Games

It's often middle aged men with lots of money planning to run fleets of tens or hundreds of future players that will never arrive in the number they plan for. The few who do drop by won't accept their terms, so the middle aged man with lots of money will have to either play alone or play nice to get enough people to fully crew his second most expensive capital ship. He won't be able to crew his most expensive one because he can't convince the crew to fill the roles of 3 necessary "engineers" who run around the ship during combat starting on top of changing blown fuses and maybe a shield generator if it blows.

Sometimes it's not middle aged men, sometimes they don't have lots of money, there are definitely a lot of backers who are financially exploited and respond to a lot of the bullshit SC's marketing regularly does.

I've played SC a lot. It's got some cool shit but it's absolutely unstable and fundamentally broken in a hundred ways, and the design is kinda stupid and incredibly naive in terms of attracting and retaining players.

I liked piracy and PvP dogfighting. I also liked having a medium large gunship with a little Fury in it. (TIE fighter) I used to stuff the gunship full of drugs (cargorunning but supposedly cool) and jump in the Fury I'd hidden (powered off) if a ship arrived, and chase them off or kill them. I got really used to that little shit, it was incredibly satisfying to barely keep my shields up while G forces were almost blacking my guy out, and whittling down larger ships. I fucking miss that patch. 3.21 was kinda sweet, despite it's Star Citizen-ness. Tbh in some circumstances it plays a bit like an even slower Tarkov.

Don't play Star Citizen, unless some time down the line there's a Free Fly where you see reports of good stability. I think that's very unlikely, but I'd like to see it.

I'm personally $90 in. For a long time I stuck to the $45 starter. You shouldn't buy either of them.

Maybe wait and see if the single player spinoff "Squadron 42" comes out and is well reviewed.