Games

Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.

Edit: clarity and conciseness: added "originally" to the end of the last sentence.

I don't, what else has he procrastinated on?

Chris Roberts is still rich, and could probably retire right now without worrying about anything. He could tank the company, and he wouldn't care.

Also called bikeshedding.

They got my $40 in 2012. I absolutely loved the Wing Commander series; Wing Commander II was an embarrassingly important part of my adolescense, I love space sims, and still had fond enough memories of the name Chris Roberts that I didn't think he'd blatantly lie and steal from me.

How people are still giving these clowns money I have no idea.

One of my ex coworkers has spent somewhere in the ballpark of 12k. He sells, flips and trades rare ships to sell back to people after the exclusivity of the ship has expired. He's made like 4k. I don't understand gaming anymore.

They claimed it was feature complete in 2023. And now they claim it is two years away from release. You really think polish and optimization takes three years? Of course, they've claimed it is just two years away every year since 2016.

They are lying to you.

All I want is a space pirate game that doesn't require me to quit my job and dedicate my life to it in order to acquire a good enough ship to actually be competitive.

That, or a street racing MMO with realistic physics and a true-to-life level of customization and tuning, that has a map the size of small country. Like The Crew except no arcade physics and more than 5 players in a server. And also not shit.

Somebody, please make one of these two games already. I need this so badly in my lifetime before I die.

They consistently make promises for things that will exist in the future, which then takes them years beyond their expected timeframe to achieve, or just never do them because some other past promise or promise they will make later makes an original promise either totally unworkable or wildly different.

So, so many missed deadlines, which uh, actually were just aspirational.

And... this is a game that sells you ships, gear, for hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of real world dollars.

Some crazy promise will be made and oh, turns out that means we have to rework something like half the game's systems to support that, but also they're adding new content constantly that is always in some limbo state between following the old system's paradigms and attempting to follow the new system's paradigm.

What you end up with is a constant state of everything being a bit broken, and a lot of stuff being completely broken.

Its less like a released game getting DLCs and more like an alpha test that just never ends.

Which, again, costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Game keeps wiping players inventories including the in-game money used to buy ships. You can't progress in the game, they just wipe you.

SC is a scam. They sell ships for real money that only half work. The game is riddled with bugs, quests don't complete. Users state is regularly wiped so there's no point on progressing in it and instead of finishing the game they ask players for much more money to work on tiny niche technical problems that sound super important on presentations but don't move the needle even a little bit towards a finished game. At best, it is video game history most expensive physics toy. In reality, when you scrutinize their finances executives have pocketed most of the money raised and devs have been paid poor wages and overworked to a constantly moving target. They have never finished a single roadmap item, but they have announced to fanfare at least 5 different development roadmaps that are the very definition of scope creep. Lots of announcements but never a release. Any competent studio would've delivered at least three completed games in the same timeframe for that amount of money. They're an online asset store that sometimes let's you fiddle with the digital models, not a video game.

Long story short, they severely fail to deliver on their promises and also mismanaged their development incentives so that they are not financially interested to ever release, or even make the game fully playable.

The game is exactly the same as it was the first time I played it except now the lift always shows up.

Instead of focussing on getting the core of the game finished and THEN expanding it they do it the other way around.

For example the mining loop now is broken again, people bought mining ships and vehicles with $$ and they are completely unusable. Not to mention all the bugs and instability. I hope they succeed but right now things are not pointing to something enjoyable within the foreseeable future at all.