Today, Star Citizen officially turns eight years old with hundreds of millions of dollars raised, with users purchasing ships that only exist as images due to the usage of ‘FOMO’ with limited-run ships.
Yesterday, Star Citizen raised a reported $236,775 with the vast majority allegedly going towards ships that could one day be in the game; the development roadmap that was promised months ago still hasn’t been shown, despite missing multiple deadlines and promises from the developers.
It gets a bit wilder: yesterday, Chris Roberts himself noted that Squadron 42, the single-player aspect of Star Citizen that was offered as a peace treaty which should have been released in 2016, is once again delayed of entering into a beta.
Within the Star Citizen forums, the controversial figure known for struggling to release past titles until a publisher came in and forced their hand stated that ‘Squadron 42 will be done when it is done.’
They just have no clue as to when that will be.
October 10 marks #StarCitizen's birthday! We’re taking this year’s celebration digital with goodies, activities, and more just for you! Get ready to party, Citizens.
Details: https://t.co/h9mRmxuSjx pic.twitter.com/TdiAff7SF4
— Star Citizen (@RobertsSpaceInd) October 8, 2020
Eight years into this development process, and Star Citizen has yet to release anything that they’ve promised, instead somehow being led astray into consistent delays as more fans become turned off to the idea of the title that may one day actually release in time for grandchildren to appreciate the investment that the trunk of the family tree had the foresight to invest into.
Jabs aside, it’s becoming a bit of a concern for the massive number of users that have invested in hopes and dreams that simply might not be a reality within their life span.
Of course, there are still those faithfully adamant that the next release is simply around the corner; some users have sunk tens of thousands of dollars into the title thus far, and to simply hand wave away that investment from consistent scope-creep and a failure to develop any road-map that is readily adhered to by the development team is an extremely difficult concept.
In this form, some are connecting the Star Citizen faithful with a bizarre new cult, refusing to see the writing that many argue is already on the wall after a multitude of failures that offer no end in sight, and lashing out to those that speak against the title and developers at Cloud Imperium Games (CIG).
CIG has attempted to quell this unrest in the past while goading additional ‘investments’ by calling backers ‘the publisher’ of the title, and thus granted the same merits that publisher s would be: transparent development and hard dates for releases. Yet while publishers can lock out a developer by refusing to pay them if developmental milestones aren’t met, CIG has no such issue: they already have the money to fund multiple titles, and can easily continue to coast on the purchases that many in the community have called ‘JPEG purchases’ as they only exist in the artwork.
They aren’t necessarily searching out the ability to get hard deadlines forced onto them, either.
So the aimless drifting of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 will continue unabetted from external pressure while offering platitudes to frustrated backers in a new saga that makes Duke Nukem Forever look well-managed. If CIG can manage to release…anything that has been promised, we’ll be among the first to celebrate; until then, forewarned is forearmed.