Star Citizen Catch-all

PurEvil wrote:
thrawn82 wrote:
*Legion* wrote:
PurEvil wrote:

I said he was trying to emulate SW, not that he succeeded.

Is he consciously emulating Star Wars, or does he just not recognize where his mental imagery of space adventuring is cribbed from?

It reminds me of a lot of amateur writers whose "original" stories all read like fan fiction of their influences.

Are we trashing JJ abrams again?

I think there's only room in this thread to beat one dead horse...

absurddoctor wrote:

Was that not done in the game engine? I assumed from some of the wonky looking animations that it was. It seems even sillier than I realized if not.

I kind of assumed it wasn't, if no other reason that if it had been, they likely would have mentioned that somewhere at the beginning of the video (or Facebook, or Twitter, or their website, or the website they made specifically to sell the ship in the video for another $225, or the website they made to sell merch for the ship from the video...). Game studios love showing off how versatile their engine is so that's easy marketing if the trailer is made within the game. I don't see any other studios credited at the end of the video, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was made within the game and not using whatever animation software they use for cinematics.

Ah, fair point, not mentioning that would be a strange marketing slip.

Shockingly, Squadron 42 delayed, with no release date.. Blog post dropped on the afternoon before Christmas Eve to hide it a bit, one would assume.

[qteuo]The new Roadmap is not meant to give people an early estimate on when Squadron 42 will be completed. We made a conscious decision to only show the Squadron 42 work concurrently with the Star Citizen work over the Roadmap’s four-quarter window. This is because it is too early to discuss release or finish dates on Squadron 42.

As I said earlier this year, Squadron 42 will be done when it is done, and will not be released just to make a date, but instead only when all the technology and content is finished, the game is polished, and it plays great. I am not willing to compromise the development of a game I believe in with all my heart and soul, and I feel it would be a huge disservice to all the team members that have poured so much love and hard work into Squadron 42 if we rushed it out or cut corners to put it in the hands of everyone who is clamoring for it. [/quote]

Love that last sentence, just LOVE it. It's exactly why this has taken almost a decade and never will happen; it's not about a game or development or a business. This whole thing is about Roberts' VISION and his EPIC IDEAS and he'll never draw a line in the sand, define a realistic scope for the product, and deliver. It's all just to fuel his self-image of a true visionary.

Had to go to Reddit to check it out; everybody's talking about how great this is because Cyberpunk was a mess, and someone actually said "CIG can delay it all they want as far as I’m concerned."

I know some good little Redditor who's going to get exactly what they want for Christmas this year . . .

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

I know some good little Redditor who's going to get exactly what they want for Christmas this year . . .

IMAGE( https://tse2.mm.bing.net/th?id=OGC.4b1be5cda7e6d72e74af1e15fb9ea039&pid=Api&rurl=https%3a%2f%2fmedia.giphy.com%2fmedia%2fMHwlMMzytbrna%2fgiphy.gif&ehk=tnysIYACy4wBO%2bPchdEak67M2IFoeAMRkG0yswNhtgA%3d )

I'm calling it now... sometime within the next two years we see a "Squadron 42 wasn't meeting our internal expectations so we're starting over" post.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

[qteuo]

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/9IAQP76.jpg)

This is because it is too early to discuss release or finish dates on Squadron 42.

Remember, this is a game that was supposed to go into beta release in Q3 of this past year. Now we're not even remotely talking a beta release.

There's quite a bit of "good" news in there about how much people are playing and what they've added. That's exciting and cool.

Unfortunately, Roberts spends the vast majority of the rest of the long entry talking about road maps and money.

That a sp game is nowhere being seen is nuts to me. Guess they're upping the graphics again now that another console generation is out...

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

Shockingly, Squadron 42 delayed, with no release date.. Blog post dropped on the afternoon before Christmas Eve to hide it a bit, one would assume.

[qteuo]The new Roadmap is not meant to give people an early estimate on when Squadron 42 will be completed. We made a conscious decision to only show the Squadron 42 work concurrently with the Star Citizen work over the Roadmap’s four-quarter window. This is because it is too early to discuss release or finish dates on Squadron 42.

As I said earlier this year, Squadron 42 will be done when it is done, and will not be released just to make a date, but instead only when all the technology and content is finished, the game is polished, and it plays great. I am not willing to compromise the development of a game I believe in with all my heart and soul, and I feel it would be a huge disservice to all the team members that have poured so much love and hard work into Squadron 42 if we rushed it out or cut corners to put it in the hands of everyone who is clamoring for it.

Love that last sentence, just LOVE it. It's exactly why this has taken almost a decade and never will happen; it's not about a game or development or a business. This whole thing is about Roberts' VISION and his EPIC IDEAS and he'll never draw a line in the sand, define a realistic scope for the product, and deliver. It's all just to fuel his self-image of a true visionary.

Had to go to Reddit to check it out; everybody's talking about how great this is because Cyberpunk was a mess, and someone actually said "CIG can delay it all they want as far as I’m concerned."

I know some good little Redditor who's going to get exactly what they want for Christmas this year . . .

Can we talk about this typo? Cause that's an amazing typo. It's like the "te" said "We're tired of being at the end of the word! Move out of the way, we're taking what's ours!"

Edit: Legion beat me to it.

I think we should all get the game and become the world's premiere Star Marine team.

Mmm... Space crayons...

maverickz wrote:

Can we talk about this typo? Cause that's an amazing typo. It's like the "te" said "We're tired of being at the end of the word! Move out of the way, we're taking what's ours!"

Edit: Legion beat me to it.

We're publishing a roadmap on how we're striving towards spelling tags correctly. I could just try to spell it correctly now, but that would be a disservice to all the people who have been reading my posts all these years, and I'm unwilling to compromise my vision of what "qutoeutoeute" should truly be spelled like. For $150, I will attempt to spell your name, please pledge now.

IMAGE(https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/005/574/takemymoney.jpg)

PurEvil wrote:

IMAGE(https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/005/574/takemymoney.jpg)

What he said.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

We're publishing a roadmap on how we're striving towards spelling tags correctly. I could just try to spell it correctly now, but that would be a disservice to all the people who have been reading my posts all these years, and I'm unwilling to compromise my vision of what "qutoeutoeute" should truly be spelled like. For $150, I will attempt to spell your name, please pledge now.

"I'll also make a movie that's supposed to be about your name but mostly rips off a more popular name."

This snippet from the letter made me laugh:

"While we didn’t deliver a few of the major tech milestones we had hoped to this year like iCache and Server Meshing, we’ve made a lot of progress towards these goals. We are confident that you will see at least one, if not both, debuts of these important technologies next year."

Translation: We didn't reach two of our major goals this year, but we're hoping to reach at least one of them next year.

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

Translation: We didn't reach two of our major goals this year, but we're hoping to reach at least one of them next year.

To say nothing of the ridiculousness that we're talking about low level technical systems as deliverables instead of, you know, completed gameplay systems. Or, perish the thought, a full game.

Is Star Citizens the MLM of the gaming community?

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/zz5ciio.png)

?? what happened to the 1-4 trackers?

Godzilla Blitz wrote:

This snippet from the letter made me laugh:

"While we didn’t deliver a few of the major tech milestones we had hoped to this year like iCache and Server Meshing, we’ve made a lot of progress towards these goals. We are confident that you will see at least one, if not both, debuts of these important technologies next year."

Translation: We didn't reach two of our major goals this year, but we're hoping to reach at least one of them next year.

Indeed.

And to add: "Which means that the game is definitely not being released in the next two years, at least."

At that point, the project will have been in gestation for a decade. Like 'Duke Nukem Forever'... but the joke is on the players rather than the developers.

ranalin wrote:

?? what happened to the 1-4 trackers?

That’s actually 0.5. I think there were several blog posts and updates about the progress on the ‘new roadmap’ over the last year or so. Seemingly more than anything about the game itself.

“absurd nonsense” wrote:

Ongoing Progress
Please note that the first delivery of the Progress Tracker is actually v0.5. We still have many features & improvements in store for the Progress Tracker before we would call it complete. We plan to add the ability to search and favorite teams and deliverables, as well as link deliverables in the Progress Tracker to their estimated delivery in the revamped Release View. We will continue to add new features and continue to optimize the user experience with improvements to the overall usability. 

Star Citizen set a new yearly record of $78.99 million in crowdfunded income in 2020, shattering the previous record set the prior year, $47.735 million.

About $127 million of their total $340 million has been in the last two years.

All I can think of:

I understand people that bought in years ago waiting for their game. I do not understand $79 million more buy-ins in 2020.

It's got to be money laundering at this point.

PurEvil wrote:

It's got to be money laundering at this point.

Oh it totally is.

Laundering how? You have to get the money back out at some point for it to have been 'laundered'. Selling ships on ebay? Is that a thing?

Edit: Or am I the guys from Office Space completely misunderstanding how money laundering works?

billt721 wrote:

Laundering how? You have to get the money back out at some point for it to have been 'laundered'. Selling ships on ebay? Is that a thing?

Selling accounts that own the ships is the thing.

Ships are made as limited releases, then the accounts that have those ships that are no longer available are valuable.

Accounts are sold on eBay, through other websites, and through a dedicated subreddit.

billt721 wrote:

Laundering how? You have to get the money back out at some point for it to have been 'laundered'. Selling ships on ebay? Is that a thing?

Edit: Or am I the guys from Office Space completely misunderstanding how money laundering works?

There are. That said, I'd be shocked if there was enough volume to make it practical. I also suspect that Cloud Imperium is way too high profile to be doing any kind of internal shenanigans, or at least too high profile where anyone who wanted to move a lot of money would be doing it through them.

Then again, I'm not a finance guy, so this is mostly blind speculation.

But I think the more likely, more depressing scenario is that these are legitimate crowdfunding numbers, and they just have a sizeable number of people giving them money every month.

edit: just to be clear, I'm not saying that it's not laundering, just that I think people are underestimating a lot of baseline incompetence and gullibility

billt721 wrote:

Laundering how? You have to get the money back out at some point for it to have been 'laundered'. Selling ships on ebay? Is that a thing?

Edit: Or am I the guys from Office Space completely misunderstanding how money laundering works?

The same way as any other front company. Dirty money goes in; it gets split up into smaller amounts and shuffled between departments and divisions; then it gets paid out as outsized salaries, bogus consulting fees, inflated contract bids, anonymous art auctions, and so forth. All of that is now clean money that can be reported as normal income. The front company keeps a percentage as their cut and to maintain some degree of legitimate business activity in order to avoid scrutiny.

A product like Star Citizen is an ideal front for money laundering. Funds come in anonymously in transactions of various sizes. Second-hand sales can help pump more dirty cash into the system, and since they're products without objective value they can sell for any amount. The project is a never ending boondoggle in an industry with plenty of legitimate never ending boondoggles.

It's clear just from taking one peek at the forums or the subreddit that there is a big community of players that drink the Kool-aid. Does that alone explain the huge, increasing numbers flowing into buying digital content for the game? Not sure.

Snake Oil......

*Legion* wrote:

It's clear just from taking one peek at the forums or the subreddit that there is a big community of players that drink the Kool-aid. Does that alone explain the huge, increasing numbers flowing into buying digital content for the game? Not sure.

It probably does and is an entirely reasonable explanation. The whole money-laundering thing is yet another conspiracy theory in an ocean of conspiracy theory bullsh*t that we've all been drowning in for the last few years. I'm starting to think that people are getting addicted to anxiety and doom-peddling. If anyone has actual evidence of money laundering, they should notify the appropriate authorities. Otherwise it's just contributing to the endless pool of "maybe they are..." filth we've all been wading through for far too long.