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Star Citizen no longer offering refunds to backers after 14 days

Sailent

Sailent

Member
Mar 2, 2018
1,591
I see many, many drive-by posts in this thread that are not being moderated.

Funny.

I think this image defines this thread:

stop_liking_file.jpg


Sums it up pretty good.
 
Dreams-Visions

Dreams-Visions

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
41,368
Miami, FL
gozu

gozu

Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,402
America
Jinroh said:
before the end of the year we should have a product that has no equivalent in the market and that will, hopefully, finally run correctly once they update its netcode.
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You are mistaken. Cig God himself has said the SQ42 is not coming this year last month.

Swenhir said:
Are you really lowering yourselves to that level? Even reddit gaming admins deleted these article considering the rather questionable source (Derek smart, really?)
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xyla said:
I'm pretty sure there would be millions in refunds after years of articles like these. Based in something Derek Smart said sometime on twitter.
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It's like Star Citizen is a cult and Derek Smart is Satan or Xenu. Scapegoat for everything. People don't care or know about Derek Smart, they are looking at the last 6 years, at the state of the game, at the funding practices, at the money raised, at Robert's off-putting attitude and personality and at his obvious mismanagement, wishful thinking (lies?), etc, etc, etc.

UCBooties said:
Criticism 1: Star Citizen is a poorly managed project which has publicly failed to meet many deadlines, seems to suffer from management paralysis and scope creep/feature bloat, and gives no indication of coalescing into a sellable product. This lack of managerial focus has led to a high burn rate for funding and necessitated ever more extravagant methods to entice existing backers to continue funding the development.

Criticism 2: CIG behaves unethically by encouraging their backers to fund at higher and higher levels through exploitation of the sunk cost fallacy, aggressive community management (including self-policing), and exploiting FOMO by introducing as-yet undeveloped features which will require certain levels of investment (in specific ships) to experience in the finished game. [...]

I see a lot of posters accusing critics of hoping that Star Citizen fails. I personally don't hope that Star Citizen fails, but I do have strong doubts about how it is going to turn out. The question that must be asked is, can Star Citizen complete development using just the funds that CIG has raised up to this point? Given their pattern of fund-raising, I doubt very much that the answer is yes.

This begs follow up questions, how much more money does CIG need to raise in order to complete development of Star Citizen? What lengths are they going to have to go to get it? There is a theoretical maximum to the amount of money that CIG can raise from existing backers, and as the project drags on it will be more and more difficult to entice new backers to jump in. Can CIG raise enough money to complete development before they reach a threshold where they cannot convince enough people to continue funding the development?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but given their management issues, I am pessimistic about the game's chances of ever releasing in a state that matches what they have promised over the years. I think that at some point they are going to need to put out S42 in order to show that they can deliver something that is feature complete and then they are going to have to hope that S42 generates enough goodwill and enthusiasm to push a new wave of backers to fund the SC MMO product. Not to mention that sales from S42 would generate some additional revenue that could go towards funding SC MMO.
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Best post in the thread. I think you're right and given CIG's annual 25-30M burn rate, they can continue development for years to come as long as they can milk the backers for around 2 MIL a month on average. This will require increasingly controversial (unethical?) means of getting that money.

Clearly Roberts has decided that this was his magnum opus, and he will do anything legal to get it done. If it involves smooth talking loose purses out of their money, he'll do it. It's not like he's putting a literal gun to anyone's head. If he succeeds (unlikely) and SC is the next Eve/Wow/FFXI/Ultima/EQ/<insert profitable MMORPG>, then the end will have justified the means. If he fails he will be reviled and will likely NEVER get a shot at directing an AAA again. His choice is clear.

You raise an interesting topic regarding the quality of S42. If they release it and it's not great, their funding will take a huge hit so they have to nail it, which means delaying it more. But the more they delay, the less impressive the game becomes. It's a catch-22.

I was a big fan of Wing Commander 3/4 and was really interested in Roberts kickstarter, but once I saw the ridiculous ambition of the vision, a dev who peaked in the 90s, switched to movies, failed and came back now wanting to create an MMORPG? For 6 million or whatever? Insanity. I never backed because It was clear from the start Roberts was full of shit. This was confirmed in short order when I saw their awe-inspiring fundraising website and the whole vibe they had going:

"welcome to our universe dear friend. Look how spacey everything is. SC is gonna be dope. Here are some ships for $300. The game will be everything you dreamed of if you buy one. <3 <3 <3"

Nah, yeah, nah mate. I was right not to back.
 
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