Sellouts Oh I do.. its there mainly there to draw in Pro teams like TSM and Cloud9 IE.. They can sell the overpriced packages and use the pro teams to elevate the popularity of the game online. Shame those clans will pretty much "Own" the universe, seems to be considered a fair trade for the amount of marketing they will be doing. Prime example is Overwatch.. where Blizzard made a point of getting the top streamers early beta access (at the expense of the rest of the community) again for marketing / Hype reasons. Exacty, proves that its geared towards those larger guilds and keying in on peer preasure (forced teamplay) to sell more subs to friends if you want them to fly with you.
They can't own the universe...they can operate in the dangerous sectors yes, but if you go there alone, then anyone can attack you, its not because of their game package.
No organisation will own the universe. In any instance players are minority compared to AI. You obviously do not know how things are going to work.
"Owning" the game is akin to top WoW guilds / players sitting in town with the best gear just sitting there epeening/bragging about their items and gear. The whole Ego part of "look at me I have the biggest ship" (compensating for something IRL) and rubbing it in everyone face that his mom's credit card had a higher limit than his common sense. Same reason ppl spend hundreds on CS:GO skins too i suppose.
You seem to be incredibly focused on something that literally has little to no bearing on your personal experience ingame. If you have a $45 Aurora or Mustang package, the only difficulty in gaining the gear from the $15K package is time. You can get ALL of it ingame. If you are crazy enough to spend $15K on that package then all power to you, me personally I'm more than happy with my Super Hornet and M50. I'll be able to do just as much and enjoy the game the way I want and never care how much others have spent on their epeen. At the end of the day if you have an issue with someone else's purchase YOU are in the wrong.
No, it's not. Have you not heard of doorbuster deals? They're a great example of what I'm talking about. You might have 5 of an item that has had the price slashed way down, just to get people in the door. Do they really have only 5? Of course not. But they only sell 5 at that price because if they sell more, the amount of money lost would be too high. Yeah sure, the problem is, that adds a massive cost to the game. CIG is trying to contribute as much money as possible from the funding towards actual game development. Going almost entirely digital distribution only, is one way to keep their costs down. Using this model, it allows them to get get 4x as many resources put towards development than a normal AAA game would. That effectively means that their $100 million dollar budget is equal to a $400 million budget in traditional development models.
The fact that trading standards would have a sh*t fit if this practice was being used here in the UK tells you just how dodgy the entire practice is. Customer comes in asks to buy product at the advertised price he saw, gets told sorry we have sold out of that but I happen to have the exact same item here at a higher price. The other thing is I seriously doubt that SC is loosing any cash when they hold these limited quantity sales. I am pretty certain they don't do this as a lose leading activity. So yeah they do this and chances are they will continue to do this but do they really need people defending what is clearly a crappy sales practice? Just to put a spin on this imagine if Steam ran this kind of practice with their Christmas Sale this year, I could imagine people would be up in arms about it.
Im one of the first people to loose their shiz when dodgy pricing comes up, but this i can kinda of understand in the general sense. A retail outlet my only have allowed for a certain amount of loss on a product, say 100 of item X, before a sale starts eating into their bottom line. So i can kinda of understand a limited quantity in that regards. Though in the case of SC, this is not that, they are not hurting for cash by any means. Edit: Then again, i dont have access to SC's bank accounts.
Except whenever those sales happen, it explicitly says in the ad "limited quantities" or "Only X available at this price!". There's nothing illegal or deceptive about it. And I don't get your problem with this is. They're taking a product which is already 62.5% off and slashing even further down to 75% off. Why do you have an issue with people getting a good deal? They're not losing cash on the sale itself, because they have very little overhead. But they ARE losing out on the chance to cover the costs of development. I've never seen someone so pissed off about people saving money. It's amusing.
No, you don't and that's alright. Most people are too lazy to take the time to understand something fully before naively engaging in conversation about it. If you spent even half an hour reading about the way ships will work or the importance of player skill (not talents and attribute points (ie shiny gear)) in Star Citizen before comparing them (ships) to varying tiers of gear in a game like WoW, you would realize how ridiculous your argument is. Spending $15,000 isn't like buying a fully decked out 'toon with top tier gear that can immediately jump into the end game raiding and clear content. If there was a WoW analogy to be made, I guess it could be like buying a 25man raiding guild that is just getting off the ground. All you did was fast forward through the time it takes to acquire those other members. Having them doesn't mean you work well together, or that the other people even know how to play the game. All you did was ensure your ability to walk through that zone portal, not that you would be successful at clearing any content. And as for Blizzard's Overwatch being your "prime example" of "companies selling over priced packages for pro teams to use to help elevate the popularity of a game", as far as I'm aware CIG has never once even mentioned the names of the people who purchased the $15,000 packages. So if it was their intention to use that package as some sort of hype booster, they've failed miserably at that. In fact the only mention I've ever seen regarding those packages were articles written by under informed people claiming that the $15,000 package was a Pay2Win way to own the in game universe. Go figure. Cheers
Hard copy distribution is a small fraction, less than 10%, of the cost of a game. You're not magically going to create $300 million out of less than 10% of $100 million.
This is what I find amusing, you actually think people are saving money, you're the kind of mook that SC wants, in fact any retailer wants, someone who not only believes they are saving money but will then go away and actually defend their crappy sales practices to other people. Correct me if I am wrong but the kickstarter achieved it's goals, the stretch goals have all been more than met. So development costs HAVE been met, they could be giving this game away for free at this point.
Uploaded a couple of 4K videos from 2.0 PTU: I waited until 5AM France time (didn't know Star citizen was that late in the show damn it) to see this trailer, was quite a letdown to me to be honest. I had played 4K PTU for a couple of days and they gave us a 1080p footage not that exiting imo. Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7PppqEVv1s&list=PLIElK9KmAYDZmo7YqymKD8pIRB-aClgiw&index=2
Indeed but doesn't mean they need someone to defend the way they are going about it, especially when it's a pretty crappy way of going about it.
Spoken like a true communist. People don't develop games just to break even. Profit is what fuels creativity and innovation and drives developers to continue turning out great games.
Uhh, to those say you can't own the universe: Yeah I'll totally be able to do that with my aurora vs some clan that bought their way into multiple battleships...smh Also what's this nonsense about finding other people? NPC Crew is very much a thing: Look at that, I can buy my way into those too. Yeah someone with that 15k dollar pack totally doesn't have an advantage...get real. Oh also, those large packs and concept sales generally have life time insurance, which means that anyone that bought into those will not have to spend a dime of ingame currency to replace their ship if it gets destroyed; no advantage.
First learn what Communism is because THAT sure as hell ain't it and Second the year on year sequels to established games, delivering little if any real creative development or new features would suggest that cash does not drive innovation or creativity in fact some of histories greatest and creative artists ended their lives in the poor house. but nice try fella
You are wrong. The game's initial costs have been met and utterly exceeded, allowing faster production of the larger gameworld the Stretch Goals expanded too. Secondly the game isn't getting a sequel, it's intention was always to deliver an MMO that lasted for 5+ years with content being produced for it during that time. Something publishers certainly wouldn't agree to normally as they are addicted to the EA/Actiretard method of rushing out crappy sequels to cash in on prior successes. I don't see how just spending all the money instead of using it wisely to make more money keeping the business sustainable for the longer term is doing something wrong or dishonest. It's short sighted to think that spending the money they raised to make the product with no thought for continuity and sustainability is a good thing.
Well, I played a couple of hours of this over the weekend having picked up the cheapest game package a while back. Despite all the arguing over the funding methods used and the question of ambition, I really enjoyed it and it's incredibly beautiful to play. I've been building my own computers for a while, and it's good to have a game that I can aim my next rig towards. If anyone does sign up for the game, use referal code STAR-VK4V-QSYM and you'll get an extra $5 of in game credit. Every little helps