colonelwest posted:

Yeah its hard to say what is going to happen exactly. But If we go with the SOTA model, they'll declare a "release" at some point when the money really starts to dry up, but string along remaining whales with promises of major future content updates. Then CIG will just slowly fade away into nothing. The problem with this theory is that CIG is operating on such a huge scale (5 studios and 500 employees) that its harder for them to quietly scale things back, in both a structural sense and without raising huge red flags in their community.

But I kind of think that Chris still needs a "release" as a smoke screen, so he can salvage some shreds of his reputation and try to move onto the high perch in the movie industry he thinks he deserves.

Mirificus posted:

https://twitter.com/Abriael/status/1188904556241010688

quote:

For naysayers and haters, this is a perfect opportunity to play-test the game for free. For people who don’t have a computer powerful enough to play the game, well you can always watch better people play via YouTube or Twitch.

Dementropy posted:

You might remember OAG from his racially-charged rants against people who criticized Star Citizen. Now's your chance to play it for free and meet the best community ever!

Zazz Razzamatazz posted:

Wait... is that real? That has to be a fan mock-up because those glasses look ghastly... even for SC...

Dementropy posted:

One Angry Game: STAR CITIZEN ALPHA 3.7 IS FREE UP TO NOVEMBER 3RD


You might remember OAG from his racially-charged rants against people who criticized Star Citizen. Now's your chance to play it for free and meet the best community ever!

Mirificus posted:

Tokamak posted:

Disco Elysium has a bit where you trick an old man into giving you his ham sandwich by hyping the best drat ham sandwich ever, and requesting his sandwich as a prototype. If you like CRPGs, you need to play this game.

Dementropy posted:

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/17329-Playable-Now-The-Stats

MedicineHut posted:

Huh, those stats give us a glimpse to hourly average concurrency figures. Total alleged hours played divided by total hours in the 10 month period:

9,300,000 / (10*30.5*24) = 1270 average concurrent players per hour

If the numbers are legit this is much more than I actually expected. It is still borderline ghost town territory but I was expecting just a few hundreds tops.

Dementropy posted:

https://twitter.com/890Jump/status/1188955324482572288

Agony Aunt posted:

In discussion over on reddit, and someone actually said it....

Hogo Fogo posted:

My inner Todd Howard really wants to let him know that while that may be true, the entire SC content also fits into Rorikstead.

Dreadwroth2 posted:

These idiots know X3 Albion Prelude basically does everything they want SC to do, but its like a complete game they can play right?
I should reinstal my lovely $35 package and poke around this stupid free fly garbage.

Hav posted:

The scam aficionado knows the names of Theranos and Enron, but there’s a new kid on the block...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/how-weworks-adam-neumann-became-billionaire/600607/

...WeWork.

Dementropy posted:

Dementropy posted:

Dementropy posted:

https://www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-is-free-to-play-this-week/



"Some missions take place in random places of the system, while others can be on a planet or moon. Flying down to a planet for the first time is honestly a surreal experience. One planet even has a working subway system."

quote:

Cloud Imperium Games has kicked off another Star Citizen "Free-Fly" week to mark the recent release of alpha 3.7.0. From today until November 3, players can hop into the cockpits of five free ships and go for a spin in the inky, incomplete blackness.

The 3.7 update made some big changes to the game, including the ability to go mining in cave systems. It sounds more like a job than "fun"—scan a planet, locate resources, land and dig them out, take them someplace to sell them—but I suppose the "occasionally getting shot at" part does add a certain intensity to the experience. Ship rentals are also now available, so you can lay out some in-game cash to get some stick time on ships before you throw real money at them.

Players also have personal inventories now, and missions can now be shared with other party members, which wasn't previously possible. (Rewards are shared too, though, so keep that in mind before you let you generosity run away with you.)

If you like what you see on your travels you can get into the game full-time a little more cheaply than usual, as starter packs are being discounted "across the board" for the duration of the week. Players can get in on the action for a pledge of $40—a "pledge," rather than a purchase, because Star Citizen is still technically raising funds for development—which will net them a starter ship, a "game package," three months of ship insurance, and 1000 United Earth Credits, the in-game currency.

Will Star Citizen ever be finished? I honestly don't know. The Squadron 42 beta was recently delayed, but as we noted at the time, its scripted singleplayer adventure is effectively an entirely separate game, as is the Star Marine FPS component we never hear about anymore. (Although, ironically, a new Star Marine Elimination map was added in the alpha 3.7 update too.) Whatever the semantics of its status (and Star Citizen is hardly alone in muddling the meaning of "released"), people are still throwing money at it, still playing it—and, presumably, still enjoying it.

Details and signup links for the Star Citizen Free-Fly week are up at robertsspaceindustries.com. And if you're a fan of infographics, we've got one of those for you, too.

Sanya Juutilainen posted:

SSOCS = Jesus patch.

Today, I've been literally told: "Core features are being implemented, Server side object container streaming and server meshing being the big ones right now, server are buckling under the weight of content being loaded on them right now, server meshing will solve the issue and allow more content to he added," when I asked about missing gameplay loops. In the eyes of the hardcore fans SSOCS will fix everything (and they'll first be disappointed when it doesn't and then praise some new made-up term).

Bootcha posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otCpCn0l4Wo&t=112s

2,392,596 "citizens" and 9,325,386 hours means an average of 3 hours over the course of 10 months.

But let's go with the Turbulent metric of only half of the registered accounts are paying accounts, so now that's 1,196,298 citizens and 9,325,386 hours means an average of 7.8 hours of star citizen in 10 months.

But let's say that half of that citizen count actually play the game and are not waiting for a release, 598,149 playing customers and 9,325,386 hours means an average of 15 hours in 10 months.

But let's say half of that playing user base only logged in for 2 total hours in this 10 month period and got bored/frustrated. 299074 content locusts removed, 299075 true citizens remain. Minus the content locusts' 2 hours, leaving us with 8,727,237 to enjoy the game and have "fun". The remaining 2+ hour players have all played on average 29.2 hours over 10 months.

We're looking at player count reduction to about 12% of the "official" cited player count to approach healthy player-base average-engagement times.
I'd say 3 hours a month per player is just before the event horizon of the "we can't get people to play our game" problem.

I suppose there are other questions to ask about the data, like is it just PTU? Does Evocati testing count? Do Star Marine and Arena Commander count towards spaceships and gun numbers?
Numbers are numbers, yes, but in true CIG fashion they are vague and obfuscated.

So this all had me thinking, what's the dollar to hour ratio?
$239,556,346 ytd total, $213,363,737 on Janurary 1st, $26,192,609 raised so far.
For people who played over 2 hours a month, that's about 3 dollars an hour.

I honestly think CIG could drop selling spaceships, straight up charge a $12 a month subscription at this point, right now during alpha, and maintain it's funding. Everything else is just frosting on the money cake, by this rough metric alone.
And they can justify it: "You're not paying for access, you're helping with a monthly pledge service to make the BDSSE!"
And think about it, how willing would a backer be to pledge $12 a month for access to nearly everything (3rd party exclusives excluded of course, gotta buy that Optane SSD)?

Beet Wagon posted:

So, I'm an idiot getting into idiot slapfights over at GameFAQs but I thought this was interesting enough to merit a post. Some Citizen over there was arguing that CIG's budget was equivalent to WoW's (Blizzard famously revealed in 2008 that upkeep, customer service, etc. for WoW had cost $200 million, although sources say the initial game itself was made for around $63 million) and that this is a fair comparison because CIG is also covering things like infrastructure overhead, marketing (somehow I guess that's coming out of the main budget and not the subscribers' thing like CIG says it is, but ignore this minor quibble) etc...

Eric Kieron Davis posted:

With Star Citizen, the universe and all of our modules are playable now. We have people playing hundreds of hours of all those modules every week. They’re jumping into the 3.2 release to give us helpful feedback. It’s ready to go live, and it’s been cool to get everything running and get some feedback from our players.

We all know that the number of backers actually putting time into Star Citizen is shockingly low, that's not news to the thread. The "two million" (remember: the real number is likely significantly less than that, based on the interview Turbulent did with HuffPo in 2016) backers aren't actually playing all that much. "Hundreds of hours per week" is a pretty broad statement, but it means we can safely assume players aren't playing thousands of hours a week. Hmmm. And that's not even getting into the breakdown between modules (which have been broken down in this thread before).

So, what about WoW? I mean I knew it was one of if not the most successful MMO of all time, but I actually found out something I didn't know today:

Kotaku posted:

Mixed in among all the research findings, however, the article also drops one particularly mind-boggling statistic:

'By one analyst's calculation, the 11 million or so registered users of the online role-playing fantasy World of Warcraft collectively have spent as much time playing the game since its introduction in 2004 as humanity spent evolving as a species-about 50 billion hours of game time, which adds up to about 5.9 million years.'

That's very nearly six million years of World of Warcraft played worldwide. How fortunate we are, then, that these moments seem to rewrite the brain in a positive way, and not a negative one.

Fifty. Billion. Hours. But what does that break down to weekly? That article was written in 2012, 8 years or about 416 weeks after WoW's launch. Unless I haven't had enough coffee to math yet today 50 billion hours over 416 weeks is an average of 120,192,307.692 hours/week.

It's a shame I can't seem to find the "hours played" from launch to 2009, I'd absolutely love to see the hours played per week compared to the $200 million upkeep costs. Also, it's worth nothing that the two games have wildly different sized userbases. Saying "all the star Citizen backers play 999 hours a week but all the WoW players play 120 million hours a week" doesn't mean much if there's 11 million people playing WoW and only 3 playing SC, but luckily we're just (again, bizarrely) comparing infrastructure cost in an attempt to wave away Star Citizen's insane budget, so I guess the average hours per player per week don't really matter, unless we want to try and find out just how unpopular playing Star Citizen is even among its own backers.

If that's what we want to look at, the situation gets weird and it actually gets better for Star Citizen the fewer backers there are. Let's be generous with EKD's statement and assume backers are logging 999 hours of gameplay a week. We don't know how many Star Citizen backers have purchased the game currently, but we do have a watermark from 2016, via the Turbulent interview:

HuffPost posted:

Of the one million user accounts that includes the Roberts Space Industries platform, 500,000 fans have already pre-purchased content in the game, which is actively involved in its funding.

Just for funsies, let's try and make Star Citizen look as good as possible here. That HuffPost number is our hard floor of actual backers: there can't really be fewer than 500,000. Now, it seems obvious that there's probably far more who have bought in in the last two years (even counting dirty leavers) but remember we're trying to make CIG look good here, and the more backers there are the lower the average play time per backer per week gets. So, assuming 500,000 backers are logging 999 hours a week (because we know it's hundreds not thousands), the average play time per backer per week is * drum roll please* 0.001998 hours.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

How much space does SC take up? I'm thinking of trying the free-fly thing just to get a personal experience of the trainwreck I spend so much mental energy following, but I only have a 250 GB SSD and if I have to uninstall Borderlands 3 and The Outer Worlds to play this, fuuuuuuck that.

Beet Wagon posted:

~50 gb, at least last time I updated it

Rotten Red Rod posted:

How much space does SC take up? I'm thinking of trying the free-fly thing just to get a personal experience of the trainwreck I spend so much mental energy following, but I only have a 250 GB SSD and if I have to uninstall Borderlands 3 and The Outer Worlds to play this, fuuuuuuck that.

peter gabriel posted:

Remember when Chris told us that the scope increase would not slow down development, and in fact it would speed it up instead?

Dynastocles posted:

Star Citizen: its fuckin shite

Colostomy Bag posted:

Roberts has to be making GBS threads himself with how MS Flight looks in the fidelity department.