Games

Feels very similar to the trend of 'why QA our AAA game before release when we can call it GaaS?'

Do you think they could finish the game if they wanted to?

But dude, Star Citizen ships are the NFTs of tomorrow!

Think of the fat stacks you're gonna get when the game drops, the plebs cant buy the pre-order ships and you take them to resale!

Sunken cost fallacy: the game.

Uh-huh, and devs are incentivised to keep that fallacy up, because the release would mean that ships bought for in-game currency will not be wiped every something update.

Yes, right - the only ships that currently persist are the ones bought for real money. And the devs have 0 incentive to change that, because players really end up buying the ships for cash (easily $300, $400, $1000 for a ship) instead of leaving such bullshit for good.

But then pushed back to 10 years after the heat death of the universe.

I played during a free week (dunno if it's still going). The game offers this world of awesome prospects. Even in a state where there's no additional content to the current, it's already a relaxing game with beautiful scenery. But: OMG the bugs. The tutorial waypoints sometimes don't appear for minutes. Interaction work at the servers whim. I bugged out one of my starter items (the helmet). I had to buy a new one. The first mission is the one I failed when I was delivering goods and they bugged out, so I couldn't deliver them anymore and the mission was bricked.

Pirate Software put it best: "what the game wants to be is great, but the only thing I see expanding is the storefront and I'd like it to not be that"

And I would extend that quote to "as long as the storefront expands while the core game doesn't function, this is not a game but a development service and as long as it's not a game you shouldn't buy it or anything related to it". I wanna play games and not glorified tech demos. Especially when there is more than 10 years of development. We definitely gave them enough leeway.

There is! I play it all the time with my friends and its some of the most fun I've ever had in a video game. The other day we hijacked some guy's space yacht and flew it to deep space, I left the ship with my friend while we brought our huge salvage ship over and scraped off all the metal from the ship, then chewed it up with the mounted claw/grinder. The whole process took 3 people 2 hours and it was so much fun.

It's not for everyone and may very well never release. But I've been waiting for a game like this for years and I can't get enough of it. The immersion is insane.

Yep. But it is still "Early Access" so it isn't finished. But like other early access games, it's a playable game. Think first person Freelancer or a better Elite Dangerous.

Scam Citizen

I haven't played SC, and i haven't played Eve in a while, but here is some readily available information:

1. Eve has been in release state for 20 years.
2. Eve has an ancient dedicated player base that probably knows the game better than the devs.
3. Most old players place a priority on helping new players and keeping the game healthy.
4. You can't walk around outside your ship.

In Eve, you control your ship in a 3D view more akin to a strategy game. In SC you pilot it from the cockpit like say Elite Dangerous or other space sims.

Star Citizen is all about first-person perspective. You're not a "capsuleer" like in Eve, you do exist outside of your ship, you can walk its interiors, you can walk cities, socialize with people on the ground, or capture enemy ships and go ground battles, you go to planetary "hotels" to rest, etc. etc. It's more like an immersive space sim in a massively multiplayer world - it's about living in this virtual place. If we would use all those fancy modern buzzwords, "metaverse" would probably be the closest.

Eve operates on a very different layer of abstraction. You don't even get to directly control your ship - you set general commands for where and how it should move to target, orbit it, etc. (which is something that frustrated many newcomers since this model is pretty much nonexistent in modern space games). The juice of Eve is not personal interaction of character models, which doesn't exist, but the economy and legacy of such a massive project. When it comes to an economic system, Eve may rival the real world in its complexity. Also, the control of systems adds a strong political layer on top - something that players expand on, creating a long and complicated, player-generated political lore. People there take it very seriously, which makes Eve more of a strategy than the game you immerse yourself in to have a light and nice evening.