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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.
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I just want to know who would buy this shit so I can do a few things:
1: bitch slap some sense into them 2: buy them lots of hookers and balloons 3: make sure they understand that a real world does exist
unfortunately by todays late stage mercantile economy this is just a bad deal
Honestly, at this point, if you buy this you and SC deserve each other, have fun.
The biggest scam in gaming continues unchecked.
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”
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.
According to a friend of mine that plays, the whales were asking for this feature so they didn’t have to go through the purchase process for each ship
Fucking billionaries… :)
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.
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.
Some poor fuckers are getting fleeced.
Kinda hard to consider them poor if they can afford the $10k it costs to whale out $48k more :-\
Kinda hard to even feel sorry for them
Apparently they only pay the difference to 48k for the missing items.
Meaning they’re getting fleeced continually.
They might not be poor, but they could be middle class sinking all their savings and getting credit to fuel their addiction.
If you can afford to spend $48,000 on a video game, how is that getting fleeced?
Like, OK, maybe some idiot mortgages their house for this. Bad spending decision. More likely, anyone who looks at that ticket price and thinks “fair deal” is already a millionaire, and quite welcome to do whatever the fuck they want with their money.
Virtual ships certainly cost a lot less to operate than a Lambo or a boat.
They’re being scammed. They are getting next to nothing for inordinate amounts of money. They might not be financially poor, but they’re being taken advantage of. Like NFTs, just because the fraud is mainly being bought by millionaires you don’t stop calling it a fraud. And just like NFTs and gambling there will be a percentage of people who can’t afford it who will hurt themselves and their innocent loved ones because con men are willing to abuse their addictive personalities to make them fall into debt and have them pay for nothing.
It’s like any amount, there’s people that can properly afford it, and others that will beg, borrow and steal to buy it for the prestige and hurt themselves and others to do it. It’s the latter where the harm lies.
Just like leasing a fancy Mercedes to keep up with the Joneses when you’re already approaching six figures of credit card debt.
My buddy loves this game, but I just don’t really get it.
Why don’t you get it? Huge fun space game, has more content now than most other games and they’ve only just started working on it properly after finishing squadron 42
Based on my friend’s description, it’s a perpetual work in progress. It seems like the appeal to him is the idea what it might eventually become, and the anticipation of updates, as opposed to what it currently is. Not for me.
It hasn’t been the focus of the company, until now. The devs were all working on the squadron 42 game until this month. Now the focus has moved to star citizen
Once you spend 10k, you’ll understand.
I swear I’ve heard the same thing about NFTs
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.
Not real life money right?
Padme_meme.jpg
Galaxy dollars /s
I’d be willing to pay with real life money if they were real life spaceships.
Wrong
I can only assume you’ve no idea what Star Citizen is. 🤦🏽♂️
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
Bless his heart.
Never play Star Citizen, even if it somehow becomes playable. Got it.
The game costs $45, for the record. For an MMO. With no subscription fees.
WOW costs $155 per year.
Yeah, this is what I keep telling people but nobody wants to listen.
Once the snowball effect has taken hold, it’s next to impossible to reverse.
I fully expect us to see SC detractors to vanish into thin air like those who voted for George Bush Jr. once the game launches and everyone is playing it.
It’s been 11 years. You aren’t getting a full release.
It’s fucking Stockholm syndrome with you people and that game. I tried it for a few weeks. You constantly run into huge game breaking bugs that, when you google it, people say ‘yeah its been like that for years here is the 20 minute work around’.
ITS ALPHA OF COURSE THERE ARE BUGS GAWD DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND GAMES?!
There. I got that argument from you out of the way. Games aren’t in alpha for over a decade and rake in half a billion dollars and not manage to crank out a working product. Thats not how this works. There are 2 options. Its a scam or they are morons.
This game could be the second coming of Jesus, Robin Williams, and Mr. Rogers all in one and it still wouldn’t excuse the shit the devs have pulled. This isn’t a case where its reputation will be fixed with an amazing final product. The moment you charge thousands of dollars for fictional video game ships in an unfinished video game that has been in development for more than a decade is the moment you cross a moral event horizon as developers and can never recover your reputation as anything other than leeches. This game will never have a good reputation, it could jerk you off to the tune of the Imperial March and it would still be worth less than a glamorous prostitute. At least a prostitute would charge more appropriately for their services.
iRacing easy costs $200-$300/year + paid tracks + paid cars
Apparently it costs up to 48k to get certain ships, so that means absolutely fucking nothing.
It costs 48k for every ship in the game. The most expensive single ship that I’ve seen was about 1.2k.
No ship should cost any real world money to buy. If the stuff you can buy in a game with real world money can give you an advantage over other players or unlock parts of the game faster than players who don’t pay real money for it, then it’s meaningless to say the game itself is “only 45$”. The ships make up a huge chunk of the game and you can pay 48k to obtain them all immediately, or rather, not you because statistically speaking you’re probably poor, so you don’t get the same game for 45 dollars, not unless you want to spend a fucking loooooooooooooong time grinding in-game (based on what I’ve seen the time needed to grind for enough money to buy even one high class ship is ridiculous). Meanwhile richer players get to fly in circles around you in their better more expensive ships from the start. You get access to less of the game than them.
Also, 1.2k for a single video game spaceship in a game that hasn’t even been officially released yet is disgustingly predatory enough on its own.
1.2k … for some bits and bytes.
I know professional software licenses that are cheaper.
Dude that’s like a month of any Autodesk software! :O
And yes it’s utterly ridiculous, and I just wanted to take a shot at Autodesk because screw them lol.
WoW works.
$45 plus a rig that can play it, I have a decent one and it nearly melted
I don’t like WoW, but that’s at least an actual game. SC is still nothing but a glorified tech demo. And I say that as one of the earliest backers.
Yes, it is nothing but a glorified tech demo right now. You’re absolutely correct.
That $45 price (or whatever you choose to spend on the game) is a pre-order.
If you don’t like owning incomplete products, don’t buy incomplete products. This seems pretty simple.
That’s all cool and dandy but they blew several release dates over the past decade already and can’t even get their second system out while waiting for that glorified network tech and magical performance increases.
That’s a incorrect comparison. You’re treating WoW and Star Citizen to be similar games. When WoW for more than a decade has been in its own premium bucket.
The average MMO today is free. Then the small percentages of MMOs that require the core game purchased.
No MMO is free. The question is just how you’re paying.
Servers cost money no matter what.
If it’s $45, how are people spending $10,000 on it?
Genshin and league of legends are both free, how do you think people (collectively) spend millions on them year over year?
Same way people spend thousands on games that are “free to play”. What kind of a rock have you been living under? People routinely spend $10,000 on mobile games.
Yes, you can buy spaceships for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. You can also buy those same ships using money earned in game. This is not the first or last game to do this, and it’s really weird how every time a pointless article gets written about it for cheap clicks, a bunch of people suddenly want to pretend that they’re only just just encountering this phenomenon for the first time.
Free to play games with even a sliver of integrity only charge money for stuff like cosmetics, not for important shit or equipment, and I have never ever seen a free to play game charge over 1k for anything ever, let alone fucking 48k, so spare me the “pretending this is unusual” crap. I sure other games that pull this shit exist, but don’t act like it isn’t ridiculous or fucked up or like it’s somehow completely normal. It’s predatory leeching is what it is.
Please learn the difference between “Stupidly expensive” and “Predatory.”
Lamborghinis aren’t predatory. They’re a dumb purchase for rich people to blow their money on, but they’ve got the money to blow.
Now Lotto Max? Those little one dollar tickets? That’s predatory.
The most blatantly exploitative free to play games are often full of dirt cheap purchases. A dollar here, a dollar there, because when the numbers are small you lose track.
When SC charges you $200 for a ship that you could just unlock by playing the game, that purchase is an informed decision. You know up front exactly what you’re getting, and exactly what it will cost. There’s no loot boxes, no random rolls, no gambling. Just a simple transaction.
Whether or not the person on the receiving end of that transaction is getting a good deal is for them to decide. We could just as easily argue over whether or not spending $250 to go to a fancy restaurant is a good deal; it’s largely down your personal preferences.
Bro just because something is expensive that doesn’t mean it can’t be predatory. The game has been “in development” for more than a decade and yet is charging thousands of dollars for equipment, if you can’t see the issue with how they’re operating then you are either blind or delusional.
To be fair, WoW is an actual complete game, while SC is very, very unfinished. And I say this as someone who occasionally plays it and gets some enjoyment out of it.
This isn’t a game anymore, it’s just blatant money grabbing.
