Star Citizen Catch-all

Chairman_Mao wrote:

maybe Trump really just wants to play the most groundbreaking space sim ever created?

President Chris Roberts, 2024.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

maybe Trump really just wants to play the most groundbreaking space sim ever created?

President Chris Roberts, 2024.

Still a better president than Trump

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

maybe Trump really just wants to play the most groundbreaking space sim ever created?

President Chris Roberts, 2024.

Make Star Citizen Great Again

Chairman_Mao wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

maybe Trump really just wants to play the most groundbreaking space sim ever created?

President Chris Roberts, 2024.

Make Star Citizen Great Again In the First Place

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

maybe Trump really just wants to play the most groundbreaking space sim ever created?

President Chris Roberts, 2024.

Make Star Citizen Great Again In the First Place

Can you hold a moonbeam in your hand? would you really want to?

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I assume it's a money laundering operation at this point. If this were a real estate venture that pulled in $3 million per month from anonymous sources but didn't have a groundbreaking after six years, it would throw up a lot of red flags. A company selling virtual space ships for millions of dollars for a game without even a roadmap to launch should throw up similar flags.

This is not impossible.

I think it would take some organizing, but I can see how it could be done. Several hundred regular anonymous backers, donating several hundred dollars per month...

The only thing that muddies the waters for me is the fact that CIG has also received $60 million dollars in private investment from the Calder family in exchange for stock and seats on the board. One would have assumed that they had done some due diligence...

But without seeing the donation data, we will never know.

PurEvil - Thanks for the Woody Harrelson gif! My sentiments exactly. From what I can tell, their due diligence looks pretty minimal, while their T&Cs look pretty maximal in terms of distancing them from the relationship between 'creators' and 'backers'.

To be slightly fair to backers, there is playable parts to the game, though it is disconcerting to read the early part of the thread and see how excited folks were to simply see their purchased ships in a hangar.

detroit20 wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

I assume it's a money laundering operation at this point. If this were a real estate venture that pulled in $3 million per month from anonymous sources but didn't have a groundbreaking after six years, it would throw up a lot of red flags. A company selling virtual space ships for millions of dollars for a game without even a roadmap to launch should throw up similar flags.

This is not impossible.

I think it would take some organizing, but I can see how it could be done. Several hundred regular anonymous backers, donating several hundred dollars per month...

The only thing that muddies the waters for me is the fact that CIG has also received $60 million dollars in private investment from the Calder family in exchange for stock and seats on the board. One would have assumed that they had done some due diligence...

But without seeing the donation data, we will never know.

PurEvil - Thanks for the Woody Harrelson gif! My sentiments exactly. From what I can tell, their due diligence looks pretty minimal, while their T&Cs look pretty maximal in terms of distancing them from the relationship between 'creators' and 'backers'.

I don't get how this benefits anyone... If I have dirty money and 'launder' it through Star Citizen, I get a pretty starship in a hangar in return?

dejanzie wrote:
detroit20 wrote:
ClockworkHouse wrote:

I assume it's a money laundering operation at this point. If this were a real estate venture that pulled in $3 million per month from anonymous sources but didn't have a groundbreaking after six years, it would throw up a lot of red flags. A company selling virtual space ships for millions of dollars for a game without even a roadmap to launch should throw up similar flags.

This is not impossible.

I think it would take some organizing, but I can see how it could be done. Several hundred regular anonymous backers, donating several hundred dollars per month...

The only thing that muddies the waters for me is the fact that CIG has also received $60 million dollars in private investment from the Calder family in exchange for stock and seats on the board. One would have assumed that they had done some due diligence...

But without seeing the donation data, we will never know.

PurEvil - Thanks for the Woody Harrelson gif! My sentiments exactly. From what I can tell, their due diligence looks pretty minimal, while their T&Cs look pretty maximal in terms of distancing them from the relationship between 'creators' and 'backers'.

I don't get how this benefits anyone... If I have dirty money and 'launder' it through Star Citizen, I get a pretty starship in a hangar in return?

It's better than a fake car wash or an imaginary stay in the Ozarks.
IMAGE(https://miro.medium.com/max/500/1*6Ms1sKuXSdYRlx_XNrAFwQ.jpeg)

dejanzie wrote:

I don't get how this benefits anyone... If I have dirty money and 'launder' it through Star Citizen, I get a pretty starship in a hangar in return?

Let us step away from the specific case of this game, for obvious reasons.

One way of removing money from a company (A Co.) could be to set up a separate 'shell' company (B Co.) that either invoices A Co. for work not actually done or simply over-charges for work that is done.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

In my opinion, it's almost certainly not a Ponzi or pyramid scheme. I'm pretty sure it's just an amazing synergy of all kinds of incompetence and ignorance from various parties that has created this utter clusterf*ck. Plenty of these things happen but get shut down by at least one halfway competent person with power. There isn't one here, so this zombie project keeps going, until people stop feeding it.

Oh my god.. a zombie project: It's eating brains.

maverickz wrote:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

The past 3 years have taught me this is a ridiculously insupportable maxim and reality is better described by assuming the opposite unless there is sufficient evidence not to.

My and your elected leaders are both malicious and stupid, so it's complicated.

dejanzie wrote:

I don't get how this benefits anyone... If I have dirty money and 'launder' it through Star Citizen, I get a pretty starship in a hangar in return?

Money laundering, generally speaking, is the process of putting dirty money (money derived from a criminal activity) into some sort of legitimate business where it gets mixed in with legitimate transactions and then is paid out in some fashion back to the criminals as legitimate-looking profits.

A classic example of this would be a bar that served as a money laundering front for a drug business. Drugs sold for cash would need that cash laundered so that it could be spent. Bars also deal heavily in cash transactions, so the bar would expect to bring in a lot of cash money. The money from the drug sales is mixed into the cash from the bar, and it's all reported as income from the bar. The bar then pays out money to the people running the drug business as owners or contractors or salaried employees or whatever. Now the drug money looks like legitimate business income.

What Star Citizen reminds me of is what's called trade laundering. This is something that's most common in the art world, but the idea behind it is that you launder money by over-billing for goods and services with subjective values. I make a painting for a drug trafficker; she buys the painting for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction; I take a cut of that money and then pay it back to her through some means. She has hundreds of thousands of dollars of now-clean money, plus a painting.

Trade laundering works best in an environment where the buyers or sellers (or both) are anonymous and are paying for things without a fixed value. Things like interior design, business consultation, art; things like that. Or... virtual space ships that sit in a virtual hanger.

But surely you'd need to be able to get your money back out once it has been cleaned. And that's clearly not the case with Star Citizen.

A digital spaceship sitting in a digital hanger is worth $0.00 if the game never comes out and therefore a marketplace never matures. It's not like vbucks, gold farming, or hell even TF2 hat barons.

Also, the game itself need not be participating in fraud for it to be used as a tool for money laundering. Recall that the CS:GO skin market was almost 100% laundering activity at one point.

Steal credit card. Buy virtual good. Liquidate virtual good through a 3rd party marketplace. Keep the new unencumbered money.

Star Citizen has both the digital goods (with shockingly high values at that) and the external, 3rd party "grey market" to do the same thing.

So when people wonder, "why are people STILL buying SC ships?", the answer might be the same as the past question of, "why are people suddenly buying SO many CS:GO crate keys?"

CS:Go is an actual game with actual players and an actual thriving community.

Again, Star Citizen isn't that.

r013nt0 wrote:

CS:Go is an actual game with actual players and an actual thriving community.

Again, Star Citizen isn't that.

None of that is relevant to the point.

What the virtual good is is completely meaningless. All that matters is the existence of a buyer for it.

r013nt0 wrote:

But surely you'd need to be able to get your money back out once it has been cleaned. And that's clearly not the case with Star Citizen.

A digital spaceship sitting in a digital hanger is worth $0.00 if the game never comes out and therefore a marketplace never matures. It's not like vbucks, gold farming, or hell even TF2 hat barons.

If the game were a money laundering front, the money wouldn't flow back out through digital goods or anything like that. It would go back out as paychecks or investments or contracts for other things. As a money laundering scheme, the game development part needs to get just enough resources to look like it's still legitimately trying to do something. Otherwise, the outflow of cash is all behind the scenes and unrelated.

*Legion* wrote:

None of that is relevant to the point.

What the virtual good is is completely meaningless. All that matters is the existence of a buyer for it.

That is absolutely relevant to the point. If you have no market, there is no marketplace. There will be no buyers for goods if the game never releases. Which it won't. There is a market for TF2 hats, because they have players and therefore an economy. There's a market for CS:Go merch for the same reason.

Star Citizen has no players, and therfore no market, and therefore no economy. The well of rubes willing to pay into the con will dry up long before any meaningful amount of money could be laundered through a player economy.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

If the game were a money laundering front, the money wouldn't flow back out through digital goods or anything like that. It would go back out as paychecks or investments or contracts for other things. As a money laundering scheme, the game development part needs to get just enough resources to look like it's still legitimately trying to do something. Otherwise, the outflow of cash is all behind the scenes and unrelated.

Yes, I don't disagree at all with the possibilities of trade laundering. It's the insinuation that the digital goods are a form of laundering that I find completely implausible wrt this particular "game."

r013nt0 wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

None of that is relevant to the point.

What the virtual good is is completely meaningless. All that matters is the existence of a buyer for it.

That is absolutely relevant to the point. If you have no market, there is no marketplace. There will be no buyers for goods if the game never releases.

If you're trying to suggest that the game that is selling millions of dollars of ships every month doesn't have a market of people willing to buy ships, I think you need to step back and re-assess your argument.

The market's already here. It exists. See the link I posted above. See /r/StarCitizen_trades.

I don't think SC is a laundering machine, even through the various Subreddits and whatnot, simply because the community of active players isn't large enough to be targeted, yet. The prices on the ships and whatnot would probably be attractive, but I believe you want your laundering to be lost in vast amount of transactions and not, say, be all of the dozens of transactions a day.

But, really, this is a silly topic that is beyond idle speculation and probably somewhere in the realm of fantasy. Makes for a good plot line, but probably not actively happening.

*Legion* wrote:

If you're trying to suggest that the game that is selling millions of dollars of ships every month doesn't have a market of people willing to buy ships, I think you need to step back and re-assess your argument.

The market's already here. It exists. See the link I posted above. See /r/StarCitizen_trades.

And how long do you imagine that market will exist when the game inevitably doesn't come out? You can only milk the rubes for so long. You would need an actual player base over a long period of time for any laundering operation to be worth the effort. You need demand to go with the supply. A few whales so in to a piece of vaporware that they are willing to spend money on extremely non-extant sh*t -like, far less extant than a Fortnite skin- do not make for a safe and sound laundromat.

I think you are massively overestimating the chances of this product ever seeing the light of day if you think incredibly savvy criminal organizations would be willing to drop millions into it. Subreddits are a terrible gauge of the real popularity of anything.

r013nt0 wrote:

And how long do you imagine that market will exist when the game inevitably doesn't come out?

Who cares? These kind of things aren't meant to last forever. They're to be exploited while the conditions are right, then discarded when they are no longer so. Like a website with a security hole.

The idea isn't to buy and hold onto assets like a stock market. The concept is to buy and then resell as quickly as possible.

I think you are massively overestimating the chances of this product ever seeing the light of day if you think incredibly savvy criminal organizations would be willing to drop millions into it

First of all, let's be clear. I said the conditions that need to exist to use SC to launder money exist. Anything beyond that - assertions that it is definitely happening, suppositions about the scale of any operation, etc - is outside the scope of what I've stated.

But as for the logistics of it, it sounds like you're envisioning a whole "Star Citizen" wing to a criminal organization or something, as opposed to a couple of guys in bedrooms for whom buying and selling in the SC market is just one of many markets they trade virtual goods on in a day.

And I still disagree with you that any type of market that a criminal organization would use to launder money exists in the highly-speculative and unstable vaporware that "is" Star Citizen.

Why would they bother when other, safer, tried-and-true options are available? Buy hats. CS:Go skins. Fortnite vbucks. WoW Companions. Gacha crap from whatever game is taking over in Asia. They aren't investors trying to get in on the ground floor. The conditions absolutely don't exist in Star Citizen.

Regardless, neither of us is apparently going to convince the other, so let's just agree to disagree and move on.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
r013nt0 wrote:

But surely you'd need to be able to get your money back out once it has been cleaned. And that's clearly not the case with Star Citizen.

A digital spaceship sitting in a digital hanger is worth $0.00 if the game never comes out and therefore a marketplace never matures. It's not like vbucks, gold farming, or hell even TF2 hat barons.

If the game were a money laundering front, the money wouldn't flow back out through digital goods or anything like that. It would go back out as paychecks or investments or contracts for other things. As a money laundering scheme, the game development part needs to get just enough resources to look like it's still legitimately trying to do something. Otherwise, the outflow of cash is all behind the scenes and unrelated.

So you do mean that you suspect Chris Roberts / Cloud Imperium is an active party in this hypothetical money laundering scheme? That specifically wasn't clear to me.

dejanzie wrote:

So you do mean that you suspect Chris Roberts / Cloud Imperium is an active party in this hypothetical money laundering scheme? That specifically wasn't clear to me.

Yes.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
dejanzie wrote:

So you do mean that you suspect Chris Roberts / Cloud Imperium is an active party in this hypothetical money laundering scheme? That specifically wasn't clear to me.

Yes.

Thanks I'm not convinced that's the case, more like an oversized ego and denial than active fraud.