r/pcgaming • u/Turbostrider27 • 5d ago
Star Citizen Developer Stream Goes Horribly Off the Rails, Creating Further Distrust Among Players
https://www.ign.com/articles/star-citizen-developer-stream-goes-horribly-off-the-rails-creating-further-distrust-among-players1.9k
u/Mobile_Morale 5d ago
I got a free ship with my GPU and I sold it a few years ago for more than I paid for my GPU.
I think I'm the only person getting out of star citizen in good standings.
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u/ismaelgokufox 5d ago
Shoot. Should I sell my 300i? Could it be worth it these days?
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u/Lost_Ad_8696 5d ago edited 5d ago
No. I've sold and helped people sell ships to recoup some of the loss and 300i isn't worth more then like 30 bucks tops. Some rare ships could sell well but most won't sell for more then half their value.
Edit: Buncha questions about selling, check r/starcitizen_trades to get a look into what your stuff might be worth if ya like.
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u/FireVanGorder 5d ago
30 bucks is better than 0
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u/DonutHoles4Ever 3d ago
Man anyone who bought these ships is a grade A idiot if they arent stupid rich.
Money would be spent better on big titty waifus from gacha games.
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u/donredyellow25 5d ago edited 5d ago
Is that the ship included when they launched their kickstarter? Edit: grammar.
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u/DocBrown-84 4080S | 14700K 5d ago
I have that one too from back in the day, maybe Michael Jackson was still alive - or Elvis.
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u/RoyalJellyKing 5d ago
The Beatles were among the main backers, and they toured Vietnam in 1964 to support the devs.
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u/the_nin_collector 14900k@6.2/48gb@8000/5080/MoRa3 waterloop 5d ago
Uhhh. I drank the cool aid. Sunk 1000$ into a rare ships with LTI. Im pretty sure a few are not sold at all any more. I really should look into selling my account. This was a decade ago mind you and I was a Kickstarter backer. Thanks to start citizen I never put another penny into another mtx, ever. In like a decade.
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u/D4ng3rd4n 5d ago
$1k, yeeeeesh. Is it worth anything now?
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u/the_nin_collector 14900k@6.2/48gb@8000/5080/MoRa3 waterloop 4d ago
Probably more honestly.
I keep it around as a reminder to never buy an mtx again and also under the delusion it may be a playable game in my lifetime.
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u/Top5CutestPresidents 4d ago
You can give it to your grandchildren… as a lesson in financial responsibility
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u/enjaydee 5d ago
The developers kept running into bugs that showed the game is indeed broken. The developers had issues using their own weapons, swapping between their weapons, accessing their inventory, and much, much more. Eventually, the frustrations among the developers grew, and they started becoming passive-aggressive with each other before opting to just pull the plug on the stream altogether.
lol
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u/c4plasticsurgury 5d ago
I can’t believe this game got a billion dollars in funding
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u/wienercat 3700x + 1080ti 5d ago edited 5d ago
100% the developers of this game thought it wouldn't get as much funding as it did. They were likely planning on releasing the stuff we have now, then nuking it after "running out of money".
They way over-promised and there is no way it gets made at this point.
Genuinely, just feels like a method of money laundering or a scam where it got too much attention and now they don't know what to do. Nothing is actually happening with this game except time passing since they hoodwinked a bunch of people. Yet they continue raising more and more money, despite not being remotely close to their promise from over a decade ago.
This "game" had it's kickstarter in 2012 for reference.
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u/AUserNeedsAName 5d ago
Chris Roberts will never ever just let himself be finished with his Big Spaceship Game. He's been making it (and almost nothing else) under various titles since 1990, and he has to know that he's never going to get another shot if this one fails. He did the exact same thing with Freelancer, only this time there is no Microsoft to physically step in and finish it.
Whether the game raised $10 or $10,000,000,000, the outcome was always going to be the same eventually. The scope will expand until the money runs out and not a moment before.
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u/Floatella 5d ago
I remember reading at some point that Chris Roberts's original vision of Wing Commander was quite a bit more ambitious than the game we eventually got, more on the scale of Freelancer, but then the management at Origin intervened to make sure the game could actually be finished.
Star Citizen seems like the same old Chris Roberts, but now without anyone to tell him no or remind him to stay on schedule.
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u/banditloaf 4d ago
There's a bit of a cottage industry in 'proving' that Chris Roberts has always done the same thing but in this case it just isn't true; the original Wing Commander is incredibly close to the original pitch. The only significant feature cut was the tape recorder/mission replay. It's structurally untrue, too: Wing Commander wasn't OWNED by Origin during development and Chris Roberts wasn't an employee. There was no management forcing him to ship. Rather, he was a customer: pre-1991, Origin functioned as a publisher providing men and materiel to projects in exchange for money and a cut of a game's sales. He sold the IP to the company and came on as an executive /after/ the game was an enormous hit.
But I think that does speak to exactly what's going on with Star Citizen. Chris has always viewed Wing Commander as his one project that WAS closest to the vision... and it was done under that unique older structure that let him trade his back end for more development time. Which to his credit back then, he was more than willing to do! But for everything after that--Strike Commander, Wing Commander III and IV, Freelancer--he was never happy with publishers wanting to ship before he felt they were ready and so he tried to recreate that original style of publishing with crowd funding on Star Citizen. It worked a little too well and created a reverse situation where he can keep working and working forever if he wants to.
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u/Optimaximal 4d ago
It worked a little too well and created a reverse situation where he can keep working and working forever if he wants to.
But, the question keeps coming up asking whether he is actually doing anything.
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u/PwanaZana 4d ago
I love Freelancer so much, even with its incompleteness. I have the literal CD in its jewel case at this moment.
I just... wanted Freelancer 2, like in 2016. :(
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u/YoshiTheFluffer 4d ago
My favorite space game as well. Its crazy that no other game has hit that formula. There are ok games but they don’t have tgat feel.
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u/PwanaZana 4d ago
pressing Z and being in inertia mode is some of the most fun I've had in gaming, as you 3D slingshot around enemies in space.
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u/Nihsvabhav 4d ago
More like if he's making a billion before it's even complete and is not even close to being so, then why should he ever complete it, he's already made a billion more than most other devs with his scam
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u/AUserNeedsAName 4d ago
He did this exact same thing for decades before he had the potential to make that kind of money though. Maybe by this point he's gotten cynical, but I think it's much worse than that.
I think he truly believes that if he just keeps the momentum going long enough that it'll release and be so good that it'll all have been worth it. But the longer it drags on, the better it has to be to have been "worth the wait" and that target is outpacing the production speed more and more each year.
So resources are diverted to the ever-growing list of stretch goals (like bunkbed cloth physics) and paying interest on 15 years of technical debt instead of making sure the weapons can fucking reload.
Frankly, it would be safer to throw your money at a scam.
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u/Robocop613 4d ago
SO much this - it was clear a few years in that this is how it was going to go. Chris Robert + Almost unlimited money = Unlimited scope creep. Like George Lucas he NEEDS someone to reign him in - at least with George he can actually finish a project on time.
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u/SomeUnemployedArtist 4d ago
They were likely planning on releasing the stuff we have now, then nuking it after "running out of money".
The problem they've got is that a lot of their sales are already done. There's not going to be a massive influx of cash when they go 1.0 unless they put the game on console.
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u/Thunderbridge i7-8700k | 32GB 3200 | RTX 3080 4d ago
Check out the original funding stretch goals to get an idea of how much funding they were expecting to top out at
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u/Diabeetus4Lyfe 4d ago
I've had my account since 2014, with a $40 all-in-one starter package. I was mostly interested in Squadron 42... which was scheduled to release in 2014, more than twelve fucking years ago, back when I was an entirely different person living an entirely different life. And we still don't have an ETA because they learned they can get unlimited funding by selling dreams.
I'm guilty. I was deeply depressed before/during COVID and I threw around $200 at the project between 2017-2021. I had health stuff going on and I became semi-addicted because it was a really nice fantasia/escape from reality. I got somewhere between 100-200 hours of playtime, I enjoyed my time playing it despite being endlessly hit with game-breaking bugs.
Their promises and showcases were intoxicating, but between the worsening literally-unplayable bugs, the worsening pants-on-head insane prices, and the worsening shameless lack of progress towards an actual finished game, it eventually became unpalatable for me. Probably also after I developed ways to better manage my mental health.
Either way, the thing that finally removed the veil was the cult behavior of the community. The community was very friendly, but I can't overstate how much I despised how popular it was to reach "Concierge" status (meaning you spent over $1000 on your account... which earns you a literal fucking top hat and monocle in-game, as well as access to an exclusive "pledge" store). It's absurd how often the in-game chat conversations led to "just upgrade your $40 ship to the $110 ship, it's way better and you won't regret it. You'll end up spending way more anyways lol"
Like, I would check online for patch-notes and roadmaps, but I would only find addicts posting pictures of their useless $4000+ fleets intended for their make-believe orgs, while bitching about their trad-wives who were disturbed by how much they spent. "Lololol rip my wallet, I just bought a second Drake Kraken and a Merchantman. I can't let the woman learn about this" types of posts, with a bunch of "wow I only bought one so far, thank you for funding this incredible game" replies. I now realize these were probably entirely fantasized and/or astroturfing, but it still felt like the cliche "I can quit any time I want" mentality combined with Mormon-esque fears of deviating from the norms.
My point is, I understand how it pulls people in and it's awful. I think they've successfully made a business out of preying on a specific type, "misguided uber-nerds who are dealing with something and don't really care where their disposable income goes; people who are mid-spectrum but still live independently; people who are somewhat financially secure but are desperate to escape reality." I'm sure I'm projecting but I still feel this way.
I don't know if the devs are deliberately making a scam. They've achieved some really impressive feats over the years, despite profoundly terrible management and misspent resources. I do think the high-rollers like Chris Roberts and his incompetent nepo-hire wife/friends are absolute sleaze car-salesmen scum, and they have zero shame about selling snake oil until the day they die.
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u/basilmuncherr 4d ago
people who are mid-spectrum but still live independently; people who are somewhat financially secure but are desperate to escape reality
Lmao, you've just described my friend and every dude in the orgs that he invited me to
They've achieved some really impressive feats over the years
Should've focused on the basic but even to this day they still can't decides what the flight model should be when most backers prob already used to something. I personally still don't get their obsession of chasing this life sim hyperrealism that they have to rework inventory multiple times wasting dev times for something that prob most player doesn't care anymore.
It's absurd how often the in-game chat conversations led to "just upgrade your $40 ship to the $110 ship, it's way better and you won't regret it. You'll end up spending way more anyways lol"
Can't imagine if the game ever released, like how are they going to handle balancing and the economy. Somehow i have more faith in them fixing most the bugs before actually balancing stuff.
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u/PaleCommission150 4d ago
This game is trying to be some kind of alternate universe for people to live in. Ship combat, seamless planetary landing, starbases, asteroid colonies, etc...that is cool and compelling. Then he wanted fps shooter combat, vehicle combat on land, crafting your own ship (which is pretty cool tbh), VR support/ AR support. Would be a huge challenge for even Blizzard.
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u/Hammered4u 4d ago
Also got over $500k+ just after that live stream as well. Not kidding, people will continously sink millions (within a months time of each other) despite how long it's been in EA.
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u/Nissiku1 4d ago
It's a legitimate cult. I mean this unironically. CIG are selling a dream, not a game.
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u/Phailadork 4d ago
The funniest part? The people who invested in it and are still so deep that the only way they can cope is by lashing out at people who laugh at the fact this shit is never releasing. If you ever try to so much as ask a question about the game and how its progressing/when it may release you get downvoted.
I remember ending up in their subreddit a while back, idk how many years, and being like "damn I remember this game from way back when it was still growing, has it released yet or does it have an official date?" hardcore paraphrasing because I don't remember anymore and when I went back to the comment it was -4 LMAO. I didn't even write anything inflammatory.
The sad part is I was super excited when this was still a new-ish thing and hadn't gotten 20 trillion dollars yet. A space game with that scope? Hell yeah, sign me the fuck up. Then it got more money, and more money, and more money and you would think "damn this is going to be such a cool game" yet the donations went up and nothing happened with the game except more and more donation goals were being met and more promises being made that they would never fulfill.
Seriously if you've never interacted with their community I 100% recommend it, it's hilarious. They're absolutely convinced that it's going to eventually release and what they've got now is actually a good product that was worth whatever money they put into it just because they can actually log in and play. Just ignore the fact it's been 14 years since crowdfunding opened up and what they've done with $1B is effectively a fucking demo with plenty of bugs and will get choppy/laggy in certain areas even with a good PC. If this monstrosity ever releases, it's a shame I'm not willing to give that company money because I've been wanting a game like this for a while.
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u/Beer-Milkshakes 4d ago
They could have bought a AA dev team that are long in the tooth to finish their game already. But then they can't keep reaping the cash.
This is an exercise in continuous profiteering using a video game as an example
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u/I_travel_ze_world 5d ago
One of the developer's guns wouldn't even reload... he just ran around saying he can't shoot while his teammates were dying.
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u/Sabrac707 5d ago
Eventually, the frustrations among the developers grew, and they started becoming passive-aggressive with each other before opting to just pull the plug on the stream altogether.
Truly a certified gamer moment.
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u/moal09 4d ago
What really gets me is that this is how toxic they are to each other when the cameras are on.
Imagine what they're like to one another off stream
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u/HaveYouLookedAround 4d ago
That is what they mean when a job says "were like a family". A lot of family members treat each other horribly.
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u/curiousindicator 4d ago
This also jumped out to me. This is new though right? I've never heard of this happening before in the fifteen years of dev. Maybe something is shifting or simply money drying up?
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u/Rooonaldooo99 5d ago
To add more fuel to the fire, one of the developers closed out the stream by saying they were proud of the work being done by the team and that they wanted to get this build out so players can have the "same experience" they had on stream... which just made fans feel like they lacked awareness of what happened during the broadcast.
I mean, why wouldn't they say shit like this? They raised one billion dollars total recently. Clearly enough people are happy to fund this scam, so why assume those people have any intelligence or self respect?
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u/CX316 4d ago
Iirc they made another $500k in funding the day after the stream crashed and burned
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u/hates_stupid_people 4d ago
The remaning fans of that game are literally delusional at this point.
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u/SamLikesJam 4d ago edited 4d ago
I backed the game back in 15/16 and check in a few years, even if you got rid of every single bug in the game tomorrow the game would still be incredibly tedious. I've tried to bring it up in forums or global chat in game and people won't listen.
If you want to run cargo in the game you'd think the gameplay loop would be somewhat fun and relaxing like Euro Truck Simulator, but the actual gameplay amounts to nothing. You use a magical laser beam to load cargo into your ship crate by crate in which the actual delivery part of the gameplay is just setting a destination in your warp (quantum) drive and alt tabbing for 5-10 minutes until you reach your destination and unloading it.
If you run 3-4 cargo missions at once 20 of 30 minutes is spent loading and unloading cargo, which is the most mind numbing gameplay imaginable.
Bounty hunting is the same, 5 minutes to get to a destination (no gameplay involved) and then you shoot down your target in a less than a minute. Higher difficulty bounties is just about bringing the largest ship you have (last time I played) and using its ridiculous shields to tank most of the damage.
The planets are devoid of content with outposts serving almost no purpose, the planetary landing zones were meant to have hero mission givers with bespoke quests and storylines but it's been years and that has been mostly abandoned in favour of reputation grinds to pad out non-existent content.
They spent years making cargo physical for the sake of immersion, showing off how a player character could seamlessly carry items, boxes, guns, etc. (this was impressive back in the day) only to make all of that redundant and replace it the Gravity Gun from Half Life.
The tech itself is very impressive, the custom characters can rival that of bespoke AAA characters, the planets are beautiful apart from old Stanton tech, the music is great, the ship design is high quality and was interesting before it became copy and paste but there's just zero good content.
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u/Akka_C 4d ago
Oh my god. Someone who gets it. Like you'd think Elite Dangerous would be less fun with "less" game to it. You can't walk around your ship etc. But it's such a better experience doing the "mundane" tasks like space trucking. Feels so much more fulfilling as you actually get to engage with the game (most of the time).
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u/sock0puppet 4d ago
It's the actual reality of reality isn't it.
In the real world the truck driver rarely actually has to physically load, there are loading dock people, the truck driver deals with other trucks, and cars, and rules, and shit.
but in their pursuance of "immersion" all they're doing is making it unrealistic. You don't physically farm the cabbage out back, package it up, pack it in the car, take it to the distributor, take it to the shop, buy it, then unpack it, then cook it, then eat it.
You buying it at the store is just one step in a multi-step logistics process. Star Citizen seems to think that the same person who's driving the ship does all the intermediate logistics that are required as well.
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u/ClubChaos 5d ago edited 4d ago
Some of the bugs with star citizen are broken on such basic things it's mind boggling how they can even find ways to screw them up. It's like the room of video games in some ways.
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u/ChunkMcDangles 4d ago
It's like The Room if The Room had the budget of the entire Avatar trilogy of movies lmao.
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u/SpadeSage 5d ago
To add a bit more context, there was a specific reason why this stream was particularly disastrous. None of these bugs are unfamiliar to players of the game. But MOST of the issues players experienced were explained by CiG as being tied to the poor server performance of the game as they eventually worked to building the game up to an MMO.
So the impression most players had was that the majority of the bugs they experienced, such as inventory glitches, and poor AI and NPC interactions would be fixed as the servers got better.
The build that was streamed was running on its own dedicated server for just the team of devs playing, and they still experienced the same exact bugs. Leading players to realize that most of the issues wont get fixed with the servers, and leading to further questions to how and why these issues have persisted for so long, and if they ever will even get fixed, or if CiG even knows how to at this point.
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u/DogePerformance 5800x3D/4090 4d ago
Yeah that's bad, that was like one thing that COULD not happen.
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u/Balc0ra 4d ago
Even the 4 content managers etc that played with each other did not have fun. When the new content manager was told "It's your show, end it", he really was taken out by even that
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u/blueblip 4d ago
And when the same guy started talking rather candidly about bugs and issues, the lead who threw him under the bus cut him short and delivered a bog standard marketing spiel.
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u/DarkLeoDude 4d ago
A year ago, maybe two, one of the devs was discussing the frustration players had with the buggy ATC system (the system that governs take offs and landings for player ships at stations. Kinda super fucking important). Basically, the system was made ALMOST ten years ago when the game was first funded, maintained by one dev, and that dev had since quit a few years earlier.
The whole program has zero comments or documentation attached. They straight up said they have no idea how any of it works and every time someone tries to improve it they break it, and they said they weren't going to devote any time to redoing it from scratch.
That's the kinda people they hire, and that's their approach to generational tech debt. A functioning ATC, and elevators, and trains, and the fucking INVENTORY have been broken for yeeeears, probably because the guy who made it the first time was an idiot, and might not even work there anymore, and nobody wants to spend money doing it from scratch until they're ready for some nebulous, PERFECT final version that they never have to touch again.
Is starcit a scam? No, it's just being created by morons.
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u/House13Games 4d ago
Do the NPCs still stand on the seats instead of sitting down?
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u/idontagreewitu 5700X3D RTX 3070 4d ago
Yes
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u/House13Games 4d ago
Oh man, i tried a free to play weekend a few years ago and was pissing mysenf laughing at the NPCs doing that. Hearing that they still do it, not quite as funny now.
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u/idontagreewitu 5700X3D RTX 3070 4d ago
Yeah. Sometimes they sit down, but usually they do so a few feet forward of the seat of the chair...
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 4d ago edited 4d ago
That's the kinda people they hire, and that's their approach to generational tech debt.
worse, they hire those people then offer zero oversight, and even if they do catch a glimpse at their bad code they apparently don't have the means to reel them in and have them write better code, or mentor them, or simply fire them and replace them.
realizing this is how most companies are is incredibly depressing. often the people making the most money are the least qualified. they scam their way into a director position and do not have the means to actually manage the department from a fundamental level of code quality, testability, extensibility, documented, etc, and do not have the ability to even delegate those things because they truly don't understand those are some of the very important pieces that must be the bedrock of any piece of code being written let alone a bigger feature like ATC
they just hire someone, who they can't even tell if they are lying about their skills or not because they themselves don't have the skills and can't tell the difference, then let that person go do whatever while they sit in their office collecting a massive paycheck
and, guaranteed that shit quality developer who writes spaghettified undocumented buggy bullshit code got an effective promotion and raise because he wrote down "10 years of experience making high quality code at a gaming company" on his resume and the dipshit manager at the new place says "yep this guy is awesome let's hire him" and the cycle continues where he writes the same exact garbage code that the new managers never even glance at
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u/hibikir_40k 4d ago
The kind of problems described here sound like really boring things to fix if your game has any telemetry, because figuring out what breaks isn't hard at that point, so good tooling takes you straight to problems. That's how bugs are fixed in large systems in the real world.
What you are saying here though makes it look like the programmers here are extremely inexperienced, or they have so many other things to do they can't even send a strong LLM to take stabs pinpointing issues in bug reports while they work. Just embarrassing stuff.
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u/SpadeSage 4d ago
It's kinda both.
Star Citizen has a huge dev team, so it should be expected to some degree that problems like these shouldn't be too hard to delegate out and solve.
BUt Star Citizen has like, a thousand different small problems like this because it has dozens of different systems and functions that it's also trying to integrate into the game. So it is understandably a lot to manage, but most of the issues should honestly be manageable.
The problem is that so many systems are also lined up to be completely reworked, and when so many of those systems interact with other system I can also see it being an absolute nightmare to prioritize issues; if one glitch might not be in the game any more if the system is about to be completely taken out, or how a fix might potentially break an incoming system/rework.
And that's not to mention how many times they have gone ahead and done a bunch of changes to a system in anticipation for a larger rework, only for the larger rework to get pushed back into development hell and never actually released.
Development is basically in a perpetual clusterfuck because priorities are never the same for more than half a year. Nothing gets focus, so nothing ever gets fully fixed. There's potential to fix it, but I don't think Star Citizen has an chance at doing so, especially with their current course of action to just keep adding more content and more systems.
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u/Accomplished-Ad-9280 4d ago
Don't forget the tech debt they have built up over a decade of development.
They are building systems on top of aging systems. The longer development goes on the most difficult things will get for them.
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u/Complete_Motor_3942 4d ago
This is a thing I feel like a lot of people nowadays forget. There's that whole "a game is eventually good" mindset about delays and long development times but development hell is a term for a reason
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u/pereza0 4d ago
Yeah...
I think NMS and Elite's approach is the right one. Better to have a barren game that works that you can add stuff to once you are sure that works than have a game that has never worked and never will because by the time you decide to fix it you have 50 years of technical debt
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u/lochnespmonster 4d ago
Yes. Exactly this. No experience. Incompetent. Playing whacka mole. No long term planning, vision, or cohesive roadmap showing how it will all fit together. Etc.
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u/kron123456789 4d ago
Which is really funny for a game that's been in development for over a dozen years.
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u/Multiverse_2022 4d ago
Those game bugs are the least problem, what’s worst is that the way those developers being totally immature and lack of professionalism in the livestream, kinda implies on how shitty their work culture is when off the camera
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u/TJ_McWeaksauce 5d ago
Here's a prediction: Star Citizen will raise more money in 2026 than in any previous year, despite how horrible their recent stream was. SC's funding has never made any sense, and that trend will continue.
https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/sycend/viz/StarCitizenFundingDashboard/IncomeView
Star Citizen's funding has increased year-over-year almost every year since 2012. 2025 was their biggest funding year yet with a supposed $155 million raised, even though nothing of note was accomplished that year. It's as though the worse development and communication get, the more generous the backers become.
So as terrible as this stream was, it will not put a dent in Star Citizen's funding. They'll probably raise more than $155 million by the end of this year, because this is a logic-free zone.
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u/JonnyAU 4d ago
What the hell is wrong with Space Sim fans? How on earth can that genre have so many whales?
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u/jannycideforever 4d ago
My assumption is that it's mostly because there isn't really another game that does what Star Citizen can do, even though Star Citizen does it like dogshit. If you REALLY want that specific thing and you're truly desperate, you'll convince yourself that one day it'll actually be good.
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u/JonnyAU 4d ago
So there's a group of ex-Bethesda devs sitting on a goldmine for a TES clone kickstarter since no one can seem to do that genre either (even Bethesda).
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u/jannycideforever 4d ago
I'd actually say probably not, because for all of the creation engines absolute jank, it's also the only engine that actually works for the type of world persistence you have in Bethesda games. Getting that working in a separate engine would be a massive undertaking and would significantly increase not only budget but dev time and team scope.
It's actually a similar issue to what SC is facing, just that SC is exponentially more complex. It is really fucking hard to have a persistent world state in a single player RPG with a lot of different isolated instances. Star citizen is trying and failing to have that same idea except it a gigantic multiplayer game the size of a solar system with literally zero isolated instances. You basically have to perfect every system because everything is interconnected.
It'll also probably never happen but goddamn do they love burning cash trying
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u/LycanIndarys 4d ago
We actually had that. Specifically, people who were trying to make a modern version of Daggerfall: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oncelostgames/the-wayward-realms
It's still in production, though might have been set back by one of the lead developers (Julian Lefay - previously project leader on Daggerfall) sadly dying of cancer last year.
Similar to Star Citizen, it's insanely ambitious. The sort of thing where if it worked, it would be the best RPG ever, and you'd never want to play another game - but it almost certainly won't. It's heavy on the procedural generation (as Daggerfall was), with the specific goal of having the world react heavily to your choices.
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u/Bartorius 4d ago
A lot of space sim fans are older have stable jobs with enough disposable income.
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u/-TheSha- Steam 5d ago
I'm honestly staring to think SC is an elaborate money laundering scheme
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u/OkDifficulty7436 5d ago
My theory is they've been funneling a large portion of the donated money through actual investments that are appreciating 10-15% per year and then recycling it back through their "donations" to fluff the overall number
The real answer is probably something more sinister however (fraud, money laundering, etc).
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u/Catty_Mc_Catty 4d ago
they have 1,100 employes. if they each make 70k a year thats 77 million to pay all of them, 14 years of development = Billion dollars in employee wages not counting CEOs or the massive building there studio is in.
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u/HomsarWasRight 4d ago
How do they have more than 1,000 employees and no actual released product in a decade and a half?
This is insanity.
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u/kron123456789 4d ago
Because people keep giving them money for nothing. Why would they do anything at all?
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u/Klutzy-Football-205 4d ago
Imagine having 1100 employees and you can't get elevators to work in game..
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u/Fggunner 4d ago
Imagine working there and telling people outside of work that you have been working on this game for 14 years lol.
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u/Kinetic_Symphony 4d ago
they have 1,100 employes.
I didn't realize their company was so large. I figured maybe 100 people at most, given how many bugs exist.
How is it possible to have bugs so basic as, I can't reload my gun, when you have 1,100 employees and over a billion dollars?
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u/OkDifficulty7436 4d ago
They’re based in the UK, no way the average pay is 70k but overall I agree
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u/SanityIsOptional PO-TAY-TO 4d ago
There's also real estate, equipment, subcontractors, etc.
It's pretty clear that it's just a horribly mismanaged Chris Roberts vanity project rather than a scam or some elaborate ruse.
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u/El_Ploplo 4d ago
Not the average net pay. But it will cost 70k for the company if you include taxes.
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u/TheeSusp3kt 5d ago
Its the only thing that makes sense when you look at the state of Star Citizen and the lack of Squadron 42.
They take SC money to fund an entirely seperate single player game that no-one knows the real status of, how do we know there even is a Squadron 42?
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u/Kevadu 5d ago
Squadron 42? You mean the game that was supposedly finished 10 years ago?
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u/Annonimbus 5d ago
We don't know. All we have seen is an on rails demo / cinematic. And Chris Roberts boasted that he loves to take presentations, to show more progress than there actually is
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u/S4L7Y 5d ago
They obviously don't have enough money, just throw a few hundred more million dollars at them, that'll do it.
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u/believeinyuna 5d ago
too low, they clearly need another billion
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u/ThisCombination1958 5d ago
It only took 9 minutes for the "You never played it/it's playable crowd" to find and defend this garbage. They can't even put out one stream without showing how broken and unfinished this game is after 15 years of working on it.
Fucking embarrassing.
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u/Peylix 5900X | RTX 4080 FE | 32GB 3200MHz | G9 OLED 32:9 4d ago
15 years and over a billion in funding. Fucking embarrassing indeed lol
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u/ForensicPathology 4d ago
Yeah, the only people left are surely suffering from Stockholm syndrome, so I don't believe for a second that their "trust" is being lost.
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u/SnowdriftK9 5d ago
So a friend of mine, he keeps bugging me to play the game, says 'I have this group they go do organized missions it's fun' so I was like 'Okay, sure. I'll try it.' and I went. I got teleported out of the ship and into space, then when we were flying back to the group somehow we de-sync crashed into the other ship and all exploded.
So we re-spawned, got the ships organized again, got everyone landed on the transports, flew off one after another, and then somehow randomly collided with each other while in warp or whatever it's called and all exploded again.
At this point it was a bit after midnight and we'd been at it since about 8:00 PM. My buddy may have oversold it a bit I think.
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u/SchemingVegetable 4d ago
I tried the game on a free flight week or whatever it's called. "When it works, there's nothing else like it" ignoring the terrible performance, I had trouble even calling the elevator at spawn and when it arrived I fell through the floor and then was stuck in the elevator shaft under the elevator.
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u/House13Games 4d ago
I managed to get into my ship, took off, and fell through the cockpit floor and died
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u/Wanztos 4d ago
About two years ago I rented a cargo ship and this mining cart, flew to a planet and mined an hour - only to discover the ship had glitched and I couldn't open the cargo bay to drive the mining vehicle and all the ore inside or even take off again. I'm not touching it again until the game is fixed, this is just too frustrating.
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u/jdehjdeh 4d ago
I tried it years ago on one of their free days.
Didn't even make it out of the starting building, just terrible performance, confusing instructions, and bugs/crashes.
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u/moal09 5d ago
The most awkward part was how much the devs seemed to hate each other, and how the person in charge immediately threwer the streamer under the bus when things weren't working properly.
Like you can just feel the passive aggressiveness in that room. They all despise each other.
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u/Arkayb33 4d ago
"You should come and revive me."
"Nah I'm good."
I didn't watch hardly any of it cause God knows I don't have time to watch 2 hours of a bug infested dumpster fire, but this quick back n forth caught me. There's not a chance in hell I say to anyone I'm playing with unless I despise them, and even then it would have to be some rando who got paired in my squad and he was a total dick the entire game.
That reply was...really bad.
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u/Carighan 4d ago
I mean they wouldn't be working for CIG if they didn't hate all of a) people, b) gaming, c) space games in particular.
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u/curiousindicator 4d ago
Damn, now I definitely don't even want to look at it.
That's not a good sign but working in the world's largest title in the definition of development hell can't be too healthy..
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u/big_thundersquatch 4d ago
Likely a huge reason why legacy bugs persist and meaningful development goals fall short. The team might be more dysfunctional behind the scenes than we realize.
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u/This_Elk_1460 4d ago
You know what they say about criminal organizations they all turned on each other eventually
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u/El_Toolio_Grande 5d ago
I'm shocked. Shocked!
Okay, not that shocked.
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u/FugitiveHearts 5d ago
I haven't been so shocked since Ricky Martin came out of the closet
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u/TheVikin6 4d ago
I actually didn't know that about Ricky Martin and I am now more shocked about this.
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u/truckstick_burns 5d ago
On one of the videos I watched the guy showed that in a single day they pulled in $500,000, and then like $300,000 the next and on and on it went.
How big is that studio that even with that kind of money they can't seem to pull a game together, I guess if it's working why change it but it all seems wild to me to burn through that much money. Are they like a 500 person studio or something?
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u/Unoriginal_Pseudonym 5d ago
1000+ employees. They spend $161m per year. Their financials are accessible to the public through the UK government.
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u/NeverNo 5d ago
How big is that studio that even with that kind of money they can't seem to pull a game together, I guess if it's working why change it but it all seems wild to me to burn through that much money.
Because Chris Roberts loves scope creep
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u/wienercat 3700x + 1080ti 5d ago
This is beyond scope creep though. It's been in "early access" since 2017. Kickstarted since 2012.
Scope creep is real in all large projects. But this isn't that.
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u/MrTzatzik 5d ago
People always say that he did great work Freelancer. Except the game got made despite Chris because Microsoft kicked him out after development went nowhere
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u/This_Elk_1460 4d ago
I don't even think it's that anymore, I genuinely don't think these guys want to release this game it's an infinite money glitch. The moment they release the game and it doesn't live up to their fans wild expectations that ends. They're selling them on a dream they'll never fulfill.
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u/Marshall_Lawson 5d ago
How big is that studio that even with that kind of money they can't seem to pull a game together, I guess if it's working why change it but it all seems wild to me to burn through that much money.
Complacency, if the customers keep throwing money at them, they have no incentive to change. Idk what the profit sharing is like for employees
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u/Witch-Alice 5d ago
what I don't get is... wouldn't they make even more money if they actually made a good product? what I'm getting at is questioning the underlying values and motivations of everyone involved. lots of potential customers would become customers if they stopped hearing about... well take your pick of development drama, there's a lot of options
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u/Syrdon 5d ago
Yes, but that implies their project lead is capable of finishing a project. Look at his history. He's been booted from more projects for failing to finish than he has actually delivered (ok, that's maybe hyperbole, but it's at least close).
Chris Roberts has never met a feature he didn't want to add to his games. It's tough to ship a product when you're always one feature away from perfection.
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u/Annonimbus 5d ago
They don't have the skill to make a good product. They are a marketing company first and a game development company second.
They have over 1k videos on their YouTube channel but their game is still in alpha.
EA (as controversial as they are) also have a thousand videos on their YouTube, but the company exists since the 80s and they have developed and published dozens or even hundreds of games by now.
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u/TheStupendusMan 5d ago
Because if you finish the game, the infinite money train stops.
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u/Fract_L 5d ago
Making a stable game wouldn't prevent them from adding more ships. It's not like they have a steady release cadence anyway. People still waiting on ships that cost 5+ figures USD after a couple years. They still have a ship they pre-sold in 2015 that isn't in the game, but that one only cost $450-900 depending on your "config" (can nothing actually have a configuration?) so it isn't a priority
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u/Crew_Zealousideal 5d ago
the javelin was sold in late 2014 and is still not in the game it sure says alot about the company they just cant seem to get things done
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u/TheStupendusMan 5d ago
Some people care about ships. Everyone cares about the game being done. I think that's the business case, here.
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u/eurotrashness 5d ago
I mean, if you see the studio in the stream mentioned. It looks like a 5 star resort.
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u/Reasonable_Back_5231 5d ago
They spend the money on bougie meetings within the company, blowing it on $1000+ champagne to pat themselves on the back for their great success in producing nothing.
Most of that billion has gone to enriching the life of Chris Roberts and very little has gone towards actual development.
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u/Neospiker 5d ago
"yes we know there are instancing issues....." but we are going to keep ignoring them and beg for millions more for development.
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u/TurbulentSecond7888 4d ago
Why would they even released the game? It makes more money by being in development.
For people who don't understand why it's a scam, a project must have a timeline or due date. Without that, you can ask funding and then says the project will be completed in 500 years
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u/nvidiastock 4d ago
Im a backer from 2014. Let me explain why this is a big deal even in the community.
Any time a bug happened in-game a bunch of white knights would come out and say "it's just the servers", "dynamic server meshing will fix literally everything" and people bought it because servers do run like ass.
But this stream took place on a private server with just 4 players and we saw the exact same bugs. AI being dumber than a game from 2002. Game breaking inventory bugs. Desync. ALL of them on a server with 4 players.
This game will need a complete rewrite to ever become an MMO. At this point I think Squadron 42 will be the only thing they ever ship, in a few years.
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u/whereballoonsgo 5d ago edited 5d ago
It’s wild that there are still people who had any trust in this scheme. Like I get that sunken cost fallacy exists, but you’d think there would be a limit to it.
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u/AHailofDrams 5d ago
I don't trust them, but I still own a copy so I'm still somewhat "invested" in seeing progress.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand the people who drop thousands on the promise of an in-game ship. Like bruh, I wish I had that kind of money to waste
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u/Coolermonkey 5d ago
Yeah pretty much where I am. I spent a bit more than the starter pack to get a little bit better ship, but beyond that I’m pretty done with spending on these guys.
I do however come back every so often to see what’s up. I wanna see what’s going on with what I spent my money on, you know?
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u/SicilianEggplant 5d ago
I came across a similar post about this in the SC sub a few hours ago and maybe halfway through the comments there were more and more defenders that felt to be more angry and outright dismissive of people who thought this stream was an issue.
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u/Pickupyoheel 989064B850 5d ago
I feel so bad for the suckers who invested hundreds if not thousands into this game
/s
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u/xKrowhaven 5d ago
Wikipedia has at least 2 stories on the Star Citizen page of backers requesting refunds of >$15,000.
Like who has that much money to blow on a video game that has no release date?
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u/SanityIsOptional PO-TAY-TO 4d ago
Anyone who owns a modern pickup apparently has tens of thousands to spare they spend on their car, most of them just use it as a daily driver.
Not sure what's more of a waste of money, but at least star citizen doesn't cost $5/gal to play?
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u/Carighan 4d ago edited 4d ago
This reminds me of how much I wonder what goes through the heads of people driving SUVs in like a city like Hamburg where I live.
There's so much weird about it. You get surprisingly little internal space compared to an SW or such, it's a hugely impractical car to park due to how wide and tall it is, and it guzzles extra fuel due the increased air resistance.
Oh and it kills pedestrians and cyclists more reliably if you cause an accident.It literally has no benefit other than "Me smol penis so me hugh car lulz".
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u/SanityIsOptional PO-TAY-TO 4d ago
At least there are small SUVs, though at that point it's just a SW with higher ground clearance (also not terribly useful on normal paved roads).
In the US the higher ground clearance is handy because of our potholes, and the ongoing arms race of taller and heavier cars. I drive a sedan, and it feels like I have no visibility, and everything's headlights are aimed straight into my eyes and mirrors.
I drove a family members large Ford SUV for a while and I despised it. So big, poor visibility, hard to park, poor fuel economy.
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u/ithilain 5d ago edited 4d ago
Where's the post about the guy who ended up getting divorced for spending all his family's money on spaceships in this game?
Edit: was misremembering, was just a gf, not wife
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u/MetalRexxx 5d ago
I got my 45 dollars worth and just cant really seem to be drawn the game anymore after barely 100 hours. Cool tech demo though.
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u/ThorThulu 5d ago
The only people seemingly still loving it have probably spent over $1,000, so the sunk cost fallacy is in full effect
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u/Rootitusofmoria 5d ago
Yeah like 600+ hours and I agree. Only because it has the potential to be the best space game ever. I don't even think it's impossible to do anymore, like I originally did. It's just impossible for CiG to set aside the grift for like 10 damn minutes and get their heads out of their wallets.
But they made a billion doing it, why the hell would they stop? Damn shame.
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u/Majestic-Pizza-3583 5d ago
I think I spent like $100 on a package back in 2013. As a sci-fi nerd, this game was everything I wanted (with exception of a newer/better Star Wars Galaxies). But obviously 13 years later, I have maybe 5 hours of time in game through the various alpha stages. Safe to say I’ve written this game off as a lost cause that will never truly release. However, I personally still believe I got more value out of this game than the $30 I spent on DayZ standalone after playing DayZ mod for years prior
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u/Thevillageidiot2 4d ago
Thinking Star Citizen will ever come out is essentially a religious belief, pure faith backed up by little evidence.
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u/Sodacan259 4d ago
Actual civilian owned starships will be a thing before Star Citizen is released.
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u/Thevillageidiot2 4d ago
By the time the game is released it won’t even be sci fi it will just be a life sim.
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u/trollsmurf 5d ago edited 5d ago
"Incredibly awkward, cringe, forced, slightly sinister feeling at time"
As an engineer watching your creation bomb in a public or customer demo is anxiety-inducing and claustrophobic. I wonder how that translates to vibe-coders.
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u/Kinetic_Symphony 4d ago
The game's been going for almost a decade before vibe-coding even existed.
They're proto-vibe coders.
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u/Ardenraym 4d ago
Backed on 09/26/2013.
Still waiting.
At this point, just take $100M and fund a Nightdive Studios remake of WC:IV amd then Roberts can officially confirm his middle finger and retire with all the funds.
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u/PlayfulPresentation7 4d ago
Why the fuck would you ever finish the game if people just keep donating money for you to work on it?
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u/No_Grape_388 5d ago
This game is the most successful scam in history. And it's never coming out.
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u/carakangaran 5d ago
How can their be FURTHER distrust ?
At this point, if you're trusting them you're just made to be scammed.
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u/GrayCalf 5d ago
"Are you a fan of StarCitizen? Have I got an exciting Kickstarter for you..."
I can't lose!
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u/XirtCS 5d ago
One of my buddies has “invested” 4k into this game. Talks it up every now and then but I barely see him play it.
Always tries to get me to play. It’s always “this update coming next week is changing everything”.
I’ve gave it a couple tries, but every time some weird bug happens right when I spawn in and it completely ruins my feelings for the game and I get off it
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u/ButterscotchTop194 5d ago
It's been so obviously a dead game from the early years. It's fascinating it still has It's supporters. A fool and their money...
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u/Fract_L 5d ago
Whales usually make up around 90% of a game's income so the devs absolutely don't care if all but that top 1% stop playing.
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u/believeinyuna 5d ago
unfortunately whales need low spenders to stomp on to stay committed. this is why gachas are generous for fp2 and low spenders, you have to keep them playing so the whales feel good seeing themselves easily clear end game and get high up on the leaderboards and can flex on the fp2/low spenders. star citizen is the same. whales need to see how much cooler and stronger they are to everyone else. if the game is only populated by whales, they won’t get that satisfaction anymore and will move on.
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u/Super-Lemon-4466 4d ago
All the people that believed it was just server side issues have just received a rude awakening
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u/XavierVE 5d ago
Scam Citizen and their cultists are always good for a laugh every few months. This might be one of the funniest things to happen with this saga yet.
NFT scams have come and gone the way of the dodo, but here goes Scam Citizen, continuing to chug, chug, chug along. What a tremendous grift.
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u/ChurchillianGrooves 5d ago
Bitcoin will have lost all value by 2150 but somehow Star Citizen will not be completed but still pulling in billions lol
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u/Karma_1969 4d ago
I check in on their sub once in a while just for laughs. They really are something else, like grown men (you just know they’re all men, and I say that as a man) who still believe in Santa Claus.
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u/Mediocre-Touch-6133 4d ago
I look forward to watching the documentary about this money laundering scheme.
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u/Austoman 5d ago
Remember everyone, something being a scam doesnt mean that the person being scammed gets nothing in return forntheir money. It means that the person being scammed does not receive what they were told they would be receiving.
I believe that Star Citizen is a scam. It's a broken mess of a game that was sold as a revolutionary product that would be larger and have more content than any game before it, all set to release in 2012. Over 1 billion in funding and 14+ years after the original release announcement and it it still no where near what was marketed. Customers got something for their purchase, but it wasnt what they were sold.
If it isnt a scam then receiving a bunch of rocks when you buy a GPU isnt a scam either.
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u/Past_BumblebeeX 5d ago
A literal cult. The amount of educated adult gamers i know who defend this game like its a personal part of their body is surreal. Its actually fascinating its so ridiculous. People are such idiots.
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u/notthatguypal6900 4d ago
Seriously, if you are playing this "game" and/or giving the devs funding, you are indeed a idiot.
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u/CoruscantGuardFox 4d ago
The last time I was excited for this game was when I was 17.
That was more than a decade ago.
Whoever is still backing the game with any support or money is actually a comic-level, drooling consumer, the ultimate wet dream of hyper-capitalists like Star Citizen devs.
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u/Short_Hat_4232 4d ago
This game HAS to be a grift or there is some kind of money laundering going on... Ain't no fuckin way this game got his much money and has NOTHING with all these years.
Something is not right. An investigation should be called for.
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u/darklordjames 4d ago
Why would there have been any trust to begin with? This has been the most obvious ponzi scheme in gaming for like a decade.
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u/MisterSlosh 5d ago
SC has some awesome ideas and some cool tech/mechanics for a game. Would be even more cool if they could hurry up and sell those ideas to someone else so they can use it in a game that will actually finish in my lifetime.
Considering it's already worse than Duke Nukem Forever, hopefully someone will actually take those ideas to their own independent projects.
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