Wow, that article needs kneepads for how much time it spends fellating Roberts.
Good timing on the bump - this guy’s kickstarter ends in five days. He’s got 27k out of the 40k he was hoping to raise.
So many Kickstarter games have been underwhelming. Mix that with the association with a company that takes money without delivering anything and it doesn’t really surprise me that it would fail to raise the money.
The fallacy of sunk costs.
You know how when you’re a kid, looking forward to Christmas is better than the actual day? That’s what these guys (Star Citizen investors) are getting. They get that perpetual feeling of Christmas being just around the corner. Even better, they know what they are getting and they know just how awesome it’s going to be! Eventually.
And it’s a fallacy con artists have been using forever.
One of the odd things about cons is that the more money you get from the mark, the more you can get. When you hear about some sucker being conned by a Nigerian email scam, for instance, and the news story says they’ve sunk $17,000 into it before their relatives called the cops, you find yourself thinking “Jesus… okay, maybe the first $3,000 payment is honest stupidity, but by the fifth time they coughed up money why weren’t they wise to what was going on?” It’s a valid question but getting wise to what’s going on isn’t the dominant emotion. What takes over a really juicy mark is the emotion of investment. After sinking a lot of money and hope into the con, the mark is so deeply emotionally committed that it’s easier to keep paying and fool themselves into thinking it’s legit than it is to make the decision to admit it was all a terrible mistake and that there is no hope in the enterprise.
Here is an older article about the Sunk Cost Fallacy that uses Farmville as a good example…which I can relate to because someone I am close to was a Farmville zombie for a while.
Can’t access that site from work-What’s the skinny?
It’s a 27k package that gets you most of the ships previously released. But you can’t even look at the store page if you haven’t already spent a grand.
Do the True Believers that acquired all those ships the hard way get a refund on the price difference?
27000 dollar ship pack that unlocks nearly every ship in the game, you need to have already spent 1000 to even view the purchase page.
Do you know how many different new cars are available for $27,000 or less?
Yeah but you can’t fly them around in space unless you’re Elon Musk so clearly Star Citizen is a better investment.
27k is gonna get you, what, maybe ten cars if you’re willing to go used and put up with repairs? Chris Roberts will sell you like a hundred brand new spaceships for that money. And spaceships are objectively better than cars, so checkmate.
My car is fully playable and interactive with hundreds of thousands of other vehicles now.
Yeah. Some of them so brand new they only exist as concept drawings. I’ve got to admit, there are a few that would make a really neat poster, but my thinking is that there’s more like $2.70 value there.
Yeah, but that “real life” game sucks. For one thing, it’s perma-death, which seems extreme for something so expensive.
So… pre-new? That’s even better! You can’t afford not to buy them!
You know…
Me in 2015:
Me in 2016:
Me in 2017:
Funnily enough, NMS just announced that fully functional multiplayer is incoming next month. Two years after its staggeringly disastrous launch, they’re still pushing free gameplay/content updates. I never did end up buying it (its core gameplay isn’t my style), but credit to the devs where it’s due.
All within the lifespan of a thread about a game that has yet to be released.