It's currently on sale for $1.99.

It’s not a game yet. You must have a high tolerance for serious problems and no expectation of making any kind of personal “progress.” But if you go in for the vibes and have others to vibe with, there is nothing else like it.

I pop in once or twice a year to see the progress. It’s been a long road, but progress is being made. Someday it will be a real game, I just don’t know if I’ll live to see it. 😅

P.S. Never bother with “free fly” events. Their servers can’t take it. I’m surprised they still do those since the experience gets so bad that it must be turn off more people than it sells.

I remember a couple years ago where they did a release weekend and I was super excited to actually give it a try and all you're basically had the capability to do is walk around his spaceport it was incredibly boring and incredibly disingenuous to call it a game.

some other company will make and release a better game

If you think about it, SC did change gaming forever. Now everyone release unfinished games and calls them "alpha" while they use the money from sales to finance development. Many games are perpetually unreleased now. Their model has spread like cancer and made gaming worse for everyone. Meanwhile their stinking pile of garbage still has you falling out of elevators 13 years into development.

If you look into Chris Robert's history you'll know it's not a scam. You'll also know he should never be given full control of any project or it will turn into exactly this; something that never finishes.

I installed it because of the free flight that ends tomorrow and it ran horrible on my nvme ssd, I'm talking about freezes when traveling 5-10 fps in space, 30-40 while in the hub, funny thing is that I think it ran better years ago when I was again testing it for a free flight with my Nvidia GPU

So two reasons either it's a me issue because I have an AMD GPU though yet again, I don't think so.

Or it's still really unoptimized, which is a shame because I really like the premise of the game, I like the scale of it and it did things better than Starfield.

Yeah, the 'shit or get off the pot' phase ended a decade ago, and it's still in alpha. It's a goddamn scam

Saw an argument somewhere that its not an alpha anymore. Alphas you can still change fundamental things, that its okay to break things at this stage still. Star Citizen cannot, without messing up its established economy and game systems now, its selling what is the game at this point. And only receiving updates.

I always believed that they didn't expect the game would go that big and now they don't know what to do to cover their own asses.

I wonder if it'd be out by now if they had picked a different engine. It can't be easy finding devs experienced in fucking CryEngine, especially when you're using a heavily-customized fork of an ancient version of that engine.

There is a functional product. I played it years ago.

But it ain't finished yet, which is the insane bit given the breadth of funds and length of time.

Well, if they release it they'll stop getting money shortly after, so why would they?

Thats me, backed it when it came out, play it a bit every couple years.

It's reasonable to be outraged over a scam, or a 'scam adjacent' project. They're everywhere, and literally screwing up the world.

That being said, I wouldn't want to criticize the gameplay, either. If it's fun, it's fun; that's very personal. But the financial FOMO aspect is completely fair game.

I never spent any money but I remember being pretty excited back in 2013 or so. Luckily I'm not a huge idiot in this respect and decided to wait until it was at least mostly done before I got it. There's a few things that have come out of the crowd funded R&D program that this turned out to be, like trim sheets and such that are kinda neat though.