You’re not getting it at all.

“And the suckers gonna pay, pay, pay, pay, pay

Hard disagree. When a game only has a dream to sell, nothing else and nothing more, that’s not a good thing. In fact it’s a rather bad thing. When said game has gone through HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS FOR OVER A DECADE, and its only output is a tiny, buggy, catastrophe of a pre-alpha that hasn’t put out even 1%…

But every time I played the game I saw the dream of what it could be. May never be but could be.

Just look into Roberts’ history. Just look into his last few “ventures.” The man doesn’t care about games anymore. It was just the last place he had real success and where his name meant anything. He was broke, so he thought, “Why not cash in on that goodwill?” I’m sure he just wanted to raise some money to get back…

If you get “really, really angry” about the word “scam” being thrown at this massive waste of development money, built on the backs of obsessed fans spending literally thousands of dollars to buy access to unimplemented spaceship designs, then your anger is probably a personal problem.

Wasted money isnt burned, it goes into someones pockets, someone not worthy of it since they didnt create ANYTHING

Oh yeah no it’s 100% a grift. 

They definitely should have. Ironically with the same approximate business model - i.e. selling ships/cosmetics - they’d probably have made vastly more money, at this point, if they just focused on releasing a basically playable game, and then continually adding to it.

It’s not an accident that there’s no-one saying “finish it”. If Chris Roberts wanted it finished, it’d be finished. The dude has had over half a billion dollars.

And he’s a grifter - he’s become extremely rich, lives in a massive mansion (possibly multiple ones) with expensive sports cars and so on, too. At this point, Star Citizen has cost more than twice as much to develop as any other videogame in history (when we note marketing is not part of the equation).

I pledged (an admittedly reasonable amount not the crazy amounts some people pledged) back when it was in kick starter for the single player game I’ve now come to realize we will never get. This is just a long scam at this part. Yes they are developing something but not what I paid for and not something I really want…

“Star Citizen” IS vaporware as long as it doesn’t materialize as a proper game. “A framework of a game” is not “a game”. It’s a glorified tech demo. That can be fun when you play with friends (but quite literally anything can be fun with friends).

I paid for a single-player narrative-driven space action game in the…

is sometimes unfairly labelled as vapourware. It’s usually called that by people who have never actually played it

I remember when Kotaku UK wasn’t afraid to call a spade a spade and call out CIG for the scam it obviously is. I guess the dissolution of the UK site came with a mandate to be more friendly to publishers and developers.

Correct. This has kept Chris, Sandi and Erin Roberts gainfully employed for over 10 years with high paying jobs. Iirc Erin Roberts got a raise to over $500k per year in 2021.

The update—which introduced a bunch of stuff, so much that they made a trailer for it

Obviously the only thing that can fix this is more money. Time for RSI to roll out a new lineup of $10,000 JPEGs.

I paid $50 for the single player game in the initial Kickstarter and occasionally log in to see how the janky tech demo is going. There’s still no sign of even the first chapter of Squadron 42. Yeah, it’s vaporware.

It’s been 23 years since Chris Roberts stepped out of the the director’s role on Freelancer, a space sim that made all the same promises as Star Citizen, because of the numerous delays and cost overruns. It’s the same story all over again: the dude has a decades-old vision he wants realized, but he simply isn’t a good…