And the sunken cost fallacy.
Most definitely.
Here’s what I posted back in May:
I don’t think the base of people paying for Star Citizen stuff is widespread now. There’s not many people making their first purchase or throwing $30 or $60 at the game. I would guess that there’s just a hardcore, cultish base that keeps throwing good money after bad to convince themselves that they’re not getting scammed and that everything is right on track to be amazing.
Do we have actual revenue/“backing” numbers? I know they keep releasing even more ridiculous ships and packages, but I’d be curious to see how their actual income looks compared to how it did 3, 5, or 7 years ago. I’m guessing it’s down about 90-95%.
Good question. I did some poking around and there’s a massive spreadsheet tracking the data. They’re going to end 2020 just shy of having raised 80 million dollars from backers. I think that’s not counting the 17 million they got from a private backer earlier in the year.
So… nope, not slowing down even a little bit. If anything, it looks like it’s been on a steady uptick since very late last year.
Warning: very busy Google doc that may chunk up your browser.
Jaysus. Eighty million dollars for…what? I think I remember someone posting above that about all you can do in the game right now is go into a hanger, get in to your $600 pretend-spaceship, and fly it around a bit. Which sounds about as thrilling as taking a car for a two-block test drive. Are there any parts of the game you can actually play, right now?
I don’t think you can even get in many of the $600 spaceships met, most of the flyables are very much the cheaper ones.
EDIT: Might be a bit unfair, many of the $600+ ships are actually ‘flight ready’
Somewhere in this thread is footage of a player wandering around some base and getting stuck.
Players will be able to do that in Elite: Dangerous when Odyssey drops, presumably without getting stuck.
What the heck does that even mean? How can a bunch of computer code that represents the performance and cosmetics of a fictitious space ship somehow be “flight ready” but not actually flyable?
More to the point, how can a spaceship that exists in a game not be flight-ready? It’s not like you need to custom-design the engine for each one. What makes it flyable is a set of about a half-dozen numbers. How do you make a ship in-game without inputting those numbers?
How many are actually in the game at this moment as opposed to only existing in pretty pictures?
Oh, the ones that aren’t ‘flight ready’ aren’t in the game at all yet.
And, to answer @Skywatcher, quite a lot of them. There’s a list here:
There’s 110 flyable ships (‘Flight Ready’), 27 In Concept, and 13 In Production.
110 sounds a lot, but it looks like a fair amount of them are slight variations on themes - there are 6 variations of the F7C Hornet, but I don’t know how differently they fly. Still, that’s quite a list.
I’m getting new insides for my computer later this month, once I’ve got those upgrades I’ll install it again and give it a look. It’s been years since I did.
At this point – when you take into account the ambitions of the developers, the constantly changing technical demands, and the huge amount of money they’re clearly making – Star Citizen make take several more years of development before its full release…if ever.
Both have ambitious scales, and both of them have delivered impressive content throughout the years. Star Citizen is attempting to create a grounded take on a space simulator where players are a person in the universe, able to traverse the stars and everywhere in between, getting to be whoever they see fit. Elite Dangerous didn’t quite start like that, with players limited entirely to spaceships for a large portion of the game’s lifetime. Even when players did get out of that spaceship, they were limited then to Elite’s lunar vehicle roving around on planets.
But with Odyssey, the two are closer together. Elite Dangerous is attempting to make that leap into a game with three dimensions of gameplay, where players are a person in the Milky Way, free to traverse it as they see fit. The scale and intricacies of Elite are still a little less ambitious than those of Star Citizen, which is looking to create a new game genre, but that feature creep is why Star Citizen seems utterly incapable of releasing on any reasonable timeframe. While Star Citizen seems to be shooting for the stars, Elite Dangerous is still getting to those stars, and it’s doing it in a way that players can experience now.
Maybe Star Citizen and Squadron 42 will fully release someday, with all of the promises made about them intact. But even if it does, it’s not exactly going to be the first of its kind, anymore. While these two games are certainly not carbon copies of each other, Elite is getting closer to achieving the scale that Star Citizen boasts it’ll be capable of someday. The evolution of Elite Dangerous might be what pushes Star Citizen to achieve some of what it’s promised for nearly a decade now, but that’s not all that important, in the grand scheme of things. Elite is doing what it needs to do to stay relevant and keep players interested and invested, making itself into a game that is constantly getting better, and one of the best space simulators to ever release.
Marks?
Hey, what’s that sound?
bling bling bling
Hear that, all you haters? It’s got a playable alpha! And after only nine years, too!
It took a long time to get here, but there’s finally a lawsuit brewing. Ads for this just started showing up in my Facebook feed.
That looks to me like your typical shyster trolling for clients (cf. all those mesothelioma commercials on TV) but sometimes they can get traction so maybe this will actually go somewhere.
That’s definitely a cash grab, but so is Star Citizen. They deserve one another.
Still, a judge already ruled in favor of RSI when an original backer (which is who this suit is targeting) sued for a refund. I doubt it’ll go anywhere.
Star Citizen has already had lawsuits, this isn’t anything new. And I guarantee it won’t be the last.