manage Space Stations – Players will compete to own and operate a limited number of space stations across the galaxy.
      • RSI Museum will air monthly, with a new game featured each time!

      Like really? You needed 19 million dollars to be able to provide a pdf ship manual to users? Good thing the PDF is free though!!! (Free, after paying 19 million usd of course)

    • filcuk@lemmy.zip
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      1 month ago

      64th million has finally allowed for the technology of having pets added to the game

  • FangedWyvern42@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Is anyone really surprised?

    I do think they will at least release Squadron 42, but the main game is never coming out.

    • rozodru@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I honestly don’t even think they’ll get that far. I mean they’ve announced it now, yet again, for a 2026 release date…two years from now. they’ve been doing this for the past decade. “It’ll release in 2016” then it’s “Squadron 42 coming 2018” and so on and so forth. Mark my words we’ll get to 2026 and at their little convention they have to further milk their userbase of money they’ll announce Squadron 42 for 2028 but please, user, they need more backers and as a reward for backing you’ll get a fancy ship you’ll never get to keep.

  • shadowedcross@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    Yeah, Star Citizen is the world’s most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It’ll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a “complete game” state.

    • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      I work as project manager, just spent the entire week fighting a client on a new project’s scope, because he wanted more things done by the team than what was agreed in the proposal.

      Anytime I read about this game, I have to do breathing excercises in a corner to calm my anxiety.

  • Adderbox76@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never “release” a finished game, you’re not going to be blamed for “bugs” while still collecting money on in-game purchases.

    There’s a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It’s been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      1 month ago

      If massive universe sums like that were technically feasible all of the other studios would have done it. They were overly ambitious and didn’t understand the limits

      • Maalus@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I mean Elite Dangerous is right there, finished, playable and fun.

        • Player2@lemm.ee
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          1 month ago

          And it first released a decade ago already (in a couple months)

            • mipadaitu@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Nope, it’s real time travel with no FTL. The reason it’s “finished” is that it takes hundreds of real life years to get anywhere, so they have plenty of time to populate the world’s before the first players arrive.

          • Maalus@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Yeaaah, but they pulled the exact same thing Star Citizen did initially. They overpromised and underdelivered heavily. It took them years to get where it is now.

      • Scolding7300@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        In terms of immersion I think they’ve done a great job. Played during a free weekend. But they need to aim for a gameplay loop, polish, and release. Not this feature creep mentality

  • pyre@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    and here I was thinking they always planned to finish the game in about 16 to 30 years.

    sorry I meant durrrr