Star Citizen, Roberts Space Industries - Chris Roberts' life support and retirement fund [2012-]
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It's not a frigate, it's about 50MB tops of disk space in a computer game. Paying hundreds of dollars for an entire game is fucking stupid, paying hundreds of dollars for just a SHIP in a game is beyond stupid.
Selling ships for real money at these ludicrous prices is a borderline scam, and enough to make me never want to touch this game ever, especially considering these ships are destructible.
DuckThor Evil
Legend
Yeah this game and everything around it makes me feel sick, and I already felt like that when I noticed they are selling some ships for 20-30 dollars, the fact that they reach into hundreds of dollars... Blows my mind.
The space on the disk is a ludicrous means of assessing the cost of something. The ships cost them between $35k-$150k to make. They also need to take into account their cost in-game to actually buy, which can literally take many months or years to accrue the in-game funds. Many of us are waiting for the full game to delve into the universe and earn our way to bigger ships, there's a lot more satisfaction from that.
No one is making anyone buy these ships at these prices, I haven't bought any.
O.K that is ridiculous
ps: anyone remember the game second life, I can see star citizen ending up like that but instead of user created content it will be dev created content, they will sell you clothes, apartments furniture ect.
My point was more along the lines of these ships being an intangible piece of data which essentially does nothing; it's not an actual good which has value and a practical use. It's data in a computer game, and as such it absolutely does not have a morally defensible value of several hundred dollars. That some people have more money than brains and thus might end up buying these ships at these prices does not change this.
Also, the cost of producing assets in computer games have traditionally been lumped up in the sticker price of the entire game; not absorbed directly by a select few backers or early adopters. I can't imagine these ships becoming free to buy once initial outlay has been re-couped. Can you?
The in-game cost is entirely up to RSI to set; making some ships so expensive in in-game currency that people start considering plonking down 300, 400 real-world dollars or more just to have a chance to play with these ships is unconscionable.
That's a hella weaksauce argument. Seriously. This is not the first time it's been used, and I'm not targetting you specifically here either or anything, because undoubtedly it's been trotted out by RSI as well, if not now so then in the past.
I'm pretty sure these high-priced (both in time, as well as in-game currency and real-world currency as well) plays on the gambling risk/reward tendencies some people have problems with handling. If I was to be a games dev, I would not want my players buying ships they can't really afford because their driven desires make them unable to grind for months or years, but obviously, RSI has no such qualms.
Effin' A!
Well there is certainly a lot of precedent with MMOs and buying in-game crap with real world money and I think that's obviously what Star Citizen is now. As Davros said with his Second Life comment, but it goes way further back than that. At least to Ultima Online and its very public real estate / land exchanges.
RSI knows people will pay for intangible nonsense.
RSI knows people will pay for intangible nonsense.
Sure. Blizzard sells minipets for WoW that until a couple years ago didn't do ANYthing other than follow you around and look cute for ten bucks a pop. Sometimes they do charity drives (usually once a year, towards the end), where they only keep half. It works, I know, because I've bought every single friggin' one.
However, it's a big long step from $10 to $450, and like I mentioned, a destructible $450 at that. Even if you petbattle your minipets to death in WoW they don't really die. You can just ress them back up again. In SC, you can be sure there will be an EVE-Goon Squad-like gathering of buttholes looking to gank the hell out of people with big expensive ships, just because.
I really don't understand the argument of intangible piece of data. Everything on computers is lumped into that from your argument. A piece of software takes a certain amount of time to create and its cost is based on that value as well as other factors like comparable market price, relation to existing software but has more features, and willingness for a consumer to purchase for a price. This is no different whatsoever.
It's an interesting thing to watch the game industry develop new ways to monetize. RSI is certainly leaving no rock unturned. It's impressive in a way I suppose. It's also not surprising to see fan-atics attaching to this vision and "believing" and trying to convince other people to join in. Even if the game may still end up being some kind of terrible spaceship buying showroom with glitchy combat and whatever you're supposed to do in first person shooter MMO mode.
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That's probably because you don't want to.
Selling computer game ships for $450 is fucked-up, because there's infinite ships to be made, in-game. They don't require resources; they're not finite. Mass-duplicating them requires no further work, no costs to speak of, and their development has already been paid for by the masses of people who have invested into the game already, because you're not fuggin gonna tell me they've already burnt all 90+ million dollars they've been given. And on top of that, as already mentioned, normal games (note: entire game; not just A SHIP) don't cost $450. They cost $50, and all the ships are included already in that cost.
This is why I'm having problems with charging ludicrous sums for intangible data. That, and RSI is a bunch of greedy motherfuckers.
D
Deleted member 13524
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Yes for both.
Star Citizen went from a Wing Commander spiritual successor to a large-scale MMO with real economy that aims to become the next EVE Online.
The people spending hundreds/thousands on these ships, are doing it with the perspective that their value will increase over time, after the MMO is online.
The difference is that EVE Online took almost 10 years of improvements (infrastructures, growing online community, features piling up) after the game was publicly released in 2003, for people to trust them enough to spend that kind of money on digital property.
Star Citizen started asking for these amounts of money before the game was even released, before anyone knowing exactly if/when it is ever going to be released, and with almost nothing to show except for a poor performing and extremely simple dog-fighting "«module»". Oh, and a first-person walking simulator around a hangar with an interface so shallow that it could have been done through UE4's free tutorials, where you can't even see your utterly expensive ships, only the really small/simple ones that everyone has.
This isn't even about fun anymore. It's about a very high-risk speculation with real money.
It's a case where the increasing flow of crowd-sourced income resulted in completely screwing up the game and many of its initial supporters (me included).
Had the game been limited to its initial budget of ~$6M from two crowdfunding campaigns back in 2012, we would probably have had a final release sometime last year and they probably would have started production on a sequel by now.
I paid for a Wing Commander spiritual successor back in 2012, when the crowdfunding campaign only mentioned a story-driven single-player space simulator and didn't say anything about a MMO with a currency convertible to real-world money.
And before people come out screaming "B-BUT SQUADRON 42!!", it doesn't seem like it's going to be released this year.
We're now getting into Q4 2015 and there's no release date, so maybe 2016? 2017? Ever?
This is the most fucked up part about the purchase model they've been using. It's bordering criminal IMO.
What gives something its value (digital or otherwise) is its uniqueness.
In the real world, even the cheapest and most mass-produced object is limited to the amount of prime matter available, which in turn determines its value.
In a video game, they would have to determine the maximum number of ships from that model being thrown in the virtual world before ever putting a price tag to them.
As it is right now, they could be selling this $450 ship again in a couple of months for $250, and again in 2016 for $150, and again in 2017 for $50, and then bundle them for free with the game package in 2018.
In fact, eastmen has pointed out that this has already started to happen, where they sold a supposedly "time exclusive" batch of a certain model of ships, only to sell them again after some months for less money.
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Well if people are willing to spend the money on virtual goods they can't use outside a specific program (here a game), why not sell them ?
How is that different from many free to play games with micro-transactions ? (farmville, Leagues of Legends...)
How is that different from DLC ? (You can't use them w/o the game either...)
And it's only different from a game in that the game is self sufficient. (And that's not even true since it needs an OS to run and hardware too.)
I'd love to explore the psychology behind that mental segregation.
How is that different from many free to play games with micro-transactions ? (farmville, Leagues of Legends...)
How is that different from DLC ? (You can't use them w/o the game either...)
And it's only different from a game in that the game is self sufficient. (And that's not even true since it needs an OS to run and hardware too.)
I'd love to explore the psychology behind that mental segregation.
D
Deleted member 13524
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Because somewhere during mankind's social evolution, most 1st-world sovereign states created consumer protection entities to keep people who wouldn't know any better from being ripped off by abusing merchants. It was one of those things considered to be best avoided for the greater good, just like not letting people kill each other freely (even with consent given).
And a company who says "buy this timed-exclusive digital space-ship for $150 because it'll never be sold again" and then proceeds to sell it again some months later is clearly an abusing merchant.
I haven't heard of micro-transactions on games that haven't released yet.
Day-one DLCs are considered pretty anti-consumer and should be under the same scrutiny IMO, for that matter.
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D
Deleted member 13524
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More like "Everything created by the Holy Divine Market should go unregulated because the Holy Divine Market regulates itself."
I guess it's more of a social/political view than anything else (and therefore a RPSC discussion that's best avoided here..).
Dammit, you're making me wanna get the game!
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