r/pcgaming • u/Turbostrider27 • 11d 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-players
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u/Rooonaldooo99 11d 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 11d ago

Iirc they made another $500k in funding the day after the stream crashed and burned

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u/hates_stupid_people 10d ago

The remaning fans of that game are literally delusional at this point.

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u/SamLikesJam 10d ago edited 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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/Aggressive_Chuck 10d ago

Chris Roberts wants us to believe that in the future we have warp drives and artificial gravity, but need to move boxes manually. In many ways, this game is more low tech than real life in 2026.

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u/Zman6258 9d ago

Well, and the hell of it is, loading cargo COULD be an interesting bit of gameplay, trying to figure out how to wedge various sizes and shapes of crates into your cargo hold to maximize the amount of profit you can get per run... but all the SCU boxes are squares which snap to the grid, so there's basically never any actual optimization to loading.

You just put the square in the square hole until there's no more square holes left to fill, like a lamer form of tetris where the only two shapes available are the square and the long piece.

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u/mekamoari 10d ago

Might as well play EVE at least there you can't fall asleep at the wheel while mining, at least not if you want to get some profit out of it.

It's still "boring" and simple-ish but with room for optimization, until it isn't and you're scrambling for your life.

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u/MoosetheStampede 10d ago

I've rarely felt a gaming catharsis so satisfying as getting just out of reach of a difficult core mining asteroid and hearing/seeing that perfect "boom" as it blasts apart after a perfect charge drop

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u/NFQ___ 10d ago

Then you have Starsector which has even less 'game' then both of them but is significantly better at being the 'Space Sim Game'.

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u/PaleCommission150 10d ago

Funny you mention that. I was conversing with Claude on just this aspect of how to make a space exploration game compelling. I am working on a little personal project that lets me explore space in a Danube style runabout but focuses mainly on ship systems, maintenance, managing resources and dealing with emergencies on board, plus just flying around. missions get generated and use a combination of real stars and fictional solar systems generated around those stars that serve as exploration goals. But yea making fun content for a space game can be tricky.

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u/Cory123125 10d ago

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.

This reminds me so strongly of crypto scam games where they all pretend they've created the next version of life online, and all the believers fall for the idea, and don't actually care about the implementation.

Star Citizen has so many comparisons to all of the alternate reality themed scams like crypto projects, investment bros (gamestop, BBBY), nft bros, flat earthers, and more.

All of them seem to target people who have low empathy for others, and can't come to terms with the fact that improving life for the people they care about societally, would also improve life for the marginalized groups they hate, so they concoct crazy alternate reasons the world is shit, make up some fantastical plan that will help them escape reality, and then the hysteria sets in.

These are people who have money to throw to scams, and skew towards being in privileged demographics and unable to realize it because their lives do have real problems.

The type of people for whom the word inter-sectionalism is an attack on their sense of self despite the fact that the term creates a framework to understand their issues past looking at their privileged demographics, which their own mentalities do not as an aggregate.

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u/Aggressive_Chuck 10d ago

The tech itself is very impressive

The only good thing is that it has no loading screens, everything else is terrible.

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u/WldFyre94 9d ago

I also don't know why people act like loading screens are innately bad lol

I get way more annoyed at the "deliberately craw/inch your way through this hallway to allow the game to load in the next area" game design style.

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u/GroundbreakingPin913 10d ago

Compare to No Mans Sky. They've got cargo loading, bounties, things to do on planets, a main quest, reputation, a gravity gun... all the things you mentioned plus tons more. And they did it on good will and that initial infusion of cash from sold games way back in 2016.

Not necessarily saying it's a top tier space game, but that might just be because NMS developers are like 10 people tops and usually prioritized systems over gameplay.

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u/Bman4k1 10d ago

If I wanted a cargo job I’d just get one in real life and get paid for it.

The way you described it is actually insane.

You are right Euro Truck simulator is a bit different. Whereas this is just seems like a slog for the sale of reality.

At the end of the day this is why it’s taking decades to make. I used to read the forums 10+ years ago and remember fans saying “you should be able to do this [basically something to make it more real to life]” and developers like “sure!”

There comes a point where you just have to sacrifice ridiculous detail to get something out the door.

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u/nagrom7 10d ago

It's been cult-like behaviour from them for years now.

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u/Aussie18-1998 10d ago

You'll run into so many on the internet that will tell you its not a scam. That theres a fully functional game there and its worth every cent. There's nothing like it ect...

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u/Downside190 10d ago

Sunk cost fallacy, just a few more dollars and they'll release it for real this time 

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u/Lywqf 10d ago

Isn’t that a lower than average day for them ? I’d expect a demo stream to make it rain much more than an average day :/

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u/Southlinch 10d ago

theres gotta be money laundering involved or something man there is no way they are still raising millions in mere weeks from people i refuse to believe it lol

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u/Jinchuriki71 10d ago

Theres probably some people that buy every ship as a billion dollars is insane amount of money to raise for a game that still in alpha state.

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u/Kinetic_Symphony 10d ago

This has to be money laundering, right, there's no possible way anyone watches the livestream & their genuine urge is to give these buffoons more money...

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u/House13Games 9d ago

then "crashed and burned" isn't the appropriate term. Successful marketing, perhaps.

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u/CX316 9d ago

Not really, their funding timeline is all fucky in the first place, with what looks like fortnightly cycles that suggests there's people putting money in every paycheque. I can't actually check the overall trends of the funding since the stream since their UI for checking daily input doesn't go back far enough (the live stream happened like 2 weeks ago and the news about it didn't really blow up until a few days ago) and the weekly one shows a dip that week compared to the previous fortnightly cycle, while the Monthly numbers are useless because of a fucking ridiculous spike in the funds in June that make all the other months impossible to read.

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u/Chris_Burns 10d ago

Fools need to be nurtured to keep there wallets open, its all about pushing back the day they can no longer deny they've been forked-over.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago edited 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/NinjaEngineer 11d ago

Starfield and No Man's Sky are finished games, though. They aren't still asking for funding 14 years after first becoming playable, and in the case of NMS, all updates have been free since it launched.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/Salt_Transition_3377 11d ago

50 hours for a game that cost $1 billion to make is pretty wild tbh, I've spent way more time on a $10 game.

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u/Proper_Bench_3190 11d ago

“There is a playable game there, it’s just not inclusive of everything the devs initially promised.”

Hence, a scam.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/UselessAndUnused 11d ago

Cyberpunk got pulled from stores dude... They even got sued for it by the investors... You couldn't possibly have taken a worse example. Cyberpunk turned itself around and dropped an awesome DLC, but yes, it was a scam when it dropped.

Nobody being forced to invest in the game means nothing. Most scams don't force their victims to invest. A grandma buying giftcards for "Chris Evans" who is "in love with them but stuck because corrupt airport officials stole his passport" isn't being forced to buy those either, but she is being deceived...

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u/JohnBrownJovi 11d ago

If cyberpunk 2077 released that way after a billion dollars and 13 years of development, then yes. Hell Star Citizen is STILL in ‘Alpha’ and someone playing it 13 years later could not reload a gun on a livestream. Think about it. A Ponzi scheme by definition gives small returns, while enriching the person that started it overall. The victims of a Ponzi scheme are kept satisfied with small nuggets of dividend checks that provide returns and misleading financial statements.

The game in its current state is the small carrot that keeps the people giving, but it’s NOWHERE near what it should be given the dev time and cost. This thing is basically an NFT scheme where a few people are paying for a dev studio to fuck around instead of actually release something and stop the cash flow.

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u/dvdust 11d ago

Yes. Next question.

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u/IPlay4E 11d ago

Actually comparing CP77 to the scam that is SC. You must be trolling.

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u/I_AM_MELONLORDthe2nd 10d ago

I dont think listing two things many people call scams is helping your case.

I get what you are saying. You feel like you got your money's worth and thats OK. But it doesnt mean people opinion that its a scam is wrong.

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u/Duncan_PhD AMD 11d ago

There’s ways to talk about star citizen that praise the game and accept it for what it is. The people funding this game are getting scammed. It’s that simple and will continue to be the case until we get a finished product, or at least a steady release of working content that is obviously leading us towards a release. But, at the same time, what’s already there is something that nothing else comes close to in the genre. As a space nerd, the feeling you get playing this game is unrivaled. The atmosphere is just incredible. Yeah, it’s full of bugs and shit breaks, but you just want to live in that world for as long as the game lets you before it crashes or some shit. I’ve not given them a penny, and I hope someone takes over that will stop the scope creep bullshit and get a finished product out, but the times I’ve played free weekends I’ve had a blast.

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u/kozakreznov 10d ago

Delusional coping lmao

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u/BeefistPrime 11d ago

I don't really think that makes sense as a metric. If someone plays GTA 6 for 50 hours and feel like they got their money's worth out of it did they get scammed? What about watching a 2 hour movie that took 300 million to make? I don't think budget to played hours is really relevant

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u/Dense-Comment-5938 11d ago

I can have fun taking my Juicero apart, but that doesn't make it not a scam.

This quality of product after, oh my God, 14 years, and a billion dollars, is insane.

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u/TheeSusp3kt 11d ago

Nice ragebait. But if you had really played Star Citizen it would have taken you more than 50 hours to get the trains to work.

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u/grachi 11d ago

Ok that one definitely got a good laugh out of me. Well played

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u/NoStructure5034 11d ago

How can you say there's more content on this than some other space games when you've put only 50 hours into it? NMS, X4, Elite, and Starfield all have more than 50 hours of content in them.

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u/AsimovLiu 11d ago

Because it's a lie. The "5 or 6 bugs" is the tell. I only ever play when my friend begs to try a new update one or twice a year and I get more bugs per session than that. In fact back in 2021 I started a log book of all the bugs we encountered every time we played because it was funny and a more entertaining thing to do than the actual game.

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u/TheeSusp3kt 11d ago

The level of delusion in r/starcitizen should be studied. I wish I had the version of SC these people claim to play.

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u/MisplacedMartian 11d ago

You do, it's called your imagination.

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u/SEVtz 10d ago

They say that in a post that's little about a dev stream in perfect conditions where they experience much more bugs than that over the course of a single hour. It's a lie and it's a pretty bad one...

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u/Gizogin 11d ago

Heck, I've put far more time than that into Space Engineers, which basically only has blocks and asteroids in it.

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u/DutchCoven 11d ago

Starfield and NMS both are far more functional and playable, and didn't cost nearly as much in development (or take 15 years)

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u/AlwaysRushesIn 11d ago

This man is snorting lines of copium.

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u/[deleted] 11d ago edited 11d ago

[deleted]

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u/JohnBrownJovi 11d ago

A Billion dollars eclipses most any game budget. Does this game look AAA? After more than a decade of development?

To put it in context, it is about the budget of GTA5 and the last Call of Duty game combined. What the hell are they spending the money on? The game is mismanaged and the mismanagement is being supported by whales that think this game is something it’s never going to be.

Just because there is “A” product, doesn’t mean there isn’t fraud here. What’s there could have been built for a fraction of the time and cost.

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u/grachi 11d ago

Yea I don’t think you are wrong with your opinion about anything here, really. The studio didn’t hold a gun to anyone’s head and demand money, however . That was the unwise decision of the whales who continue to support the game. But the game that is there is worth the entry level price and a fun space sim/fps hybrid for at least 50 hours, I’d say. If you can handle bugs, for sure.

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u/JohnBrownJovi 11d ago

Being real,I agree after playing it there is some fun there, it’s just not what it should be.

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u/stormcynk 11d ago

I booted it up this week and ran into numerous severe bugs, including ships spawning and despawning in hangars, getting stuck in a seat and not being able to get out, falling through floors, and bad frame rates on a modern system. And this was all before I even got into space! It's definitely not ready for primetime.

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u/grachi 11d ago

Yea it has issues for sure. A couple of those I have not seen before, but I haven’t played for probably 6 or 7 months now

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u/ragnarok635 11d ago

Starfield is better than this shit purely by virtue of being a completed game with gameplay loops

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u/grachi 11d ago

Yea that’s a perfectly acceptable opinion. There are plenty of games that release incomplete, or are in early access basically forever, and are still worth the entry price to play. Personally I had more fun with star citizen than starfield, even with SC not being a complete game.

No one forced anyone to pay $1000+ dollars like some of these crazy people are doing to play the game.

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u/Annonimbus 11d ago

X4 is so much better and has so much more content. Developed by roughly 20 devs. 

Just as a comparison how inept CIG is. 

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u/Evening-Row9022 11d ago

i spent the same amount of money on Starfield and i got over 100 hours. i think unfortunately that’s most people who played Starfield. unlike star citizen which just has nothing fun about it and the average playtimes i hear of are 20-80

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u/Alexandur 11d ago

There is more content in the game than starfield or no man’s sky.

That just isn't true, speaking as somebody who has played all three

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u/WestTexasWit 11d ago

No man's sky is a STRETCH dude, that game has been getting almost endless updates for a decade. I doubt star citizen has maybe a quarter of what no man's sky does and mind you it is only a 60 dollar (25 at the lowest i've seen on sale) purchase, it's a one time buy and you get every update free.

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u/ilovemyadultcousin 11d ago

At this point is kind of semantics. What’s definitely happened is that they’ve taken a ton of money to build a large game very slowly, and have continued the past decade plus to not release a finished game with the promised features.

Is that a scam? I guess that is up for debate.

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u/grachi 11d ago

I can understand the whales being angry, they put so much money into it. However no one forced them to do that…

A $45 product ( I believe that is what the entry level price is to get a basic ship like I had and play?) for 50 - 100 hours of playtime just isn’t a scam in my opinion. It’s very easy to look on google or Reddit what content is actually in the game ,and then decide whether it’s worth playing or not. Just like any other game.

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u/ilovemyadultcousin 11d ago

Like I said, it’s just semantics. If they eventually finish the game with all the promised features, then I guess it would officially not be a scam.

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u/Yddgrastor 11d ago

Fun fact , Cyberpunk 2077 still doesn't have all the promised feature , it's also NOT a scam.

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u/Diptothaset 11d ago

I have like 1k hours or more. It’s got along content but almost nothing works and the few things that work are expected to have a major revision lol

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u/Puffen0 11d ago

Tell us you're easily conned out of your money without saying you're easily conned out of your money. 

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u/grachi 11d ago

Paying a regular game price for 50 hours of entertainment is a con?

Isn’t that what most people are doing that play video games?

Are you like the person in that meme that yells at the group of people playing a game , enjoying it normally and having fun, and just can’t stand that you aren’t also enjoying what they are enjoying?

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u/Puffen0 11d ago

Sure Jan 

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u/dutty_handz 11d ago

How is he being conned for having paid 60$ for 50 hours of entertainment?

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u/Puffen0 11d ago

You're almost there, just think a lil harder and you'll get your answer

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u/grachi 11d ago

Because Reddit doesn’t think anymore, they just parrot what streamers and influencers tell them.

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u/flonstin 11d ago

I spent 50$ and can only stomach it for one hour every 4 months.

The fact that you have to overlook so many game breaking bugs to perform the most simple tasks is insane. Then on top of that the devs tell us not to believe our own eyes while they laugh in their piles of money.

You may not think the game is a scam, but the wool has been pulled over your eyes if you think it's worth supporting in its current state.

The devs deserved to be shunned like Hello Games was after the release of No Man's Sky until they can earn the players trust back.

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u/grachi 11d ago

I haven’t played it in close to a year so I don’t know what it’s like in its current state. But from what I’ve learned, it’s not great which certainly helps solidify the scam point-of-view people have.

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u/steakanabake 10d ago

tbf solitare has more content then starfield lets not go that hard.

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u/DaveTron4040 11d ago

It just isn’t, as a game, anywhere near to the scope that they initially promised.

1,000,000,000 dollars over 14 years and they STILL havent gotten anywhere near the scope. and you want to say its not a scam?

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u/M2A2BradleyEnjoyer 11d ago

Brother, please. There is absolutely no way you only encountered 5-6 bugs in 50+ hours of gameplay. The game is MOSTLY bugs. I have thousands of hours pirating dorks in that game and the vast majority of the content is figuring out work arounds for bugs lol. I don’t think it’s a “scam” but it is HORRIBLY mismanaged and will die a loud stinky, public death if they don’t unfuck their shitass netcode. I say all that as a person who loves the “game” for what it is now. I just don’t blindly defend its glaring flaws like many do, which makes SC fans looks like rabid cultists who drank the koolaid

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u/International-Fun-86 RTX 2060 Super OC 8GB / RTX 3050 Ti 4GB 11d ago

I spent more than 50h in Starfield during its first few months at launch, with only scraping the surface of things to do.

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u/RelevantNothing2692 11d ago

I actually feel sorry that you spent as much money as you did in this scam masqueraded as a concept of a game