Star Citizen Introducing a $48,000 Ship Bundle, but Only for Players Who Have Already Spent $10,000::Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games is releasing a ship bundle for its controversial space simulator that costs an eye-watering $48,000.
WTF!
At the time of this article’s publication, Star Citizen had raised $658,161,596 from more than five million accounts.
The game has not even officially been released!!
Yeah, Star Citizen is world renowned master of squeezing immense amounts of cash from its userbase.
First, they have many ship tiers, and as the most basic ones cost $40+, they feel comfortable charging more for bigger ships, with some ships costing well over $1000.
Second, they commonly introduce wipes in updates, and those wipes only affect everything players accrued in-game, not purchases made with real cash. So you either accept having your entire progress wiped again and again, or you give up and buy your fleet for cash (and any meaningfully gamechanging ship costs hundreds of dollars). The developers claim that this is due to bugs and exploits being found, and that eventually everything will stay forever, no matter how you bought it, but they are obviously aware of the situation and will probably make sure this never happens.
Third, the game does a good job at immersing you into the universe, so some players really go for a second life there. For them, it is the successful counterpart of the Metaverse.
And just like that we end up with people spending insane amounts of money on in-game ships. Half of the players I know spent over $300 on the game, and I personally know people who spent upwards to $8000.
Scary part is that many of them aren’t rich, and one of the people I know literally saved for years and hid $8000 from their family to buy a ship pack. He is living in Ukraine, a country with GDP per capita of $4350.
Because there are lots of people in this thread who paint whales as “rich schmucks” who can afford to spend $48k without thinking twic. This is a myth that lots of the gaming industry itself loves to perpetuate, because it absolves them of taking responsibility for ruining lives.
Research has shown repeatedly that whales are much more likely to be people with mental health problems and/or gambling addicts. That Star Citizen isn’t a freemium game with loot boxes makes it marginally better than - let’s say - Genshin Impact, but offers like the bundle in the article is still predatory.
And yet? Nothing will be done. This is a target market that is more than acceptable to disdain, abuse, and otherwise fuck over.
It might be “cool” to be a nerd now, my fellows, but only on the surface. Don’t get suckered into believing they accept you. They’re just commodifying our interests for their gains. They are not us and they don’t want to be. They just want us to like them enough to pay them more than we otherwise would.
Fuck the poseurs.
What is one supposed to do about this? Genuine question.
Stop acting like they’re doing us all a favor by paying attention to our collective interests? It’s all marketing.
The biggest scam in gaming continues unchecked.
unfortunately by todays late stage mercantile economy this is just a bad deal
OK, I understand EVE and I understand Elite Dangerous, but this is not normal.
I know it’s not the same, but you could just play elite dangerous which is an actual game, and you can get new ships through a crazy new innovative mechanic called “playing the game”
It’s not even comparable to Star Citizen, and I feel bad for anyone who gets suckered into believing otherwise.
I know right, they’ll never those 2 hours back
They could have spent it mindlessly doomscrolling.
But they DIDN’T KNOW! They just didn’t know…
I like elite dangerous but I don’t like that you have to spend hundreds of hours grinding just to accomplish even the most minor gameplay advancement. No Man’s Sky and Starfield are more playable space games that that grindfest. I wish someone would just remake elite dangerous for normal people.
Too bad NMS is boring and Starfield is even more boring
As someone who logged an unhealthy amount of hours in E:D, tricked out the computer chair with vesa mounts for a Warthog HOTAS and coded hundreds of macros and voice attack triggers (and a whole set up for an Index) only to give it all up when Frontier dropped the ball on atmospheric landings (their initial offering was complete shite as they thought that the “community” wanted political intrigue and inter-factional complexity — which we did, honestly, but they delivered shit there, too). Hell, I even came back for a minute, hoping the flagship update was gonna be The One… But, they locked that into a fucking grind with specialized fuel, etc., too.
Shame on E:D, but fuck Star Citizen.
I can’t overstate how disappointed I am in Frontier for completely abandoning Elite in the name of making more zoo simulators. Such a fucking cop out and I hate it.
Mile wide and an inch deep. That’s Elite. Beautiful game, huge grind.
I want someone to make Elite dangerous but with single player progression. You get to pew pew in a bunch of increasingly fancy ships and at the end you fight an alien ship or something. 200 hours to complete and then go play something else with a nice experience.
Have you played the X series?
No,but I am definitely checking it out.
Evochron, Dark Star One,X series (you may bounce off a few times but they’re extremely unique and deep games), older Elite titles, Freelancer!
To a lesser extent and a bit more survival crafty: Space Engineers or Empyrion with mods. Both have some additional community made content that adds stations/factions to progress against or for and are pretty good if a little janky.
It really depends on what you want from your game. I happily spent hours in my lil hauler playing space trucker, and the only real thing that’s changed since then is I have access to bigger space trucks. I’ve been on a big exploration run for the last 80 or so hours of playtime and I’m enjoying being able to just relax and exist in my lil virtual spaceship. I don’t need to feel like a number goes up every session, but I’m a weirdo.
I used to hunt griefers in my Black Friday skinned Mur-de-Lance w/ a Huge Particle Cannon and tuned yaw slip to kite and atomize those assclowns for profit. Hit my first Elite that way. The second was Void Diamonds, grinding for those “gonna be SO cool” flagships. I nearly made it the full trip with the whole gang doing the massive trek to the edge and back, but RL got in the way, so I’m not Triple Elite, and you know what? If it weren’t for the Silverbacks group (OGs, chill and welcoming, no pressure, from for RP and what TF ever, but always got your back), I don’t even know if I’d have played as long as I did.
You keep truckin’, space cowboy. 🤙🏼
My man. We live in the age of OnlyFans, TicTok, and Twitch. People out here getting money for feet pics, doing stupid pranks, and pretending to be NPCs. You should know that people will spend money on everything. Just go with the flow and figure out how to make some money.
Gramps, did you just spell that “TicTok”? 🤦🏽♂️
Ikr? He clearly never ate tictacs
To be fair, who gives a fuck how that shitty platform is spelled
How is elite dangerous these days? I was playing no man’s sky which has been continually updated since release yesterday and my bf was badgering me that I could play that instead. I was trying to explain to him that I was having fun playing this and want to play this and he was insisting that elite dangerous has been updated and is so much better. Honestly it was so annoying but I wanted another opinion on how it is as a game lol
It’s at the dying phase. Developers turned around to develop other games instead. I have counted 1500 hours on steam and while the fun lasted, broken odyssey was a final nail in the coffin.
Honestly I haven’t played in quite a while and was just a space trucker so my opinion really probably doesn’t count for much but if you already own it I would definitely boot it up and give it a few hours and see if it works for you
This isn’t real money is it? Please tell me it isn’t. I don’t play this game but that would just be fucking sad.
Star Citizen is what iRacing players look at to feel better about themselves
Actually that’s too mean to iRacing players since iRacing works
Remembering when it was not yet released, thinking “This looks kinda cool, but the business model looks terrible”. Seems it got much worse.
Seems it got much worse.
Seems like it’s going great for the developer.
Wait, in real money? Or like video game money?
real money
If this is a genuine question you have some epic story to treat yourself to about how the bestest game of all times was
madepromisedGenuine question my friend lmao
You’re up for a ride if you have a read.
Game is 11 years in alpha development, still a buggy mess that requires a supercomputer to work smoothly, only recently got a second star system (dozens more are pinky promised, and hundreds promised since beginning of development), is constantly exploited in all ways possible, barely has any actual content…
…which absolutely didn’t stop it from earning over half a billion dollars (yes, billion) by selling in-game ships for hundreds and sometimes thousands of very absolutely real dollars, as well as such monstrous packs.
It’s weird, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone actually playing this game. Hell, I don’t even know what gameplay looks like, and honestly I’m happy keeping it that way
It’s an ethically shitty and exploitative funding model, but if you look at the gameplay, you’ll see the appeal of buying the $45 game package. Very few people stop at though. No matter how much you hear that spending more is unnecessary, they’ve built a system of incremental spending and incentives that draw people ever deeper.
The insane thing is that the supposed final vision sounds incredibly tedious in a way that I doubt most people would ever actually play it. For the sake of immersion, you will have to physically move every item from spare sets of armour to bulk cargo for transport jobs. There is a light survival mechanic of hydration and nutrition, but personal hygiene is also planned. Upgrading ships will mean physically pulling components and replacing them, but the real gains will be in the subcomponents!
Maybe that sounds fun as a vision statement, but I assure you, after losing that hand loaded, hand upgraded ship to bugs or exploits for the third time, the joy will all be gone.
I suppose it’s lucky that none of their vision or promises ever come to pass. Anyway. You want my referral code?
Real cash.
Not real life money right?
I can only assume you’ve no idea what Star Citizen is. 🤦🏽♂️
Bless his heart.
Is it that one bad game where you explore random planets?
That’s Star Field from Bethesda and you can say a lot about it but at least it exists.
Too many things with “star” in their names. Star wars, star trek, star field, star citizen
Galaxy dollars /s
Padme_meme.jpg
I’d be willing to pay with real life money if they were real life spaceships.
Wrong
This kind of news really allows me to know which games not to play.
At this point you don’t need to do a lot of research to know to stay away from Star Citizen
Yes! Sign me up!!!
Pick me! I’ll be the first in line!
I hope an underground software liberation group (cracking) can make this software accessible for everyone.
It’s an MMO, so that would require hosting private servers and figuring out how to redirect the game to those servers. Not likely to happen.
It’s not like every other game out there has private servers or anything…
Redirecting wouldn’t be challenging. Redirecting in a turnkey manner and requiring minimal effort on the part of the user?
Ah yeah. Shits tricky.
Yea reverse engineering they’re servers would be a lot tbf, but who knows, crazier things have happened
It’s $45 to buy the game outright.
The gamer careful with his money has already bought Elite Dangerous on sale for less though. Even $45 for what is currently being offered is embarrassing.
To quote Thor. Star citizen is a storefront pretending to be a game.
The god Thor?
Lol might as well be. Thor. The former Blizzard security dude who turned game Dev and live streams now.
He’s talking about Jason Thor Hall @ https://www.youtube.com/@PirateSoftware
Who’s behind https://store.steampowered.com/app/567380/Heartbound/
His middle name is Thor and that’s what he goes by (who wouldn’t)
He’s recently gotten a lot of attention because his YT Shorts have just exploded.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/@PirateSoftware
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
His shorts are great. Thanks for sharing them.
Oh wow, I’ve seen this guys shorts start popping up constantly. He seems like he understands the algorithm enough to explode
I banish you all for watching YouTube Shorts
Whaaat? C’mon, it keeps us from making TikTok accounts. …and this Thor guy is really cool. Lol
