and here I was thinking they always planned to finish the game in about 16 to 30 years.

sorry I meant durrrr

Why would there be? Seems to work really well this way. Just keep milking the idiots of their money.

That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.

The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.

Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!

Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won't be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.

Like, obviously?

And then, compare it to No Man's Sky, who gave us lofty expectations, failed to deliver on launch, but actually kept with it despite no new revenue flowing into the game from existing buyers. And now we have something incredible. We have a universe that is unfathomably large. We have multiplayer, we have all sorts of events and quests. Freighters! You can piece together your own ships now.

I hope we can eventually build space stations or pilot Capital Ships. No Man's Sky came out in 2016. In 8 years it has done far more than SC has done with far less of a budget.

Do I wish we could have everything that Roberts promised? Sure. But I also have a bridge to sell that you can at least walk over.

Do people just not know who and what Chris Roberts is?

This is what he's done throughout his career - the only thing that's notable about Star Citizen really is the scale of it and thus the opportunities he has to find ever more things to obsessively tinker with.

It's entirely possible that if Microsoft hadn't bought out Digital Anvil and given him the boot, this wouldn't even be Star Citizen - it would be Freelancer, coming into its 25th year of delays.

yeah they been grifting so long thats all they care about anymore

Yeah no shit

Well no shit. He figured out that as long as you never "release" a finished game, you're not going to be blamed for "bugs" while still collecting money on in-game purchases.

There's a reason he made sure that the in-game store was perfected and ready to go long before the game was anywhere near completed. It's been the plan ever since he and his team realized that the ultimate scope was likely out of their reach.

Yeah, Star Citizen is the world's most expensive tech demo, that is the picture book definition of scope creep. It'll just keep getting more and more complicated, but never get to any kind of a "complete game" state.

Who'd'a thunk?

Misguided development at CIG? Why I never!