this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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[–] RamRabbit@lemmy.world 80 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

This game has been in development for a decade with near-unlimited funding. Jesus christ guys, this has been plenty of time to get your shit together.

[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 60 points 1 month ago

I think you pointed out why they don't get their shit together.

[–] jaygray91@piefed.zip 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Wait why the hell did I think they've in development for nearly 20 years lol

[–] makyo@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

Announced in 2012

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[–] MyOpinion@lemmy.today 71 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Star Citizen is the biggest scam in gaming.

[–] Skipcast@lemmy.world 27 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Is a heavily mismanaged game. Calling it a scam would be a misuse of the word.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 45 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You only have to visit the secondary market for SC in-game merch to find the scammy bits. The funny this isn't that this game is fully of overpriced, stupid bullshit. It's that six developers who fell out the back of the Wing Commander franchise found a way to bilk people for billions of dollars by creating the thing Mark Zuckerberg has been losing 10x as much on for just as long.

Digital real estate. Digital in-game businesses. Digital currency. A clumsy interface with dogshit codebase to match that's sagging under its own technical debt and still ten years behind the development curve. Star Citizen is the Metaverse.

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

How many ships have you bought?

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[–] architect@thelemmy.club 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It’s a scam. They scammed the original Kickstarter investors. Ffs i had a whole campaign TEN YEARS AGO that started the refunds! Like I FUCKING STARTED THAT SHIT! If you get a refund in star citizen- YOU’RE WELCOME. It took hundreds of emails of people claiming they were scammed for them to allow refunds!

Now over ten years later you chucklefuck losers want to defend that. Get the fuck out! You don’t know what the fuck you are talking about!

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[–] kurcatovium@piefed.social 9 points 1 month ago

Scam Citizen

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[–] Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 58 points 1 month ago (13 children)

Everytime i see star citizen it frustrates me because the comments are 90% dumb. It has predatory monetization, it has been in development hell, it has been a great disappointment to many people.

Its not a scam. You can pay money and log into the game right now and play. Theyve done some technically very impressive stuff (that doesnt help the game at all, potentially hurts it, definitely contributes to the devlopment hell), and people do have fun. There is an actual game with mechanics. I would argue those mechanics arent fleshed out or fun enough and dont work well, but thats subjective.

I paid like $20 very early on knowing backing things is a risk. It didnt really pay off for what i wanted, but i still had some fun flying ships around, racing them and exploring. I dont recommend it, its ran terribly and performance is bad for obvious reasons, etc. but its still not a scam or equivalent to slop.

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Just because you're okay with it doesn't make it not a scam.
False advertising is a scam.
SC is a scam.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 13 points 1 month ago

Milking your supporters for ten years is a scam, just not legally.

[–] Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

A game being shitty isnt false advertising. This is such a loose way to define scams that it actually hurts calling real scams out

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 15 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I agree on both points but there's a difference between Halo 4 being genuinely ass (shitty) and No Man's Sky releasing on false promises and outright lies (false advertising).
One of these i consider a genuine scam (upon release, anyway).

Admittedly, I'm not the authority on SC; where would you place it on the scale? Because from what ive heard there were/are lots of empty promises.

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[–] dreamkeeper@literature.cafe 18 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I wouldn't call it a scam either. Just another shitty game farming whales. They actually refunded me so there's that. I wasted an hour of my life on that thing.

It's a shame because you can see the potential, there's nothing else quite like it. You can wake up in your apartment, walk around the city/base you're in, take a train to the spaceport, find your hangar, get in your ship, start your ship, take off and go somewhere. It has potential to be incredibly immersive but it's beyond clear the devs don't care about making it into a good game.

The controls are totally bizarre, unintuitive, and poorly designed. Everything you do is bugged in some way. The performance is ass. Terrible and confusing HUD design. The game is a complete chore to play. Got my refund and I'll never even consider going back.

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[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Correct, it is a development nightmare yes, it is beyond ridiculously delayed, it is overhyped, it is overpriced, it is predatory, it is stupid in countless ways, but a scam is intentionally fraudulent and anyone making that claim of Star Citizen is being disingenuous. It is a game being actively developed by idiotic, toxic, malignant narcissists powered largely by self-absorbed vanity, but that's not the same thing as a scam perpetrated by fraudsters. They're both very, very bad, but they're also very, very much not the same thing and we should stop confusing such basic concepts with each other.

[–] WalleyeWarrior@midwest.social 8 points 1 month ago

Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried didn't start their companies with the intention to defraud their customers. But they quickly found themselves in too deep and the only thing they could do was ask for money to keep it afloat as long as they could. The only difference between those ventures and Star Citizen is that Star Citizen hasn't collapsed under its own weight yet.

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[–] architect@thelemmy.club 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It’s a scam like a Ponzi scheme is a scam. Nothing they have promised has been delivered in over ten years. They have lied countless times to get more backer money. The original concept for the Kickstarter was tossed out long ago, those people definitely got scammed! They were told too bad the scope changed after the kickstarter! It is a fucking scam and I’ll die on that hill.

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[–] ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 36 points 1 month ago (8 children)

14 years of development, 1 billion dollars, and the tech demo is all they have to show for it. Bruh.

[–] VitoRobles@lemmy.today 10 points 1 month ago

It's also the friends they made along the way.

Which there wasn't. All those people in the video hate each other. You can tell by how they were making snide comments and nobody was supportive of anybody.

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[–] rozodru@piefed.world 31 points 1 month ago (3 children)

did it surprise me that Star Citizen is still a buggy mess? no, I expected as much.

What surprised me was the sheer unprofessional-ism from everyone involved in that stream minus the Ollie guy. That Jared is a HUGE douche nozzel and if he ever worked on one of my teams and acted that way towards other employees I'd throw is ass out of the door. the fact he acts this way on a LIVE stream is truly mind blowing. I mean your company is funded literally by the people watching your stream and you act this way? The tree other devs sitting there couldn't give a rats ass about any of this. They know the game is broken, they know the game will never get released, but why should they care as long as they get paid? they know it's a joke and treat it as such.

If you continue to pledge/support this game you're a bigger idiot than the people on that stream.

[–] calliope@retrolemmy.com 21 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yep, you’re totally right.

leading to a deeply uncomfortable moment where Jared Huckaby, content director on the game, leans behind Hull and says: "We're at time—it's your show, wrap it up."

Doing this to someone in public is something a dickhead would do. When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.

[–] rozodru@piefed.world 20 points 1 month ago

what's even more of a dick move is in the beginning it was all "we" "us" "the team" etc and then when things go south, as those fucking idiots SHOULD have expected it would, suddenly it's "your show".

These people aren't building a game for market. They're a bunch of children that have managed to covince other children to give them money to the tune of $1billion dollars. I mean hell you can look at their pledge tracker for the proof in the pudding. the stream was august 3rd and 2-3 days later players pledged another $500k in a day. ONLY NOW that people picked up on the fact that this steam even happened are people ranting and raving over it.

Just take a look at the starcitizen subreddit. Someone should study that subreddit because everyone there has stockholm syndrome. So many posts of "maybe now they'll start to produce something" like these fools are going to KEEP giving them money.

Just provide a user base the bare minimum with pretty graphics and the cash will flow.

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[–] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 23 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Maybe they will finally release it just as gaming computers become totally unaffordable and everyone gets into yo-yoing instead.

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[–] weps@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That first dude was pretty big when he said he was the host at the beginning.

Then the game bugged out and they could't continue and suddenly it was the other guys show and he needed to wrap it up.

What an ass.

[–] architect@thelemmy.club 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

He’s been a piece of shit for eleven years. I’ve dealt with that fucking asshole.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 6 points 1 month ago

Story time?

[–] mrbigmouth502@piefed.zip 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I can't wait for people to STFU about this game.

[–] Rothe@piefed.social 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Most people already have. It is just that it has a small hardcore fanbase, which behaves oddly cult-like. As long as you don't move in those circles you will never hear of the game except for when they fuck up so badly that even game journalists are reminded that the game exists.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

fanbase, which behaves oddly cult-like

Sunk cost fallacy?

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[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

I hear about it 1-2 times a year at this point.

Each time almost nothing has changed.

[–] TommySoda@lemmy.world 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

As someone that has wasted 100s of hours into Star Citizen I don't think I ever really liked that game as much as I convinced myself I did. Turns out I liked the game only because of what I thought the game could be instead of what it actually was. All my friends are trying to get me back into it but I just can't do it anymore. I probably only ever enjoyed 10% of my total playtime on that game as the other 90% was spent fighting the gargantuan technical issues, performance issues, game breaking bugs, and general jank. The game is all vibe and promises without an actual fun experience underneath.

[–] themoken@startrek.website 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Turns out I liked the game only because of what I thought the game could be instead of what it actually was.

I never played Star Citizen, but this is kinda where I ended up with No Man's Sky. I played it at launch and again earlier this year and there's definitely some fun to be had but nothing fits together right, or feels fully realized. NMS lost a coherent vision of the game at some point and eventually it just made me itch to play better games that were more focused.

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[–] M0oP0o@mander.xyz 17 points 1 month ago

Come on bro, just one more billion, it will be great, just a few more billions and another 20 years....

[–] Almacca@aussie.zone 16 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The only thing I enjoy about Star Citizen is when Bruce and Lawrence on Inside Games cover it once or twice a year whenever a new story about what a shit-show it is pops up. https://youtu.be/oWJh8EfVRrw

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[–] otacon239@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month ago (7 children)

For anyone who wants to play an actually developed space game that has many (not all) of the features of SC, I recommend checking out Elite:Dangerous. It was a fully released game 10 years ago and is still receiving content updates regularly.

[–] chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 month ago

I enjoyed my time with that game for a while. Then it got tedious. It's a mile wide and an inch deep.

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 8 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I'm gonna say elite is generally a hard sell because of the steep learning curve. I love it and have over 1,300 hours, but only after a friend brought me back because I was so lost my first time playing it. I similarly quit trying the on-foot stuff on 3 separate occasions because it's so difficult to figure it out, and failing a mission often results in a fine or bounty you have to then find an interstellar factor to pay off.

Then there's the engineer grind. I won't speak on that here.

It's frustrating because the game is incredibly deep with faction mechanics, system states, market demands, etc. but all of that is basically inaccessible in any reasonable manner without 3rd party tools. Outside that your options are exploration, shipping, combat, mining, and that's about it.

That said, if you want a somewhat realistic space sim, it's probably the best you can find. Just make sure you have a guide and inara.cz bookmarked.

[–] otacon239@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

This has been massively improved over the years with the introduction of Exobiology. Just about any new player can get into a ship worth a few mil and be collecting hundreds of millions of credits within a few hours without the need to consult a spreadsheet.

You certainly can min-max far beyond that point as you mentioned with external tools, but the feeling of ships or mission types being inaccessible is pretty much gone.

As an aside, I’m currently working on a guide to solve many of the issues you’re describing. Right now, it’s for my personal squadron, but I plan to expand this to a public sister site eventually.

https://oa.omnigon.network/

I’m also working on a video series to introduce the game. This is part 1 of 3: https://youtu.be/c9xS9tcn4sk

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[–] itsjustachairmary@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

Oh I love these shitty presentations, so happy there is a new one to rubberneck

[–] dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

SCM levels of jank. Chris Citizen should've went into business enterprise software, he'll feel right at home

[–] Eternal192@anarchist.nexus 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Hello Games has been showing how it should be done for years and while NMS did have a rocky start and you have to dig a bit to understand why it was released in such a state, they have strived to deliver on the promises they made before release and they did it with far less than Star Citizen has received and they have a stable game after years of content releases which were all free and Star Citizen couldn't showcase their game in working condition even in perfect conditions that was supposed to show the finished game, the whole stream was embarrassing bickering and has shown that not 1 cent was invested properly.

[–] Switorik@sh.itjust.works 24 points 1 month ago (5 children)

NMS is a mile wide and an inch deep. Nothing you do feels like it has meaning, the story is meh, the gathering feels like it's a placeholder, ships are only collected for looks, the graphics are ok.

This isn't a good comparison.

[–] TommySoda@lemmy.world 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yeah but I'd honestly say the same for Star Citizen. Nothing you do feels like it has any meaning as they wipe he servers twice a year and the only way to make real progress is to spend real money, there literally is no story outside of world building and subtle lore, all the missions and mining feel like they are placeholder and more than half the time don't even work depending on the update, ships are mostly just for looks and the majority of the features inside them are bare bones at best, and the graphics are pretty good if you can even run the game at 60 fps and ignore all the glaring graphical glitches.

I've probably played the same amount of time in both games and my opinion of both is usually the same with "this games could be so much better." The only difference is that I actually have fun in NMS whereas in Star Citizen I spend most of my time fighting the game in an attempt to come out the other side with any sense of actually having fun. Star Citizen is such a time suck that most days I'd play it I'd come out the other side and realize I literally didn't even do anything besides constantly play catch up because the game fucked me over in some way.

[–] iamthetot@piefed.ca 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I mean, it's a sandbox survival game. If you don't like that genre, you're not likely to enjoy NMS no matter how much they add or improve to the game.

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