Star Citizen sells the Legatus pack: $27,000 with $1,000 paywall to see the page
86 replies, posted
https://mmopulse.com/news/star-citizen-offers-the-legatus-pack-for-27000-usd-requires-having-spent-1000-just-to-view
The store page:
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/pledge/Packages/The-Legatus-Pack
Will 404 if you haven't paid 1000 bucks in virtual ships.
What simple minded bloke would possibly consider paying this much for virtual ships?
Whales. There's always going to be one person nutty and rich enough to want to spend this sort of money.
People who think the price of reliving childhood memories of early gen space games is 28,000$.
Fucking hell that actually makes me nauseous to think about.
BUT THE GAME NEEDS MORE FUNDING
https://i.imgur.com/oEYyRIs.png
I imagine that anyone buying this pack will only have 5 minutes of fun in the game when it comes out, only to realise that they've already unlocked everything and then switch it off forever.
People in the Concierge who have spent $1000+ actually asked for these packs to exist because they couldn't purchase certain ships even in packages, only through special limited time runs that lasted like a day or two tops. (Which were excessive in price by themselves.) This is everything, i THINK except promotional ships that came with Graphics Cards and an Intel SSD i think.
I can see people doing this if they have already spent an incredible amount on the game, you can melt your ships for store credit so if you already have an insane amount of ships and you want a huge ass battleship or something that gets snapped up in seconds during a sale then it would appeal to that person. I am not aware if you can melt store credit for this though.
so is this game alive? still in development? dead? which is it
3.1.4 was released two weeks ago, so going to have to go with alive but still in development.
For all intents and purposes, it is stuck in crowdfunding hell.
The symptoms of crowdfunding hell are:
Utter lack of proper management
A constant and steady leakage of funds
Bloated ambitions without the means to achieve them
A lack of incentive to finish a product in a timely manner from a lack of time or budget constraints
27,000 on a game that can’t even reliably run over 30 frames when played online even on top of the line PCs.
Once I thought about this it's not that crazy at $27,000. If you were an engineer making $100k+ a year, that's just a little over a quarter of your income. It wouldn't surprise me to see someone on minimum wage saving up and buying a $3,700 motorcycle.
Can you resell ships in Star Citizen?
Not as of yet, they're working to get the whole UEC trading / ship purchasing coming through by the end of the year.
Also there are a shitload of people over that $1k mark. However at the end of the day you don't need to spend that much to be competitive or play the game - they're just giving people who spend that amount something else to purchase and feel like they're getting something in return.
Somehow I find that really hard to believe.
Like I really doubt anyone would pour 1k+ into a game just to end up on the same playing field as some bloke who only bought the base game.
I agree. Can you imagine if you could, in even a few months, get the same ships as someone who spent such a vast sum of cash?
Honestly, I'm just baffled and disgusted. I know making a game is pretty expensive, especially one with the vision and scope of Star Citizen, but I find it astounding that they seem to be making so little progress considering the amount of funding they've received - and then afterwards they have the gall to ask people that they buy a package for $28,000. It's asinine. There's no other
word for it.
I totally understand where you're coming from with this, but that's the reason it only shows to Concierge ($1000+) players. CIG isn't asking people to spend this money. Concierge players asked for this. If you were developing a game and 10 people petitioned you for the option to give you $27,000 in exchange for you adjusting a couple values in their customer sql entry to give them more virtual spaceships, would you really say no?
This kind of paradox should be illegal jfc
The year is 2050, SC's budget is the size of a small country's GDP, they have just entered pre-beta state.
I really wanted Star Citizen to be a good game. I had so much hope for it, but it was the shit like this that they constantly pull (and the constant delays), changes to the game (feature creep) that inevitably lead me to make the big choice of asking for a refund (which I got, despite me funding the game at launch, golden ticket and all).
I still hope it's a good game for their sake, but honestly it's becoming a joke at this point.
Sources on that? I'm not keeping up on the game's development very regularly but I'm not sure what you're basing those claims on.
What indicates improper management? What are the funds leaking to? What about the game's ambitions are unachievable? What makes you think the devs are lazy?
No, I wouldn't because this only works in a vacuum devoid of the context of what Star Citizen's current image is.
Like it or not, the project currently has the image that it is in never ending developmental hell and that it has a fierce loyal following that will defend it to the very end. They are perceived to do so not because they believe the game will succeed, but because they have sank ridiculous amounts of money into it already. And from a first glance of an outsider perspective, this looks like specific pandering to those people. And yes, there is nothing inherently wrong with rewarding loyal customers or backers, but let's step back for a second here.
People who have already given the devs large sums of money are asking the developers to make a special package for them that is a better deal overall. Everyone who hasn't given money below a specific threshold can get fucked essentially. This is a bad image you are projecting as a company because at first glance to anyone who is hearing this for the first time it sounds like the developers just want your money and are saying "Pay us more so you will have better access to luxury deals". While you can argue with me that the intentions are not that, can you say that your regular everyday consumer is going to bother with the game that sounds like it's P2W on hyperinflation?
I'm not saying there's 1:1 parity, there are certainly cases where a $150 ship is better than a $36 ship, (keeping in mind the weaponry, shields, engines on both can be upgraded to be the same models, but the base weapon on the $150 is better). However take a ship such as the reclaimer which currently sells (when it's available) for $350 and as a lone pilot you're going to be at a significant disadvantage as it's a multi-crew ship; absolutely massive and just plain slow.
As Grenadiac says above, there have been backers asking for this sort of obscene level of purchasing power simply because they have cash to dump and want to dump it on something they enjoy. For reference I'm not saying RSI / CIG should do this or that all their decisions have been the right thing to do - but it's enabled them thus far to keep producing something with what seems to be a sustainable business model - albeit a very unusual one.
Star citizen's racing and arena commander modes lasted for some time since they added rental credits without being pay to win, but have since had several stints of paid only overpowered ships and items, despite the whole idea of those modes being balanced competition. For the 3.0-3.1 patch, the intel ssd purchaser exclusive raven was paid only with an area permenant stunlock that also deleted people's ballistic weapons and was nigh unkillable flown correctly even against groups of top combat pilots. Thats since been nerfed, but now there's a paid exclusive racing ship they just added thats way faster than anything else, and the new variant of that racing ship they released the other day has exclusive weapons that are the second best weapons in their size class, so i guess now people will buy racing ships to take the guns to put on their combat ships? It's a mess.
Maybe it's a small miracle they spent so many patches keeping the pay to win out. Now they've stopped caring and don't add paid exclusive ships to the in-game currency store anymore. I've spent a lot of time playing SC and feel like i've already got my original KS's price worth out of it (it helps that i've won more money than the game costs playing in a tournament). Yes, work it progress, but if they cant keep pay to win out of an arena mode then it seems less likely theyll be able to do it in a full MMO.
Except more often than not whales tend to be normal people who spend their entire savings. I don't think this is happening with Star Citizen whatsoever, but any game with gambling mechanics (this includes lootboxes) tend to take serious advantage of people with gambling addictions. That's what the term usually describes.
Here, it describes people making a really dumb investment because this game seems more and more like a scam every day, and I'm saying this as someone who *really* wants it to succeed with its goals.
If it's a scam it's an extremely elaborate one. Mismanaged yes but the tech that's there and playable is extremely impressive and only getting more impressive as the game's development finally seems to be organized and on track.
To be honest if someone has already spent over a thousand fucking dollars on your game they should have already unlocked everything in it.
It would take a lot of time to detail the entire situation with sources to back every single claim, more time than I am willing to dedicate to this.
But the essence of it is that after SC started getting more money than was initially anticipated, starting from quadrupling its target goal on kickstarter and then increasing that amount nearly tenfold by now via extra monetization, Chris Roberts began to expand the scope of the game more and more. Instead of focusing on a tightly knit and small experience funded by a significant amount of money, he began planning on far more features that had to be paid for by a larger, but more diluted budget.
If you want to see exactly what those extra features include, you can't use SC's own official website because the stretch goals have since been obfuscated: the website gives a 404 on the stretch goals page and Kickstarter does not mention the "smaller" ones by name anymore. However, there is a handy website which keep tracks of the development of Star Citizen in terms of promised features, and whether they were already implemented, abandoned or have yet to appear. You can search for "stretch goal" and you'll see that more than a hundred extra features were promised as a result of increased budget: out of 108 stretch goal promises, 30 were properly implemented and were for the most part very minor. The rest are either non-implemented, broken, compromised or stagnant, with a majority sitting at the latter.
Some of the most prominent features that were promised but have yet to be delivered include Squadron 42, the campaign story-based game that was supposed to accompany the release of Star Citizen. I would have to dig deeper for this but there used to be a competitive multiplayer shooter part that completely disappeared due to quality issues at some point and was never mentioned after that.
And the problem is that a lot of these features, on top of piling up, cannot realistically be done by one developer - they're not lazy, they're overcharged with work. So Chris Roberts began splitting all that extra charge into outsourced studios which is going about as well as you'd expect.
Mandalore's video on SC is a bit out of date by now but it still has some important explanations on the exact issues with Development, and Chris Roberts is a big one: he wants his dream game to be perfect and has absolutely no restraint at all in terms of what should be in the game and should realistically be cut off for the sake of development. We're six years into development and about 17% of the game was actually implemented. For comparison's sake, Overgrowth was made from complete scratch (that includes engine) by a team of four people in about nine years, with a small budget which only caught on in the later years of development thanks to Humble Bundle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHUbzzKJXBc
The idea is to maximize revenue while minimizing damage to the start state of the game's economy. Too cheap and everyone will have full fleets from the getgo, the economy becomes pointless and there isn't enough progression and people to man seats in those bigger ships. Too expensive and not enough people buy in.... they haven't hit "too expensive" yet, clearly. Charging for ships in the first place and involving real money at all is whats shady... which would be an issue, but even EVE lets you do similar. I don't think the prices themselves are shady, high prices are better for the playerbase on release when they've *said* they will stop selling ships. We'll see though.
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