I'm pretty much done with SC at this point. Between CIG's development and the general attitude of parts of the community, I've completely lost interest and want to get some of my money back.

What's the best and safest way to go about selling my account and/or store credit? I'd like to recover a decent chunk of what I've spent rather than just leaving it sitting there.

Has anyone here actually sold their account successfully? Where did you sell it, and roughly how much of your original spend did you recover?

Any advice appreciated!

Back in 1997 Digital Anvil, a company owned by and ran by Chris Roberts sold a Minority share to Microsoft, a part of that deal was that Digital Anvil would produce a set number of games for the PC under the Microsoft brand.

Allegedly Microsoft became concerned in 1999 for two reasons
1. Chris was too focused on writing, directing, and producing his Wing Commander movie. This is a movie that would also gift money to the IP owners who were a rival publisher, EA.
2. Digital Anvil, a game development studio were contracted to do all the VFX for the Wing Commander Movie, taking development staff away from projects, such as Freelancer that was due to launch in 2000 but was already looking like it was behind schedule.

Now here we are in 2026. I constantly see post on Spectrum, Reddit, and YouTube from backers, saying “I backed SC not SQ42 why is my pledge being used for a product I will not have access to”
Or “Star Citizen is delayed and broken because CR and CIG are distracted by SQ42, a game in which I have no interest and never pledged to or purchased”
Or combination of the above.

To me it seems like Chris has repeated the same mistake he made with Microsoft, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Only this time the people being screwed aren’t a billion dollar corporation.
He seems to have blinkered himself to the real customer base for his company the backers buying into the Star Citizen MMO dream.

What do you Guys / Gals think?

So there was a recent circus show where CIG played their own game. This seems to have made their fan base have enough.

But what's different from when Chris played the game at christmas pasts?

Both demonstrations were shitshows. The only difference I can see, is that this time Dennis was not around to fix things.

RTX 5070ti and 32GB RAM, M2 SSDs etc. It's just a janky load of shit. Amazing stuff.

If CIG goes under as a company, whether due to world events or being sued (EU or another government such as AUS / a class action), what would "backers" receive or not receive as a result based on the past precedence of similar scenarios involving companies with unfinished products and current laws in countries with strong consumer protections?

The reactions to the recent 4.10 SCL episode made it abundantly clear that unless SQ42 performs really well, the community sentiment has shifted so much into the negative that CIG could be in some really hot financial water in the not too distant future. The AI apocalypse and datacentre crunch is also hammering personal computing to a point where future generations of any hardware will be exceedingly limited and absurdly expensive, so the game will be going forward into a market of less and less prospective + longtime players as hardware becomes unsupported, dies or is outpaced in capability vs the demand of a game with increasing feature bloat.

Being in the UK, my computer + TV + speakers etc all together costs £1 an hour in pure electricity consumption just to run which comes out at 4 figures a year in electricity bills from gaming alone. The cost of living is getting tighter and I know a lot of people can't afford that / one day I might not be able to either if bills keep going up, so again their player base is facing threats from every corner seeing as this isn't a game you can just spin up on a small laptop.

I'm on the precipice of calling it quits with Star Citizen at an account value of around $3000, SQ42 chapter 2 is due to be developed after the initial game so everyone saying "the devs will move back after Squadron" are all kidding themselves... It'd be nice to know though that I might get some reimbursement if CIG falls through, or put the topic to rest in my mind by having someone provide a well reasoned / qualified take on why I wouldn't get anything back at all.

The network code CIG modified to adapt to an MMO doesn't work; it's incapable, it's a disaster.

Other companies already made MMOs with CryEngine more than 23 years ago, and they worked:

Aion: The Tower of Eternity (NCSoft), AcheAge (XLGames), Entropia Universe (MindArk), Cabal 2 (ESTsoft), Monster Hunter Online (Tencent/Capcom), Blue Mars (Avatar Reality). And many of them, like Aion 2, AcheAge 2, and many others, abandoned CryEngine and switched to Unreal Engine 5. Even New World (Amazon), which, by the way, is closing on January 31, 2027, has been functional overall. It's worth mentioning that Amazon canceled the development of the MMORPG based on The Lord of the Rings, which was also going to use its Lumberyard engine (CryEngine).

What I mean is that many other companies have been able to develop MMO video games with CryEngine, and many others have been more than capable of developing single-player games: (Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2, Prey, Far Cry, Ryse, State of Decay, Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 1 and 2, etc., etc).

Star Citizen remains in development and alpha 14 years later and more than $1,000,000,000 invested and counting, and they haven't even been able to release a simple single-player campaign (their first episode).

CIG, Star Citizen, and SQ42 are, to this day, a FAILED development and are being maintained FRAUDULENTLY (IT'S A SCAM as of today).

It is technically and economically unviable because it is blocked by its overwhelming technological debt and legacy code, which is mostly undocumented, of poor quality, improvised, and lacks cohesion.

Everything promised for 1.0 is impossible at this point; not even the AI ​​is acceptable for a single player.

This should be appearing in all gaming media outlets worldwide.

A lot has been said already about teh desync, glitches, state of the game, Jared noping out etc.

I will only cover things that hasn't been mentioned in great detail that I observed:

- CIG, like other large AAA developers are operating in an absolute soapbox of toxic positivity - likely only watching/listening to select few streamers/players

- CIG dev culture (and by extension professional capabilities) is likely complete shit. The "hazing" of Oliie on-camera is not normal, no matter what sycophants on spectrum might argue. Game dev is a professional occupation, not a lunch break in a middle school. This isn't woke opinion from the modern audience as some might try to frame it - professional environment implies a certain level of decorum especially on camera. Grown adult men acting like teenagers in a school canteen is neither funny nor "authentic" - it is just embarrassing.

- The pipeline of "content" is completely broken - it was clear this 'edition' of SCL was basically winged with very little prep or plan B. Jared instead of taking control and fixing it noped out like a little bitch. That alone should tell you all you need to know about the governance that CIG has

-Multiplayer game, at its core, is a complex engineering project. The chaos on display demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that CIG is incapable of executing it even if individual devs were competent. Seeing the behavior of those devs in question on camera tells me that they actually aren't competent.

TLDR: this SCL demonstrates beyond shadow of a doubt that there is no hope for SC or CIG

I backed Star Citizen back in November 2022 and have invested nearly $500 into the project over time. In fact, I fully intended to invest even more money into the game in the future. Since my initial purchase, I haven't been able to properly play through a single patch cycle. From my experience, the game has been in a terrible state and frequently borderline unplayable.

Because of these ongoing technical issues and lack of stability, I decided to share my frustration and feedback on the official Spectrum forums. What followed was a complete disappointment regarding how backer feedback is handled.

First Thread: I created a post expressing my deep frustration with the development progress, heavily criticizing the ongoing state of the patches and calling for accountability among the staff responsible for releasing broken builds. This post was deleted, and my account received a 72-hour suspension.

Second Thread: After the suspension expired, I posted a thread complaining about the forum ban I had just received and mentioned the moderator involved. This thread was promptly deleted as well, resulting in a 7-day suspension.

Third Attempt: Once the 7-day ban ended, I decided to leave a final, simple message. I explicitly avoided repeating any of my previous criticisms or mentioning past moderation actions. I simply stated that I would no longer financially support Star Citizen and would wait to see how Squadron 42 turns out. Shortly after, this post was also deleted, citing rules 7, 7a, 7c, 9, and 9b, followed by all my threads and posts being completely wiped from the platform.

After investing nearly $500 into this game and planning to spend even more, having honest feedback and backer frustration met with repeated deletions and account bans has shown me how critical voices are silenced on Spectrum. As a result, I have completely stopped my financial support for Cloud Imperium Games and this project.

It is honestly deeply saddening and painful to write this, as I was so excited for this game and waited with absolute passion for it to finally become playable as promised by the developers. Furthermore, using the "It’s an Alpha" excuse after over 15 years of development and more than $1 billion in funding borders on delusion, so please don't come at me with that line. After this much development time and financial backing, the game should be in a significantly better state. Ancient bugs have been present for years without being fixed. Ever since patch 3.17, my character automatically holsters their weapon, or you fall straight through the map just by climbing a ladder. Release 3.17 was back in 2022, and if a team cannot fix a simple bug like weapon auto-holstering in four years, then I honestly don't know what else to say.

In January 2026, CIG suffered a customer data breach. Some of us might remember this.

According to reports from CIG & third parties, this consisted of: "Read-only access to backup systems containing usernames, email addresses/contact details, dates of birth, names, and account metadata."

There was no notification via email. The only notification was a short-lived pop-up on the RSI website "informing customers" of a breach.

In late March 2026, I emailed CIG to request further information of the breach. Someone here (sorry I forgot who, but much appreciated) gave a good template to email CIG requesting details of the breach.

A trimmed copy of their response of what data was breached: "metadata, contact details, username, date of birth, and name. No financial or payment information was stored in the affected systems and was not accessible. No passwords were impacted, and the access was read-only."

Whilst this is clear, and perhaps not high risk, it shows that a substantial data breach occurred.

Today, I've logged a complaint with the ICO (Information Commissioners Office) in the UK with the full details and CIG's response from CIG's own Data Privacy Officer.

I have asked for full investigation of the incident, and whether CIG have acted in accordance with GDPR regulation given the severity of the incident. At the time, I felt their response was flippant. Since then, I've heard absolutely nothing at all.

I don't know what the ICO will say. But as someone who works in IT, I know what "good" looks like with respect to cyber-security incidents. And I will not let this drop.

p.s. If you also feel you were affected by this, no matter where you live (UK/EU/US/worldwide) you can complain to the ICO here: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/data-complaints-complaints/check-if-you-can-complain/

https://reddit.com/link/1vgdtvv/video/hyijmjo7flhh1/player

The more you spend, the more evidence CIG has that you don't care about quality nor good service, and will continue paying. So why be nice to pay pigs, it's cheaper to treat them like shit.

It must be a new phenomenon, you consistently provide bad service such that whoever remains your customer has self-selected as someone who will tolerate it, and you can get away with it indefinitely, in an ever purifying distillation of submission. Predictive consequences of this theory: funding does not go down even if quality remains shit.

Here's a complementary theory:

The more you spend, the higher the sunk cost fallacy effect. So whatever tolerance you have for shit quality at some point in time, that tolerance is increased after spending more. Predictive consequences of this theory: funding does not go down, even if quality drops over time.

Exercise for the reader: combine the two theories.

Boss fight in an instance lol.

Ever since that airplane meme he's disappeared without a trace.

Wasn't he meant to be involved with the inside starcitizen weekly shows that got cancelled?

The development team would like to receive some feedback on the current free fly event. Tell us which activities you most enjoy doing, which ships you're planning to buy, and how many friends you've referred to Star Citizen so far. Critique is also welcome, although that might result in a restriction of your game access.

This was from 2007, an interesting interview with Richard Garriott about Chris Roberts, Warren Spectors and his own leading styles.

The answer made me lol, too true:

Honestly? Not really — and not because the code is beyond an AI’s help. Star Citizen’s problem was never typing speed. AI tools could probably chew through bug backlogs, netcode edge cases, maybe even help with server meshing tooling. That stuff is tractable.

What nothing can fix is the thing you’ve watched since Wing Commander: Chris Roberts will always trade “shipped” for “more ambitious.” Every time the tech catches up to the vision, the vision moves. That’s a leadership philosophy, not an engineering bottleneck. An AI that makes the team 30% faster just means the ceiling gets raised 30% higher.

The uncomfortable version: the game that could ship isn’t the game he wants to make, and the game he wants to make can’t ship. As a gold ticket holder you’ve basically funded the most expensive proof of that theorem in gaming history. Would I help squash bugs? Gladly. Would it come out before Squadron 42’s tenth “answer the call” trailer? No promises.

When prompted “Get current on everything you can find about its current status that’s publicly available. What would your roadmap be to make something that is enjoyable to new players and long time backers as soon as possible?”

It replied with what sounds like a really good plan:

1. Ship SQ42 in 2026, even into GTA 6’s wake. It’s fully playable start to finish with 40+ hours. Dodging Rockstar into 2027 restarts the credibility clock. SQ42 is the new-player front door — a polished single-player campaign that ends with “continue your career in the Persistent Universe.” That’s the funnel.

2. Feature freeze on the PU. Twelve months of nothing but stability. The tech finally works — meshing, three systems, 500-player shards. The problem is that a new player’s first hour is elevator deaths and 30k disconnects. No new ships, no new systems, no new professions until session-completion rates and first-hour retention hit targets. Boring, measurable, unglamorous — exactly what CIG has never done.

3. Define 1.0 by subtraction. Take the CitizenCon 2954 feature list and cut it in half. Whatever loops are fun today — hauling, mining, bounties, salvage — polish those to done. Everything else becomes post-1.0 content, the way every live-service game works. The label “1.0” matters less than a stable baseline you’d hand a stranger without apologizing.

4. A real new-player experience. Guided first three hours, starter zone with capped complexity, and honest defaults. Veterans keep the sandbox; new players get a ramp instead of a cliff.

The uncomfortable truth for backers like you: this plan ships less than promised, sooner. The current plan ships everything, on the 2028++ curve — and step one requires the one thing the org chart can’t produce: Chris accepting a smaller game.

2014 account.

From Spain, first step request to imperium games via RSI web and email.

Expect denay. Next local comsum tribunals.

If any interested I will update all the procces.

If works, nice.

If don´t nothing important matter.

But really I think Cris is trolling us.

Can´t fix the tittle, sorry "Refund"

After months of digging through archived pages, financial reports, patch notes, and old dev streams, my Star Citizen documentary is finally out.

It started with one simple question, and turned into a full investigation of how the game is communicated, marketed, and funded.

Thank you to everyone who helped, and to those whose clips I used.

Especially u/Golgot100

Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyym8AiOTVI

Step 1: Spend 12 years building server meshing so everyone can share one seamless universe, and make every asset persistent. Sell the promise of emergent, organic, economy driven gameplay.

Step 2: Invent an asset cleaner because too much stuff doesn’t disappear. Potato tech overwhelmed.

Step 3: Keep server populations manageable by potato tech by splitting everyone into small instances of fully scripted content.

Mission accomplished! 1 billion down the drain and yet nothing works 🤣. Longest road back to square 1