Is this thing the biggest Gen X nerd con of all times?
Is this thing the biggest Gen X nerd con of all times?
I dunno, I've been to several Transformers conventions, and they'd be at least neck and neck, I feel.
Top_Shelf wrote:Is this thing the biggest Gen X nerd con of all times?
I dunno, I've been to several Transformers conventions, and they'd be at least neck and neck, I feel.
Warhammer has entered the chat.
Really don't think Star Citizen is a con anymore; it's a combination of a religion apparently entirely based on the denial of the concept of "sunk cost" as well as an incredibly effective money laundering scheme.
Veloxi wrote:Top_Shelf wrote:Is this thing the biggest Gen X nerd con of all times?
I dunno, I've been to several Transformers conventions, and they'd be at least neck and neck, I feel.
Warhammer has entered the chat.
Not convention.
A complex, planned con where the target is manipulated into giving more money.
I feel like this thing is the biggest nerd confidence scam primarily aimed at Xers.
Hrdina wrote:Veloxi wrote:Top_Shelf wrote:Is this thing the biggest Gen X nerd con of all times?
I dunno, I've been to several Transformers conventions, and they'd be at least neck and neck, I feel.
Warhammer has entered the chat.
Not convention.
A complex, planned con where the target is manipulated into giving more money.
I feel like this thing is the biggest nerd confidence scam primarily aimed at Xers.
I'm gonna throw out everything connected with the current Republican candidate for president as the obvious answer.
That's not a GenX thing, nor is it a nerd thing (just look at those rallies).
Of all the scams of the last 30 years, this feels, to me, like a Gen X nerd thing, playing on our nostalgia (and a bunch of other stuff). And I'm having a hard time of thinking of one that's worse.
Maybe one small bright side is that CIG is at least keeping 1100+ people employed, most of whom are software developers.
Is there controversy about this game?
I had never paid attention do it untill now.. looks interesting
Is there controversy about this game?
I had never paid attention do it untill now.. looks interesting
No controversy. Promises made, promises kept. 
Mmmmm let me do some research on it
Darkhaund wrote:Is there controversy about this game?
I had never paid attention do it untill now.. looks interestingNo controversy. Promises made, promises kept.
I still get the update newsletters and they are such a joy to read. Four paragraphs to tell me that NPCs can now have scripted behavior!
I still get the update newsletters and they are such a joy to read. Four paragraphs to tell me that NPCs can now have scripted behavior!
The reactions shown above are mine after reading those emails...
I have had 3 children and owned 3 houses since I submitted the original post of this game's announcement here. https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/...
Oh man. That OG thread is wild.
Tach wrote:Darkhaund wrote:Is there controversy about this game?
I had never paid attention do it untill now.. looks interestingNo controversy. Promises made, promises kept.
ohhhh so sarcasam? u guess things did not go well
Veloxi wrote:Tach wrote:Darkhaund wrote:Is there controversy about this game?
I had never paid attention do it untill now.. looks interestingNo controversy. Promises made, promises kept.
ohhhh so sarcasam? u guess things did not go well
It's pretty much a money laundering operation.
what?!!! how so?
Someone explain the money laundering to me like I’m a character from Office Space. Someone wants to launder some money, so they give Star Citizen a bunch, and then get it back out how? Is the speculation that the ‘teams’ working on the game don’t exist at all and the money gets back to the launderers via fake dev companies and/or contracts?
I am sooo confused lol but ill stay away from this game
Has anyone actually seen Chris Roberts and Elon Musk in a room together?
Someone explain the money laundering to me like I’m a character from Office Space. Someone wants to launder some money, so they give Star Citizen a bunch, and then get it back out how? Is the speculation that the ‘teams’ working on the game don’t exist at all and the money gets back to the launderers via fake dev companies and/or contracts?
People shoveling money into Star Citizen aren't doing it in exchange for nothing. They're buying ships in the game. And where there's digital assets, there's something to buy with dirty money and re-sell to get the clean money.
Valve had major issues with exactly this and the CS:GO marketplace until they took action to try and stop it.
It's hard to tell how many people are playing Star Citizen, but the evidence we can find in terms of user activity sure suggests the game's actual popularity doesn't reflect the game's financial activity. The game never has high Twitch viewership, landing outside the top 100 with around 2,000 daily viewers, putting it roughly on par with Warcraft III and Super Mario Maker 2. Which isn't nothing, but neither of which are games still having hundreds of millions of new dollars being dumped into them. Looking at YouTube view counts from videos by Star Citizen "creators" reveals similar niche-level interest.
There is a massive, yawning chasm between the amount of money flowing around Star Citizen, and the project's actual popularity. The money says it's the biggest gaming production ever, and every other metric says it's a niche title within the gaming world. The math ain't mathing.
(EDIT: For transparency, the graphic at the top came from this Reddit post.)
Legion just condensed like, 25 pages of this thread, into a single post. I was reading through them last night!
Most impressive.
billt721 wrote:Someone explain the money laundering to me like I’m a character from Office Space. Someone wants to launder some money, so they give Star Citizen a bunch, and then get it back out how? Is the speculation that the ‘teams’ working on the game don’t exist at all and the money gets back to the launderers via fake dev companies and/or contracts?
People shoveling money into Star Citizen aren't doing it in exchange for nothing. They're buying ships in the game. And where there's digital assets, there's something to buy with dirty money and re-sell to get the clean money.
Valve had major issues with exactly this and the CS:GO marketplace until they took action to try and stop it.
It's hard to tell how many people are playing Star Citizen, but the evidence we can find in terms of user activity sure suggests the game's actual popularity doesn't reflect the game's financial activity. The game never has high Twitch viewership, landing outside the top 100 with around 2,000 daily viewers, putting it roughly on par with Warcraft III and Super Mario Maker 2. Which isn't nothing, but neither of which are games still having hundreds of millions of new dollars being dumped into them. Looking at YouTube view counts from videos by Star Citizen "creators" reveals similar niche-level interest.
There is a massive, yawning chasm between the amount of money flowing around Star Citizen, and the project's actual popularity. The money says it's the biggest gaming production ever, and every other metric says it's a niche title within the gaming world. The math ain't mathing.
You are a gentleman and a scholar.
TY
Clever and well explained. I still question the ability to get the money back out though -- if there isn't much real interest in the game, who is going to buy the ships on the secondary marketplace? CS:GO we know was/is incredibly popular, so pushing money through that marketplace makes some kind of sense. Less so for a game that's not popular and is just as likely to completely collapse as it is to actually release.
if there isn't much real interest in the game, who is going to buy the ships on the secondary marketplace?
(Massive disclaimer: I am not in any way an expert or even particularly knowledgeable about money laundering. Take my layman's understanding with gigantic grains of salt. I welcome corrections.)
First off, don't mistake "there isn't $700 million worth of interest" as meaning "there is no real interest". There is interest in the game and there is legitimate money flowing through it. That's how the project came to be in the first place.
The idea is that illicit activity has jumped into the market, massively pumped up its activity, and used the legitimate activity as cover.
You asked who's going to buy the ships. It can be legitimate buyers, but it can also be the launderers themselves with their sock puppet accounts.
You're probably wondering, "what good is buying a digital asset with dirty money, and then selling it to yourself for different dirty money?".
Don't think of it as a closed system, where all the washing activity has to happen within the scope of Star Citizen. Think of Star Citizen as one link of a long chain of transactions, and those chains are weaved together into a web that goes in every direction.
The goal then is to create an endlessly complex network of transactions, where money gets chopped up, sent in a ton of different directions to other seemingly unconnected accounts, those accounts chop it up further, layer in some clean money, etc., to the point where you've got a network where you can see dirty money pours in at one point, but then passes through so many layers of transactions on different marketplaces to where, by the time fragments of the money comes back out of the system, you can't tell where the original source was, and what's from a dirty source and what isn't.
To do something like this, you need to be able to generate lots of transactions easily and repeatably, for things that purport to have value. The thing that made CS:GO so attractive was the fact that keys and crates were unlimited, always available. There was no scarcity to get in the way.
Likewise, the Star Citizen store is always open. There's always $70 ships to buy, no running out of stock. CIG/RSI is always there to take your money and give you something supposedly worth $70. And, unlike Valve, CIG doesn't seem to be putting anything in place that would dissuade this activity.
Money laundering has three phases: Placement (money goes into the system), Layering (money moves around to make it as hard to trace as possible), then Integration (money comes out of the system). Star Citizen doesn't have to be the Integration step where I get the money out, it can be one of many things I use in the Layering step.
Star Citizen doesn't have to be the Integration step where I get the money out, it can be one of many things I use in the Layering step.
1100 employee salaries, hypothetically speaking.
I guess you could cash out washed money from Star Citizen by eventually selling your ships at below market price.
Returns on laundering can be around 50%, so if you see a ship being sold at what seems to be a deep discount then that could be Integration.
Pages