Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
'Star Citizen,' a Game That Raised $300M–But May Never Be Ready to Play (forbes.com)
31 points by malmaud 2603 days ago
3 comments

I don't know anything about game development so maybe someone can explain something to me. If you develop using 2014 technologies and it is now 2019 and you want your game to still look fairly visually modern, how much do you need to rewrite?
GPU technology has come a long way over the last 5 years, but most AAA game studios want to cross-sell their titles to both the PC and console markets, so practically speaking they’re constrained to only providing as much graphical pizzazz as the current generation of consoles can support. So game graphics tend to take big leaps forward when a new generation of consoles comes out, and then stagnate for years while those consoles live out their life cycle.
Many <2015 titles still look modern or even better than popular recent games.
They aren't using 2014 technologies, and they've invented quite a few of their own technologies along the way. The game looks amazing.
The alpha version is available to play now, and free to play until May 8:

Blast into Star Citizen for free! https://robertsspaceindustries.com/promotions/35-Free-Fly

Star Citizen trial week shows off spaceladies and new spacecity https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/05/01/star-citizen-tri...

This ponzi scheme is second only to bitcoin in the number of victims who continue to insist it will be successful so they don't have to face the fact that they got fleeced.
But it can be played now, so it is at least partially successful.

And new purchasers aren't required for me to get what I paid for, so it isn't a pyramid scheme.

If you don't like it, that's fine, of course. Just be honest with us (and yourself) about why, if you're going to all the trouble of telling us you don't like it.

Bad games are playable and “partially successful”. And given that the full game won’t be finished unless ever-more money is wrung outnfrom die-hard fans or naive newcomers - a brazen state of affairs that has dragged on so long that, yes, I dare say “pyramid scheme” is an appropriate way to derisively analogize it.

Preaching honesty and offering a free taste of snake oil is a ghastly display of chutzpah (but just what an industry that fell for thos grift deserves)

Meanwhile, Star Citzen continues to entertain the world by vastly enriching the YouTube genre of wacky game bug videos, so it’s not all bad news!

Technically speaking it is not a Ponzi scheme (pyramid), but it is close enough to shady practices to be compared with.