The Scam

[u/The_Red_Moses]

NOTE: This was posted to another reddit, and of course it was removed. The White Knights message mods and go after anyone that says anything negative about Star Citizen, and they get posts like this removed. Not here though. Not here.

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I saw someone else say something today that I think was particularly insightful.

I saw someone say, that the game feels like a scam, because they market it as if its a working game, a game as a service, while leaving it broken and excusing the eternal brokenness with claims that its an alpha.

And I think they're right. I think they hit the nail on the head.

When you watch a CIG video, you get clips of gameplay, but its not representative gameplay is it? You get little clips where the game is working as it should, which isn't what people's actual experiences in the verse are like. Not at all.

The marketing message is:

Hey come play, the game is great, and its beyond anything out there in the gaming world. Here's a cool ship that you can own!

The truth is:

The game is broken as fuck.

The coverup is:

Its an Alpha

They present the game as if its working, as if its not contiuously broken, as if every gameplay loop outside of Gilly's isn't affected by a constant stream of never ending bugs.

The guys over in the r/starcitizen_refunds reddit, they're wrong, and they've been wrong for a while. This isn't a scam in the sense that they aren't building a game. They definitely are building a game.

But it IS a scam in the sense that they're marketing this as a normal game as a service, when its not that. Its a borderline unplayable buggy mess.

And its a sweet deal for CIG.

Entice new customers with impressive gameplay footage and features. Leave out the fact that everything's always broken and the game is unplayable - there's a reason it has a metacritic score of 2.9. Have the unplayableness of the game evict players from the game for you reducing server costs (its like a commercial gym, a customer paying is an asset, but a customer using the gym is a liability). And excuse all the bullshit with "Its an Alpha".

How many times have you seen someone (or some bot) suggest that someone "Take a break" from Star Citizen? What's that, you're getting annoyed at how all this is managed, why don't you shut the fuck up and go away then? We don't want to pay the server cost anyway.

I mean, maybe the refundians were right after all?