433
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2024
433 points (96.6% liked)
Games
32640 readers
781 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That was my concern long ago when I entered the game.
The problem is, CIG have financially incentivised themselves, knowingly or not, to never finish the game.
Being alpha game means you can wipe everything again and again. And they do! One thing they do not touch, however, are ships purchased with real world money. And players do buy those ships in order to not start the game from scratch over and over again, and pay a lot for it, in hundreds and often thousands of dollars!
Upon release, on the other hand, no wipes are planned, and this means one thing: revenue will absolutely plummet as players just buy ships for in-game currency instead of actual cash. Releasing the game now is a suicide move, as CIG won't be able to blatantly extort players for their money anymore.
Not to mention that they also incentivise players to spend real-world money by having their website have a secret club for whales (I think you need to spend either $1K or $5K in order to have the button appear) to spend even more money then they did to even gain access originally.
Edit: clarity and conciseness: added "originally" to the end of the last sentence.
Yes, if you spend over $1k on the game you gain access to beta-testing etc.
And the most scary part? Plenty of people do spend this much money - I know many Carrack owners, for example, and this ship costed, when I remember it, $1200. Yes, very real $1200 for an in-game ship, and there's plenty of buyers.
Heck, I know a person in Ukraine - not a high-income country by any standards, GDP per capita sitting at ~$5000, vs ~$85000 in the US - who spent about $6000 on the game by hiding huge portion of his income from his family for years. And this is not an exceptional case.