I think you pointed out why they don't get their shit together.

Wait why the hell did I think they've in development for nearly 20 years lol

Is a heavily mismanaged game. Calling it a scam would be a misuse of the word.

Scam Citizen

It's less a game and more a sim. They'll not fix broken box missions, but spend weeks on fart mechanics. Either they are incompetent or intentionally stalling. I personally believe the latter.

They don't intend to leave alpha because they're making money from ship sales. It's pretty, but it's not fun when you run, and boom, you dead. 45 mins to get back there.

Even scams have valid products behind them.

Just because you're okay with it doesn't make it not a scam.
False advertising is a scam.
SC is a scam.

I wouldn't call it a scam either. Just another shitty game farming whales. They actually refunded me so there's that. I wasted an hour of my life on that thing.

It's a shame because you can see the potential, there's nothing else quite like it. You can wake up in your apartment, walk around the city/base you're in, take a train to the spaceport, find your hangar, get in your ship, start your ship, take off and go somewhere. It has potential to be incredibly immersive but it's beyond clear the devs don't care about making it into a good game.

The controls are totally bizarre, unintuitive, and poorly designed. Everything you do is bugged in some way. The performance is ass. Terrible and confusing HUD design. The game is a complete chore to play. Got my refund and I'll never even consider going back.

Correct, it is a development nightmare yes, it is beyond ridiculously delayed, it is overhyped, it is overpriced, it is predatory, it is stupid in countless ways, but a scam is intentionally fraudulent and anyone making that claim of Star Citizen is being disingenuous. It is a game being actively developed by idiotic, toxic, malignant narcissists powered largely by self-absorbed vanity, but that's not the same thing as a scam perpetrated by fraudsters. They're both very, very bad, but they're also very, very much not the same thing and we should stop confusing such basic concepts with each other.

No, it's a scam. Hard disagree.

It’s a scam like a Ponzi scheme is a scam. Nothing they have promised has been delivered in over ten years. They have lied countless times to get more backer money. The original concept for the Kickstarter was tossed out long ago, those people definitely got scammed! They were told too bad the scope changed after the kickstarter! It is a fucking scam and I’ll die on that hill.

It's also the friends they made along the way.

Which there wasn't. All those people in the video hate each other. You can tell by how they were making snide comments and nobody was supportive of anybody.

Yep, you’re totally right.

leading to a deeply uncomfortable moment where Jared Huckaby, content director on the game, leans behind Hull and says: "We're at time—it's your show, wrap it up."

Doing this to someone in public is something a dickhead would do. When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.

Most people already have. It is just that it has a small hardcore fanbase, which behaves oddly cult-like. As long as you don't move in those circles you will never hear of the game except for when they fuck up so badly that even game journalists are reminded that the game exists.

I hear about it 1-2 times a year at this point.

Each time almost nothing has changed.

He’s been a piece of shit for eleven years. I’ve dealt with that fucking asshole.

Turns out I liked the game only because of what I thought the game could be instead of what it actually was.

I never played Star Citizen, but this is kinda where I ended up with No Man's Sky. I played it at launch and again earlier this year and there's definitely some fun to be had but nothing fits together right, or feels fully realized. NMS lost a coherent vision of the game at some point and eventually it just made me itch to play better games that were more focused.

I enjoyed my time with that game for a while. Then it got tedious. It's a mile wide and an inch deep.

I'm gonna say elite is generally a hard sell because of the steep learning curve. I love it and have over 1,300 hours, but only after a friend brought me back because I was so lost my first time playing it. I similarly quit trying the on-foot stuff on 3 separate occasions because it's so difficult to figure it out, and failing a mission often results in a fine or bounty you have to then find an interstellar factor to pay off.

Then there's the engineer grind. I won't speak on that here.

It's frustrating because the game is incredibly deep with faction mechanics, system states, market demands, etc. but all of that is basically inaccessible in any reasonable manner without 3rd party tools. Outside that your options are exploration, shipping, combat, mining, and that's about it.

That said, if you want a somewhat realistic space sim, it's probably the best you can find. Just make sure you have a guide and inara.cz bookmarked.

Was Star Citizen scope creeped?

I seem to remember it kind of always being sold as one of those "do everything for everyone" games that can't possibly exist. Fly spaceships to different planets, be a bounty hunter, be a cargo freighter, go way out in the wilderness and explore, be a back alley prostitute, get into fist fights, join the navy, run a government. Meanwhile what they've made is a marginally Elite: Dangerous without an actual game in it.

NMS is a mile wide and an inch deep. Nothing you do feels like it has meaning, the story is meh, the gathering feels like it's a placeholder, ships are only collected for looks, the graphics are ok.

This isn't a good comparison.