quote:

When Chris Roberts launched the kickstarter he told his community that every penny they pledged would go toward game development - nothing else. Not publishers, not investors.

The community has a done a fantastic job of bringing in new people to support the project, truly amazing, absolutely record breaking and every one of us should be proud... but for what this franchise has planned it would never be enough.

First let's look at an example (I've used it before my regular readers know this):
LucasArts made 75% of their annual revenue not from selling movie tickets to Star Wars movies,or even TV replay rights. They made their 75% from marketing, advertising apples, grapes and cauliflower florets, school bags, pencil cases and posters. They licensed action figures and models of the star ships - they did deals with companies like Hasbro and LEGO. The BBC paid LucasArts to create and broadcast a radio version of 'A New Hope' voice acted by the original cast (this was the first time I ever heard of Star Wars as a 14 year old back in 1975).

This kind of marketing takes money, a lot of it, serious amounts of it... that was never going to come from backer pledges.

So to the point. We should listen your appraisal of CIG upper management and their performance, or we should bear in mind that since the early days CIG have managed to gain sponsorship and investment from such as AMD and Intel, who probably had more professional analysts look at CIG's performance and plans, not forgetting of course that other development house's with a good reputation and solid base in the industry like Illfonic and Turbulent - Turbulent who let CIG take a part ownership of their thriving company - you think they did all of that without thoroughly checking out CIG and their future plans?

There are those who point to the Calder family investment and decry that Chris has sold us out - he did nothing of the sort, he kept his word, not a penny from backers pledges to go to publishing and marketing. The Calder family built their business on digital rights management and marketing/promotion of intellectual property created by others. Exactly the sort of expertise that CIG needs to even try to emulate LucasArts performance. So here again we have an established successful going concern company that can afford to invest 10's of millions of dollars, you think they don't have analysts who will go into great detail about CIG's history, performance and future plans - on the back of such an appraisal they invest 10's of millions of dollars for a non-voting rights share of CIG... but wait! not only did they 'fall for the charm of Chris Roberts and CIG' once, after a few years of watching CIG from INSIDE THE BOARDROOM they chose to take up their option of a second tranche of non-voting rights shares - more money thrown at CIG! The only way they get any meaningful return (and they know it!) on that investment is if Squadron 42 and Star Citizen absolutely smash all expectations.

Yeah. We should totally listen to your appraisal of Chris Roberts and CIG's performance and plans because after all you are far more experienced than any of those who built a multinational company from a group of 12 game enthusiasts in a basement. You are far more of a business and game developer tech insider than anyone at CIG, Turbulent or the Calder family. Strange I've never heard of you.. do you have a business email? Where are your companies financials posted?

Hammerstein posted:

Is there any multi-crew ship in the game yet, that has a functioning subsystems station for another player? One that actually adds combat value? (except for turrets ofc)

What became of the 2-seater Super Hornet?

Popete posted:

This reads like someone whose frame of reference for the state of technology is Facebook ads and T-Mobile commercials.

Kavros posted:

No subsystems for second players actually work or have any semblance of implementation. The only two functional positions a player can take are

1. the one pilot
2. any turret

Being a turret gunner is always

1. much less engaging than just piloting your own ship,

2. involves a lot of waiting and dead time in structured game activity that can fall apart in a moment, and

3. is in all cases but one (the Redeemer) significantly less valuable to combat capacity than just having everyone bring their own combat-capable 1-person craft

Fidelitious posted:

I know these topics are something that the executives of tech companies have to think about, but man, the entire letter is "blockchain", "nft", "cloud", etc. A combo-punch of bandwagon-jumping and buzzword usage.

Why "play to have fun" (scare quotes) when you can leverage your leisure time into a further attempt to survive the capitalist hellworld? Sounds great.

lobsterminator posted:

At some point I watched Jorunn's stream from some of the events. He had somebody as a gunner. The gunner served no function because Jorunn destroyed all the enemies with the better weapons he controlled before they got close enough for turrets.

The combat also was more like target practice than any actual combat, even though it was supposed to be one of the exciting special events.

Burkion posted:

What is that one person going on about Star Wars in 1975

Mirificus posted:

quote:

I've used it before my regular readers know this

Trilobite posted:

Because if you're going to be wrong about something, you should be wrong about everything. Enthusiasm means never doing anything half-assed.

Also, getting easily-googled facts wrong helps quickly identify the skeptics so you don't waste time engaging with them that you could spend trying to convert other suckers. It's like the misspellings and bad grammar in e-mail scams.


(edit: alternately, it's just a way to get attention on the internet. You can ask a question or say a thing and get nothing, but get an easily-googled fact wrong at the beginning of your question/statement, especially about something nerdy, and you'll be drowning in replies.)

marumaru posted:

Bumble He posted:

star citizen was always going to have nfts. that was clear from the beginning.
star citizen was always about contributing, not about get get get.

"i used to to be a gamer, now i am a starcitizen" remember that?
a real star citizen doesnt ask "where are my potatoes?"
a real star citizen will say "i am the potato, where can i pledge?"

and hey beet, about cyberpunk...i thought it was a great game. i played it on ps4(pro) and i had a blast. maybe its just me but i did enjoy it alot. i thought that the city itself was awesome.

quote:

But why are there not any new scenes. Are they close to release? What is going on? Release SQ42!

quote:

Because I don't think the community can handle another hype marathon, when they show Titan suits, fighting Vanduul to the backdrop of Vanduul kingships performing reaper-beams on landing zones, and UEE capital ships crashing from orbit, and civilians running for their lives towards combat battered Valkyries, as the fathers sacrifice themselves to the Vanduul by shooting back at them with their hold-out pistols to buy the dropships some time. You know, similar to the opening scene in Mass Effect 2.

Or the promotion ceremony that a player will get, upon earning a F9 lightning, after a daring against-the-odds mission.
Or the gut-wrenching but proud moment of the Old Man, being ceremonious sent-off to the void in a torpedo-sarcophagus, after a mission where he sacrificed himself for the player to perform a heroic moment.
Everything that a player imagines for the SC, will be featured in SQ42... and I don't think they wanna spoil those experiences?

I mean.. I can already extrapolate some amazing poo poo that's gonna be featured in SQ42 from the roadmap.

Terminally Bored posted:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/star-citizen-is-selling-a-40-000-ship-bundle.533318

quote:

Anyone who looks at the current Alpha PU and thinks they know what is coming, or compares Star Citizen and Squadron 42 to other games really doesn't get it - not even close. A part of the scale that Phil is talking about is the depth of immersion. It's very hard to describe and for those who don't follow closely what is going on it's very difficult to grasp. The only way you can really do it is to talk about what is not normally there in games - and not yet in the PU. For example people ask if we can have radios to play music in our ships, if they knew what the Spectrum was they wouldn't ask such a thing. Imagine the TV and radio in GTA but 10 times more realistic. Instead of having a short loop playing over and over again there would be whole shows to watch and listen to with a regular schedule, you will be getting important information about events in the universe around you from the Spectrum - of course if you tell people that they say you are dreaming it would never happen - it already has.

You will be going around slack-jawed most of the time to begin with, just saying 'Wow!' 'Wow! 'Wow!'. I'm not talking about pretty pixels here, I'm talking about the level of detail of the environment... and then you'll realise, there are things I'm meant to be doing.

In real life the world around you is brought into your living space through TV, internet and phone - this is the way it will be in Squadron 42. It's understandable when people say 'No way! they could never do that!' ...but that is what they ARE doing... that is the scale and depth of the universe you will be playing in Squadron 42. Everything else that is missing from games because it's too much trouble, or much easier to fake, or leave out because it's not absolutely necessary to the plot etc - they won't be doing that. For example there is no 'off duty time' in games like HALO or Call of Duty, why would there be? In Squadron 42 there is... and the places that you go will have the same level of detail - but more - as Stanton has now. You will go shopping, you will go to the races, you will socialise with both the crew of the Stanton and the characters you meet as you go around the place. In GTA there are maybe a few dozen different designs of clothes to buy, this is peanuts compared to what CIG are doing. You're only seeing a small selection currently in Stanton, they don't want to show everything, not just to reduce server load it's also because the awe value is lost if you drip drip drip content.

Mirificus posted:

You will be going around slack-jawed most of the time to begin with, just saying 'Wow!' 'Wow! 'Wow!'. I'm not talking about pretty pixels here, I'm talking about the level of detail of the environment...

Mirificus posted:

Bumble He posted:

and hey beet, about cyberpunk...i thought it was a great game. i played it on ps4(pro) and i had a blast. maybe its just me but i did enjoy it alot. i thought that the city itself was awesome.

Beet Wagon posted:

I actually did too, to the point that I'm even thinking of doing a second playthrough and going for more of the side jobs and stuff. That's kind of what I meant, is that even though I can't really name one thing I think they 'nailed' the game as a whole came together to be something that I at least got some value out of, and I can't see that ever happening with SC.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

The writing. All the major characters (in particular Johnny Silverhand) feel like fleshed out, real people that you come to know and feel for. I'm hard pressed to come up with another game (other than, well, Witcher 3) that made me care about the characters this much.

While I think the rest of the game is good, it only really rises to the level of "above average open world game" instead of genre-defining like everyone hoped it would be. The thing that kind of scuttles the game design as a whole is the power creep - it kind of sucked to have unique weapons you liked soon outclassed by trash you find on higher level enemies, and you really quickly get too powerful for a lot of the content. That's a problem Witcher 3 had, and it's disappointing to see it copy-pasted with seemingly no thought to improvement.

Oh, and as a fan of synthwave, I was honestly pretty disappointed by the music, which leaned much more into techno and rock than I excepted. Which is more of a personal preference issue, I guess.

peter gabriel posted:

It's understandable when people say 'No way! they could never do that!'

Bumble He posted:

i played it on ps4(pro) and i had a blast.

sebmojo posted:

Guy: what are you watching?
Star citizen: star citizen
Guy: that's a blank screen
Star citizen: (is silent. a tiny streamer of drool emerges from the side of his mouth)

Rotten Red Rod posted:

Oh, one last Cyberpunk thought...

How??? I had to refund it on my PS4 Pro because it was practically unplayable. Insane input lag, horrible loading times, CONSTANT crashing (like literally every half hour after a certain point). The graphical pop-in wasn't as bad as on non-Pro systems but was still a big issue. I re-bought it on PC and had a much better time. Did they manage to fix it that much after release?

DaysBefore posted:

I should finish Cyberpunk. I guess I burned myself out doing the open world copy-paste stuff and just kind of put it down. The sword arms were pretty fun. Doesn't compare to riding the space subway to the airport only to clip through the roof and explode, but still had a good time.

sebmojo posted:

Guy: what are you watching?
Star citizen: star citizen
Guy: that's a blank screen
Star citizen: (is silent. a tiny streamer of drool emerges from the side of his mouth)

peter gabriel posted:

Same here, I did have fun and can tell there is a lot more fun to be had for sure.
I started the game off thinking about upgrades, talent points and all that stuff and how my character build would impact my tactics etc, then I swiftly found out I could run into any room and swing a sword around until everything was dead and it was funny as hell from that point on.