In a stunning twist, the Squadron 42 beta has been pushed back three months. Also, there’s a new ship you can buy for 675 bucks.
I wish I was confident that $675 was a joke, but I’m not. How long did the Fyre Festival guy get sentenced to prison for his scam? Six months? That’s probably something Chris Roberts should consider.
Actually, you had to spend a wee bit more than $675 to buy that $675 ship. From here:
Let’s all be honest here. Who wishes they had come up with this scam earlier?
Except these people aren’t “buying” anything. They’re ‘pledging’ money towards the development of the game and are receiving virtual goods in return. As long as the game remains ‘in development,’ RSI never has to deliver on any of these products. Even if, ten years down the road, the entirety of RSI ends up being Chris Roberts fiddling with code for an hour a day before hanging out on a beach somewhere.
Granted, I don’t know the specifics of the mechanics, but mine laying is the type of thing I’d associate with the worst kind of PvPish trolling, if it’s not very carefully done.
Star Citizen Developer Adopts Staggered Development… How is this news? They did that a couple years back, when they announced that Squadron 42 would be released first to generate more cash flow for Star Citizen.
Did they ever release Squadron 42 or just announce that it would be released?
They announced that it would be released first, not when. 
In this case, though, the trolling is being done to the people who buy it, which I consider an improvement. I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that nobody’s ever going to get any of this stuff, at least not in anything like the expected form. I think you’d have better odds buying a lottery ticket with the intent to fund a dev team to build you a game if you win…
You no longer have to look like an idiot paying hundreds of dollars for virtual ships.
You can now rent pretend ships using real money.
I kinda do, too, but it would have required thirty years of work, including making some brilliant games. The only reason Chris Roberts can do all this is that he’s Chris Roberts, the man who created “Wing Commander,” a seminal entry in PC game history. He couldn’t have gotten $200 million - couldn’t have gotten a tenth of that - without that pedigree. He was a kid, really, I think just 22 when Wing Commander came out, and it was a sensation. My middle-aged Dad couldn’t stop playing it. The sequels also pushed the envelope of what PC games could be.
Almost all the money, I have no doubt, is coming from guys like me (I hadn’t spend a penny - guys LIKE me) who remember “Wing Commander” and get the idea, and it’'s quite an awesome idea. Idea being the key word.
Since then, to a large extent, he’s been trying to do the same thing. “Strike Commander” is “Wing Commander” in F-16s; “Starlancer” is more “Wing Commander,” and “Freelancer” is still more “Wing Commander.” “Star Citizen” is still more “Wing Commander,” just way open ended, at least in theory.
That was him? I had no idea, I quite enjoyed that. It came bundled with our PC along with Syndicate and one of the other Wing Commander games that I unfortunately didn’t get around to playing.
That’s the funny thing. If he had showed up and said “I’m gonna make a new space flight game! It’s going to be a single player, narrative experience, and we’re gonna call it Squadron Leader for copyright reasons!” I would have said “Take my money!”
But he DIDN’T. He showed up and said “I’m gonna make a new space flight game! It’s going to be an MMO! And a single player game! And you’ll be able to land on planets and space stations and walk around! And man a super star destroyer with your friends! And it will come with free ponies! And two chickens in every pot! And ray-traced mip-mapped flight sticks! And… and… and…” and he just KEPT PILING stuff on there, and after about the third absurd “no one has ever done this before” feature (which was nowhere near the last) I went “Nope, this is impossible, and also, it’s no longer remotely the game I want, let alone the game I trust you, Chris Roberts, to make.”
Yes, no one thought Wing Commander could be done either, but that was only ONE impossible thing before breakfast…and Mr. Roberts has a long string of Basically Failures once he put that series down.
I don’t expect a full release ever.
I think there will be a full release eventually, given one of two conditions: either someone with clout finds the balls to tell Roberts “enough is enough” or Roberts dies. Most likely the latter.
I dunno, if he dies, who cares enough to get the mess to a releasable point? 
Someone who has sunk a lot of money in? What about when they discover that it’s nowhere near good to go and will need them to sink a lot more money in?
Fear of lawsuits would make someone care. Cloud Imperium no longer has their boss to demand more bloat so there should be plenty of demands from backers to know where their money went.
Declare development has ended with no plans for a full release? That will open the company to demands for refunds.
I imagine bankruptcy and liquidation would soon follow rather than a person burning more money to try to make the endless “feature creeper” a reality at some point.