Well, I mean, I would have launched it first (as an AAA game), but I’m no game developer. 🤷 And neither are they, from the looks of it. Good at perpetually raking in money for himself and his family, though!
Yeah it’s “released”. Meaning that yes, you can buy it for money and launch it (so released), but it’s so shit they had to quickly officially declare it broken (“early access”) to save face.
When did they ever “release” it without saying its also early access?
edit - assuming downvotes are cause of a misunderstanding. im not defending early access or star citizen. I am just saying I do not recall them “backpedaling” to early access. I thought they had always advertised it as early access. Which itself is shady af
What I mean is, “early access” is just release with the makers openly admitting that everything is unfinished and broken, instead of people finding out on release day. It’s still a product X being sold money Y, just like a “real” release. And hence it should always be evaluated for what you get vs what you pay, not the promise of what you might get later. See also: Preorders (at least these are protected by a lot of laws in some countries), Kickstarters, Religions.
Maybe because development has a high ongoing cost that they do not have any other product to take up? Star citizen has a fairly large scope, and the fact that they have even gotten to the point where a fairly high number of gameplay loops are fully integrated is quite impressive. If you look at their ship designs, for example, you can see just how much care was put into a lot of the designs (see the architectural reviews, for example)
Star Citizen has raised more money than the budgets of GTAV, Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 COMBINED.
The only people defending it now are those so deep in the sunk cost fallacy they can’t get out.
Edit: the total budget for StarCitizen so far is equivalent to the nominal GDP in 2023 of Sao Tome & Principe
Yeah, maybe. But it’s also ridiculous, finish what you have instead of constantly bolting on scope to keep the sales treadmill running.
Of course, it’s a business first and foremost. And if that’s what people gladly pay for, no fault in pocketing the money I guess.
Playable in very loose terms. I booted it on a decent rig (13700k/32gbRAM/3080ti), after ~10min of loading screens I finally got my ship onto the pad and tried to take off from the planet; half way into the burn out of the atmosphere, I clip out of the pilot seat, through the whole ship and start free falling back to the planet while my ships continues to burn away from me…. I alt+f4’d and uninstalled that hot garbage.