Nope. Nothing means anything until it releases. They had an hour of gameplay footage over 5 years ago. The only line these fucks are holding is the bottom line while they milk their players for hundreds of dollars whenever they release a fancy ship.
Even worse is when they announce the future release of a fancy ship and sell limited hulls. Over $1k per ship with no actual release date, but the ships are all sold out.
Between the two of you, you’ve complained they’re selling both too many and too few paid ships.
The claim they make is that they sell better ships because they want there to be late-game ships in the universe on launch day, and that they want the number limited so the game is properly balanced. If they weren’t trying to grab cash at least a little bit, they could have raffled them off or given them for free to the people with the most playtime in alpha, so there wasn’t a need to involve money, but their claim isn’t wildly inconsistent with their actions.
I think part of the reason there’s no set release date is that without shareholders breathing down their necks to release early to recoup their investment, they don’t see any advantage to releasing sooner rather than later. Maybe that means they’ll polish the game to a degree we’ve never seen before, but that could either mean a good game with no bugs on launch day, or a game that no one ever gets to play because some perfectionists working on it will never be satisfied.
you’ve complained they’re selling both too many and too few paid ships.
No, they said non-existant ships are sold out for 1k. They’re talking about how easy the playerbase is to milk.
they want there to be late-game ships in the universe on launch day
Can you buy the ships with in game currency? If not, why the fuck not? If so, let them grind for it. I promise the players have plenty of time before release.
they don’t see any advantage to releasing sooner rather than later.
And herein lies the problem. The pledge ships are supposedly just to fund early development and will not remain after launch because that would make the actual game pay to win. Right now it’s just “pay early to win” which is better somehow I guess? But the point is they’ve made over 800 million goddamn dollars from that. Why in the hell would they EVER release this game when they have people shoveling over hundreds and thousands for in game items? Blizzard, EA, Bethesda, ubisoft, every big dev is looking at this macrotransaction system and frothing with envy. If they release the game, that kills their golden goose and dumps new players into a game they’ll have to grind for months or years to achieve what early players achieved by opening their wallet. And the new players simply won’t.
So you’re almost correct about having a no incentive to release early, it’s a negative incentive to release. They’ll never do it. They keep expanding the scope and changing the roadmap and players keep coping and shoveling money into the fire while they play what is essentially a very good looking tech demo with no depth.
Exactly! They’ve found an incredibly successful business model without having to release a finished game. There’s no incentive for them to change that.
The only thing we have is that they claim it’s “feature complete” which could mean anything based on how they use language in regards to their progress.
For all we know they mean all of the mechanics are done but the campaign and most missions still need created. It could still be years away from release.
SC has been almost 7 years overdue even based on the most distant projections for launch and it keeps just puttering down the road for as long as people keep buying ships I guess. The poster child of what companies will do when people keep giving them money for the pleasure.
They’ve turned game development into a live service business model instead of just making a product and selling it.
Says their game is feature complete then starts talking about new features they’re adding and improving. Not sure these guys know what feature complete means.
Alienate a shitload of gamers in favour of whales and shovel cute trailers. RSI is a joke. People that keep telling others to install and try it are the same people that bought RAGE and thought it was a full game.
that is a very bold statement. I would wait until release before I make any conclusions.
I must admit that the first seconds of the trailer are looking beautiful but the gameplay then suffers from the same issues (strange controls and a horrendous framerate) of the base game.
After all this time and for a singleplayergame without any server issues, this is quite alarming.
It’s an absolute joke that fans of SC say ‘when you get a clear server it runs perfect’, because it doesn’t. I’ve been in a brand new, freshly populating, rebooted server. The game runs like ass, the bugs are still everywhere. it’s just a badly made game and the design ethos is “we added more time wasting for realism!” (when they’re pretending not to just be ship salesmen)
Also, haven’t they STILL not decided on the final flight model for the game?
I once dug into old reddit threads and the cope is always the same. “They’ve made so much progress it’ll be done in a year or two tops!” over and over since the early '10s
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