Star Citizen Introducing a $48,000 Ship Bundle, but Only for Players Who Have Already Spent $10,000::Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Games is releasing a ship bundle for its controversial space simulator that costs an eye-watering $48,000.

135 points

Because there are lots of people in this thread who paint whales as “rich schmucks” who can afford to spend $48k without thinking twic. This is a myth that lots of the gaming industry itself loves to perpetuate, because it absolves them of taking responsibility for ruining lives.

Research has shown repeatedly that whales are much more likely to be people with mental health problems and/or gambling addicts. That Star Citizen isn’t a freemium game with loot boxes makes it marginally better than - let’s say - Genshin Impact, but offers like the bundle in the article is still predatory.

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5 points

And yet? Nothing will be done. This is a target market that is more than acceptable to disdain, abuse, and otherwise fuck over.

It might be “cool” to be a nerd now, my fellows, but only on the surface. Don’t get suckered into believing they accept you. They’re just commodifying our interests for their gains. They are not us and they don’t want to be. They just want us to like them enough to pay them more than we otherwise would.

Fuck the poseurs.

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1 point

What is one supposed to do about this? Genuine question.

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1 point

Stop acting like they’re doing us all a favor by paying attention to our collective interests? It’s all marketing.

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119 points

Only for Players Who Have Already Spent $10,000

This is so predatory in itself.

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60 points

Just being eligible for it is a sign that you need to make some life changes.

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6 points
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If you can blow 50000+ on a video game they are doing something I’m not.

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8 points

A good portion of them are just making bad decisions and ruining their finances.

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-2 points

Like: shower, touch grass, rekindle an interest in humanity as a whole.

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10 points

Meh my sympathy only runs so far.

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33 points

You don’t have sympathy for people with addictive personality disorders?

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36 points

On the one hand, my gut says “if they have 50k to blow and do so on a game, fuck em”

On the other hand, my experience with addictive personalities knows they almost certainly don’t have that money to blow, but they will do so anyway, fucking their life (and possibly their families lives) over even more in the process, and no amount of lecturing them will change, because they need therapy.

My gut isn’t as sympathetic as my brain is.

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-1 points

Nah, if you’re going to hide your bad choices behind clinical language, then you need therapy. If you’re not getting therapy and you have 50k to spend, then that’s a you problem.

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7 points

It’s like the scammers who include spelling mistakes, to make sure they only attract the real dipshits.

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5 points

Probably a way to avoid costly charge backs for when regular users purchase that by mistake

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1 point

It is the Ferrari model. You want a new Ferrari? Well you have to prove you have already owned several other Ferraris. Make people feel special while they hand over stupid money to you

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91 points

I know it’s not the same, but you could just play elite dangerous which is an actual game, and you can get new ships through a crazy new innovative mechanic called “playing the game”

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40 points
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I like elite dangerous but I don’t like that you have to spend hundreds of hours grinding just to accomplish even the most minor gameplay advancement. No Man’s Sky and Starfield are more playable space games that that grindfest. I wish someone would just remake elite dangerous for normal people.

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22 points

I want someone to make Elite dangerous but with single player progression. You get to pew pew in a bunch of increasingly fancy ships and at the end you fight an alien ship or something. 200 hours to complete and then go play something else with a nice experience.

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15 points

Have you played the X series?

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3 points

Evochron, Dark Star One,X series (you may bounce off a few times but they’re extremely unique and deep games), older Elite titles, Freelancer!

To a lesser extent and a bit more survival crafty: Space Engineers or Empyrion with mods. Both have some additional community made content that adds stations/factions to progress against or for and are pretty good if a little janky.

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12 points

It really depends on what you want from your game. I happily spent hours in my lil hauler playing space trucker, and the only real thing that’s changed since then is I have access to bigger space trucks. I’ve been on a big exploration run for the last 80 or so hours of playtime and I’m enjoying being able to just relax and exist in my lil virtual spaceship. I don’t need to feel like a number goes up every session, but I’m a weirdo.

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4 points

I used to hunt griefers in my Black Friday skinned Mur-de-Lance w/ a Huge Particle Cannon and tuned yaw slip to kite and atomize those assclowns for profit. Hit my first Elite that way. The second was Void Diamonds, grinding for those “gonna be SO cool” flagships. I nearly made it the full trip with the whole gang doing the massive trek to the edge and back, but RL got in the way, so I’m not Triple Elite, and you know what? If it weren’t for the Silverbacks group (OGs, chill and welcoming, no pressure, from for RP and what TF ever, but always got your back), I don’t even know if I’d have played as long as I did.

You keep truckin’, space cowboy. 🤙🏼

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7 points

Too bad NMS is boring and Starfield is even more boring

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5 points
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As someone who logged an unhealthy amount of hours in E:D, tricked out the computer chair with vesa mounts for a Warthog HOTAS and coded hundreds of macros and voice attack triggers (and a whole set up for an Index) only to give it all up when Frontier dropped the ball on atmospheric landings (their initial offering was complete shite as they thought that the “community” wanted political intrigue and inter-factional complexity — which we did, honestly, but they delivered shit there, too). Hell, I even came back for a minute, hoping the flagship update was gonna be The One… But, they locked that into a fucking grind with specialized fuel, etc., too.

Shame on E:D, but fuck Star Citizen.

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6 points

I can’t overstate how disappointed I am in Frontier for completely abandoning Elite in the name of making more zoo simulators. Such a fucking cop out and I hate it.

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5 points

Mile wide and an inch deep. That’s Elite. Beautiful game, huge grind.

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6 points

How is elite dangerous these days? I was playing no man’s sky which has been continually updated since release yesterday and my bf was badgering me that I could play that instead. I was trying to explain to him that I was having fun playing this and want to play this and he was insisting that elite dangerous has been updated and is so much better. Honestly it was so annoying but I wanted another opinion on how it is as a game lol

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3 points

Honestly I haven’t played in quite a while and was just a space trucker so my opinion really probably doesn’t count for much but if you already own it I would definitely boot it up and give it a few hours and see if it works for you

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3 points
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3 points

My man. We live in the age of OnlyFans, TicTok, and Twitch. People out here getting money for feet pics, doing stupid pranks, and pretending to be NPCs. You should know that people will spend money on everything. Just go with the flow and figure out how to make some money.

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-8 points

Gramps, did you just spell that “TicTok”? 🤦🏽‍♂️

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6 points

To be fair, who gives a fuck how that shitty platform is spelled

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2 points

Ikr? He clearly never ate tictacs

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3 points

It’s not even comparable to Star Citizen, and I feel bad for anyone who gets suckered into believing otherwise.

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1 point

I know right, they’ll never those 2 hours back

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4 points

They could have spent it mindlessly doomscrolling.

But they DIDN’T KNOW! They just didn’t know…

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1 point

Have you ever played Star Citizen? You can earn your ships in game too, not just by spending real money.

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48 points

Never play Star Citizen, even if it somehow becomes playable. Got it.

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25 points

The game costs $45, for the record. For an MMO. With no subscription fees.

WOW costs $155 per year.

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12 points

Yeah, this is what I keep telling people but nobody wants to listen.

Once the snowball effect has taken hold, it’s next to impossible to reverse.

I fully expect us to see SC detractors to vanish into thin air like those who voted for George Bush Jr. once the game launches and everyone is playing it.

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-10 points
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It’s fucking Stockholm syndrome with you people and that game. I tried it for a few weeks. You constantly run into huge game breaking bugs that, when you google it, people say ‘yeah its been like that for years here is the 20 minute work around’.

ITS ALPHA OF COURSE THERE ARE BUGS GAWD DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND GAMES?!

There. I got that argument from you out of the way. Games aren’t in alpha for over a decade and rake in half a billion dollars and not manage to crank out a working product. Thats not how this works. There are 2 options. Its a scam or they are morons.

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-11 points
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-14 points
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This game could be the second coming of Jesus, Robin Williams, and Mr. Rogers all in one and it still wouldn’t excuse the shit the devs have pulled. This isn’t a case where its reputation will be fixed with an amazing final product. The moment you charge thousands of dollars for fictional video game ships in an unfinished video game that has been in development for more than a decade is the moment you cross a moral event horizon as developers and can never recover your reputation as anything other than leeches. This game will never have a good reputation, it could jerk you off to the tune of the Imperial March and it would still be worth less than a glamorous prostitute. At least a prostitute would charge more appropriately for their services.

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11 points

WoW works.

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10 points

That’s a incorrect comparison. You’re treating WoW and Star Citizen to be similar games. When WoW for more than a decade has been in its own premium bucket.

The average MMO today is free. Then the small percentages of MMOs that require the core game purchased.

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-3 points

No MMO is free. The question is just how you’re paying.

Servers cost money no matter what.

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9 points

GW2 is free and FFXIV is also free up to storm blood or shadowbringers expansion. How much content is there in Star citizen again?

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6 points

I don’t like WoW, but that’s at least an actual game. SC is still nothing but a glorified tech demo. And I say that as one of the earliest backers.

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1 point

Yes, it is nothing but a glorified tech demo right now. You’re absolutely correct.

That $45 price (or whatever you choose to spend on the game) is a pre-order.

If you don’t like owning incomplete products, don’t buy incomplete products. This seems pretty simple.

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1 point
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0 points

$45 plus a rig that can play it, I have a decent one and it nearly melted

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-1 points

If it’s $45, how are people spending $10,000 on it?

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9 points

Same way people spend thousands on games that are “free to play”. What kind of a rock have you been living under? People routinely spend $10,000 on mobile games.

Yes, you can buy spaceships for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. You can also buy those same ships using money earned in game. This is not the first or last game to do this, and it’s really weird how every time a pointless article gets written about it for cheap clicks, a bunch of people suddenly want to pretend that they’re only just just encountering this phenomenon for the first time.

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2 points
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Genshin and league of legends are both free, how do you think people (collectively) spend millions on them year over year?

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-2 points

To be fair, WoW is an actual complete game, while SC is very, very unfinished. And I say this as someone who occasionally plays it and gets some enjoyment out of it.

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-4 points

Apparently it costs up to 48k to get certain ships, so that means absolutely fucking nothing.

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24 points

You can buy them in game. honestly i dont know why these people even want to buy all these ships with real money, a big part of these games is working your way up and upgrading your ship or buying new better ones. These people are paying to remove that part of the game which blows my mind

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14 points

It costs 48k for every ship in the game. The most expensive single ship that I’ve seen was about 1.2k.

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47 points

Some poor fuckers are getting fleeced.

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30 points

Kinda hard to consider them poor if they can afford the $10k it costs to whale out $48k more :-\

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5 points

Apparently they only pay the difference to 48k for the missing items.

Meaning they’re getting fleeced continually.

They might not be poor, but they could be middle class sinking all their savings and getting credit to fuel their addiction.

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2 points

Kinda hard to even feel sorry for them

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7 points

If you can afford to spend $48,000 on a video game, how is that getting fleeced?

Like, OK, maybe some idiot mortgages their house for this. Bad spending decision. More likely, anyone who looks at that ticket price and thinks “fair deal” is already a millionaire, and quite welcome to do whatever the fuck they want with their money.

Virtual ships certainly cost a lot less to operate than a Lambo or a boat.

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24 points

It’s like any amount, there’s people that can properly afford it, and others that will beg, borrow and steal to buy it for the prestige and hurt themselves and others to do it. It’s the latter where the harm lies.

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10 points

Just like leasing a fancy Mercedes to keep up with the Joneses when you’re already approaching six figures of credit card debt.

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4 points

They’re being scammed. They are getting next to nothing for inordinate amounts of money. They might not be financially poor, but they’re being taken advantage of. Like NFTs, just because the fraud is mainly being bought by millionaires you don’t stop calling it a fraud. And just like NFTs and gambling there will be a percentage of people who can’t afford it who will hurt themselves and their innocent loved ones because con men are willing to abuse their addictive personalities to make them fall into debt and have them pay for nothing.

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