https://www.pcgamer.com/new-star-citizen-ship-pack-unlocks-nearly-every-vessel-in-the-game-for-dollar27000/

I haven't heard much from Star Citizen in quite awhile until this article got my attention. I know a lot of gaming publications and Giant Bomb have for the most part stayed away from covering every little Star Citizen thing that pops up but this one seems particularly egregious. So I'd love to hear either podcast cover this.

I hope Star Citizen doesn't turn out to be a bust or even worse a scam because the original pitch sounded amazing and I'd feel bad if all those backers ended up with a terrible product or even worse nothing.

"Nearly" every vessel in the game? Wow.

This whole Star Citizen saga just keeps getting weirder and more ridiculous.

Pay your way into the Star Citizen VIP lounge so you can spend the real bucks.

Also.....nearly?

Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one. –Benjamin Franklin

Time till this game has it's own cryptocurrency?

I'm finding it hard to think of something more dumb you can spend that much amount of money at in one purchase.

As of this post $186,778,776 has been raised by 2,040,126 players.

That's an average spend of $91 per player.

Can you do much more than just walk around your virtual hanger looking at your virtual ships yet?

Yeah, this stupid thing has raised $187M+, has a fan convention, dedicated podcasts, dedicated Twitch shows, etc. but I have yet to see anyone actually play it other than the ship viewer and some sub-20 fps footage of running around a space station.

Oh my god.

From this is neat to this might be a scam to Chris Roberts buying a island creating his own jurisdiction in order to not get sued.

I want to preface this by saying that I hope it releases and is amazing. It would be extremely heartbreaking if this whole thing turned out to be a scam. I am however skeptical that the game ever releases in a state that will live up to the expectations. Those being the ability to do anything and everything you could ever imagine in a space sim. The subreddit for this game is full of people posting about how when the game releases they will be space traders, or pirates, or captains of an army. All that on top of the fact that the game has been in development for ~6 years and only has a tiny fraction of the feature set promised.

It is also extremely concerning that with very little game to show people are still buying into the game. There funding page shows that they still manage to pull in over $2million a month.

I really want to know the kind of person who has a spare $27K laying around and also has enough time to play a highly involved Space Sim/MMO, or whatever the hell Star Citizen is supposed to be. Like, are you some sort of investment banker who really liked Wing Commander? Are you the child of a Gulf State monarch? I have zero conception of who this is for.

What a crock of shit. I bought into Star Citizen for 20 quid a couple of years ago and even that's starting to feel like a poor investment.

I've been trying to put my finger on what annoys me about the way this game is behind handled and I think I figured it out...

For paying so much, they sure are offering these people so little. They offer single ships for a couple of hundred bucks to shit like this for $27000 that doesn't even include everything in the game. For $27000, you better get literally everything in the game for free along with everything they were offering in the highest tier of their kickstatrter which - hey, by the way - says this game was supposed to ship in 2014. But they keep adding shit, so it's cool I guess? Anywho, then, after all that, they better come up with some more shit to give you.

Clearly, these people don't mind dropping all that money on this alleged video game which is totally fine, but from an outsider's perspective, it looks like they're milking their whales plain and simple because they're on some next level feature creep.

@jesus_phish said:

Yeah, you can actually do quite a bit but it's still far from a cohesive experience. The game has a fairly robust starship dogfighting module, first-person multiplayer with a handful of modes (deathmatch, control, etc.) and a very early version of the open-world sandbox featuring a single star system.

I'm not entirely convinced this isn't just a massive money-laundering operation.

@jesus_phish said:

Sure, you're free to bug out in many different ways anywhere in a single system(out of I don't know how many promised), with horrid performance, it's barely functional.

Or you could participate in boring races, also you can play an underwhelming multiplayer FPS game.

I don't know why I hold on to my copy that I got when I was suckered back in 2012 really.. should try and sell it while it's still worth something.

@arbitrarywater said:

*eyeroll* I'm so sick of being singled out like this. My dad found that oil fair and square, and Chris Roberts is a god. I've worked it into my budget so it makes little impact on my financial standing anyway. If I only eat panda hearts every other day for the next year, I'll already save about $10k, and I can easily postpone two of my weddings. Big deal.

The insensitivity in this thread is disgusting.

Is this game some sort of ponzi scheme?

This stuff is wilder than mobile game whales. Whether this fails or succeeds, seems like we're going to get some good postmortem articles out of it.

Remember that time those sonic boom guy made a whole fps module in the wrong engine and literally throw away 2 years of work..... You know sometimes it's ok to have a publisher at least they give two fucks about money and don't just throw it away at a studio.

I hope this thing comes out but Roberts has thrown away so much money i am guessing in two years he's gonna come out and say that there all out off money and do a other kickstarter or something like that or change the engines again and do a Duke Nukem with Randy Pitchford buying the assets for cheap.

You kidding? If Tencent bought them they'd be bankrupt in a year.

Star Citizen is the new Duke Nukem, it is never coming out as a finished product. Ever.

@brunothethird: What's insensitive about his comment he's probably right people who would spend 27k on a videogame are so rich they woudn't even care about money at this point so you have to be some kid from some Saudi Shjiek.

@johntunoku:

There is a good series on Youtube examining the Star Citizen racket being made by a former true believer who was invested to the tune of more than $10,000. Really interesting, episode 5 is a good place to start.

From an outsider's perspective it felt like they were being very transparent about the dev process at least what with the frequent updates and streams.

Now, I don't know if I'd call it a scam exactly but it very much sounds like the whole thing got way out of control, and either it's going to take a protracted amount of time for anything feature complete to see the light of day. Or, they're just going to end up releasing a very wonky stripped down product to get it out in a realistic amount of time.

Considering they have the budget of a AAA title now you think they'd just hire more staff like crazy, hunker down and maintain mostly radio silence rather than potentially waste time and resources on streams and cons at the risk of not being as forthcoming to their customers, and just brute force their way through development. I think even if it turns out mostly OK relativitely soon people are still gonna be angry, though.

@ripelivejam: They got a shit ton off people working on this game you should look up all there studios i think they almost got one on every continent. And the got a pretty big studio in Frankfurt Germany. My guess is there gonna run out of money because of bad management. And these 27.000 bucks weirdo packs are like a hail Marie to keep there studios afloat.