[The E]

Because "similar concept but better executed" is exactly what Elite Dangerous is.

Yeah, ED and Infinite Warfare taken together pretty much cover the entirety of what SC wants to be.

[666maslo666]

ED has no space legs, so it simply does not cover what SC wants to be. Now I realize this is a Freespace forum, where the player is firmly glued to the pilot seat, so many of you may not see this as important. But the reality is, as long as there is no other AAA MMO spacesim where you can go on a walk, SC will have quite a large niche for itself, and the money will likely continue to flow, too.

[Aesaar]

ED has no space legs, so it simply does not cover what SC wants to be. Now I realize this is a Freespace forum, where the player is firmly glued to the pilot seat, so many of you may not see this as important. But the reality is, as long as there is no other AAA MMO spacesim where you can go on a walk, SC will have quite a large niche for itself, and the money will likely continue to flow, too.

Bull****.  You'd just move the goalposts to make sure Star Citizen is the only game you consider to be in contention.

You make it way too easy.  ED may have nearly everything SC has and considerably more besides, but it's the space legs that count!

If Star Citizen can be judged by what it wants to have but does not have (nearly everything), then surely Frontier's future plans for giving ED space legs count as well, no?

[wistler]

ED has no space legs, so it simply does not cover what SC wants to be. Now I realize this is a Freespace forum, where the player is firmly glued to the pilot seat, so many of you may not see this as important. But the reality is, as long as there is no other AAA MMO spacesim where you can go on a walk, SC will have quite a large niche for itself, and the money will likely continue to flow, too.

Bull****.  You'd just move the goalposts to make sure Star Citizen is the only game you consider to be in contention.

You make it way too easy.  ED may have nearly everything SC has and considerably more besides, but it's the space legs that count!

If Star Citizen can be judged by what it wants to have but does not have (nearly everything), then surely Frontier's future plans for giving ED space legs count as well, no?

 But you can drive around on planet surfaces in ED, or do you have to be walking with legs to count?

[The E]

ED has no space legs, so it simply does not cover what SC wants to be.

Yeah, see, that's why I included Infinite Warfare in there too. Think before you post.

Also, given how long Frontier has been working on their own space legs and given how Frontier designs their game (as in, they actually design their game, with mechanics and content and all of that as opposed to the CIG approach of promising everything and the kitchen sink and selling jpgs), I'm pretty sure that what's holding them back from rolling out something along those lines has a lot to do with them not having figured out how to hook space legs into the gameplay loop in a fun way yet.

Now I realize this is a Freespace forum, where the player is firmly glued to the pilot seat, so many of you may not see this as important. But the reality is, as long as there is no other AAA MMO spacesim where you can go on a walk, SC will have quite a large niche for itself, and the money will likely continue to flow, too.

Several assumptions in there, a lot of them wrong.
1) You are assuming that there will be a true 1.0 release of Star Citizen (as in, a release in which all core gameplay elements are locked off, a core game loop exists, and there is enough content to fill a reasonable amount of time with an eye towards infinite gameplay).
2) You are assuming that there is a large-ish crowd waiting for SC to release before putting money into the game. By now, most of the people interested in this sort of game have either bought in or bought in and then requested a refund because CIG can't develop for ****, or have forgotten about the game because it hasn't actually released anything that people could agree as being great to date.
3) You are assuming that the crowd waiting for SC's release is not just relatively large in terms of the spacegame crowd, but absolutely large in terms of gaming as a whole. The problem there is that SC is the niche-iest of niche games. It wants to be a mechanically complex, multi-game-mode MMO based around a specific vision as codified by Freelancer/Wing Commander. There just isn't a huge market for games like that as the games that implement parts of the SC vision prove (Speaking of ED, No Man's Sky, X, Infinite Warfare). SC, even if released, will never be as huge as it needs to be in order to function for long.

[666maslo666]

Yeah, see, that's why I included Infinite Warfare in there too. Think before you post.

Obviously its gotta be in one game, or it does not count. There are plenty of FPS games and quite a few space sims. The niche is a game that combines both mechanics seamlessly. In fact I believe this

No Man's Sky

is another example of the same syndrome I am talking about. I think No Man's Sky is quite an average game, to put it mildly, and in a different world it would be quite a flop. Yet the huge and disproportionate amount of hype it generated (in some ways more than Star Citizen), and the high amount of sells and players it has, can be traced to the same thing as SC - it is attempting to fill the MMO FPS spacesim gaping hole in the market, a hole that remained unfilled ever since Star Wars Galaxies ended.

[Aesaar]

Way to ignore The_E's point.  No such gaping hole exists.  That's what Infinite Warfare's lackluster sales compared to other CoD games prove.  It's what the middling sales of E:D and No Man's Sky prove.  SC is not as big a deal as you and other citizens like to think it is.

[666maslo666]

SC is not a big deal when compared to the likes of WoW or CoD (what is tough?). But both SC and also No Man's Sky are huge deals in spacesim market segment. Now is it a coincidence that two of the biggest games in spacesim segment are currently of questionable qualities but include space legs? I dont think so. It is a combination that attracts lots of players and they are willing to tolerate a lot of BS because they have nowhere else to go. And I dont see that changing in foreseeable future.

[Mongoose]

How about those of us who don't give a **** about "space legs" (what an awful term) bit just want a tight, well-plotted linear space sim? Because Squadron 42 is a punch line at this point.

[General Battuta]

When you realize that space legs feature creep is the reason your crowdfounded MMO messiah became a disaster of technical debt and overpromised 'features', but you can't consciously admit it

Imagine the mediocre yet pretty Freelancer-like we could've had by now if this game hadn't desperately stapled its mouth to the crowdfunding cash hose while growing blisters and wattles of cancerously unrealistic stretch goals out of its distended asshole.

[The E]

I dont think so. It is a combination that attracts lots of players and they are willing to tolerate a lot of BS because they have nowhere else to go. And I dont see that changing in foreseeable future.

The people that had "nowhere else to go" are playing No Man's Sky and Elite right now, as we speak. Star Citizen may become a huge deal at some unspecified point in the future when they finally manage to implement a minimum viable product with even half of the functionality that No Man's Sky has right now, but SC is not there yet and is unlikely to ever get there.

And then comes the kicker:
Even if SC becomes a game worth playing, by the time it does, it will have spent so much time in early access-equivalent that anyone who ever wanted that game will have bought in already. The expected long tail of users waiting to get in that CIG is banking on (or rather, that they would be banking on if they were a more normal company) isn't going to appear. There will be no giant bump in cash influx because people decide to hop in en masse when the game launches.
Over the past few months, we've seen that exact scenario play out with PUBG: The game is still hugely popular right now, but its popularity is nowhere near where it was earlier in the year. As much revenue as it brought in (and make no mistake, it is a fantastically profitable game), it has already peaked in terms of usercount, and its post-launch monetization strategy is just the stupidest, most pointless lootbox bull**** possible.

That, on a much smaller but much more pathetic scale, is the fate waiting for Star Citizen. To continue at the envisioned scale, SC needs a lot of longterm revenue, the sort of revenue WoW generates via subscriptions for example, and outside of switching to an F2P-like monetization scheme, I do not see that happen.
Because here's the other kicker: As far as I can tell, SC is currently buoyed by a handful of people willing and able to pump thousands into jpgs. These are the sort of whales that F2P games bank on having, but because SC isn't designed as an F2P game, they have little incentive to keep spending once the game is properly out. Paradoxically, CIG have backed themselves into a corner where releasing the game is actively harmful to their business model, something that I think has never happened in the history of games.

[The E]

Imagine the mediocre yet pretty Freelancer-like we could've had by now if this game hadn't desperately stapled its mouth to the crowdfunding cash hose while growing blisters and wattles of cancerously unrealistic stretch goals out of its distended asshole.

And that's the other bit that is impossible to avoid: No matter what state SC is in on release, if it had been developed in a sane way (i.e. with the original scope as envisioned by the kickstarter with any post-kickstarter features being pushed back to post-release), we could be playing the game and be having actual opinions about the game (as opposed to opinions about the developer and their practices) right now. We could do all the comparisons to ED and NMS in earnest, without bull**** (and yeah, maslo, what you've been doing is bull****: You keep comparing your headcanon version of SC, which does not exist right now and may never exist in the form you imagine it, to actual released games that people can experience in their entirety).

[Spoon]

And furthermore, Starcitizen is good.

[redsniper]

Lol, there are actually people on HLP who are true star cit believers still. I mean I shouldn't be surprised and yet.......

[X3N0-Life-Form]

Imagine the mediocre yet pretty Freelancer-like we could've had by now if this game hadn't desperately stapled its mouth to the crowdfunding cash hose while growing blisters and wattles of cancerously unrealistic stretch goals out of its distended asshole.

Quoting because poetry.

[Nightmare]

Lol, there are actually people on HLP who are true star cit believers still. I mean I shouldn't be surprised and yet.......

There are even people who bought themselves SC passports. And the black hole still isn't satisfied yet.

[666maslo666]

Imagine the mediocre yet pretty Freelancer-like we could've had by now if this game hadn't desperately stapled its mouth to the crowdfunding cash hose while growing blisters and wattles of cancerously unrealistic stretch goals out of its distended asshole.

I can imagine it all right. And I am sure it would be an acceptable game, but I already play multiple similar games and it does not scratch that Star Wars Galaxies itch. So Id rather have them fail than release that.

[666maslo666]

The expected long tail of users waiting to get in that CIG is banking on (or rather, that they would be banking on if they were a more normal company) isn't going to appear.

Not sure why you think they expect some great cash influx, they already got almost $200 million. The entire spacesim market, no matter what features you offer, is not much larger. But as long as SC is filling this space legs hole in the market, they can comfortably get $ few tens of millions per year of revenue indefinitely. That is what "filling a hole in the market" means.

[wistler]

Meanwhile I’ve put 500 hours into Fractured Space and absolutely love it.

[The E]

Not sure why you think they expect some great cash influx, they already got almost $200 million. The entire spacesim market, no matter what features you offer, is not much larger. But as long as SC is filling this space legs hole in the market, they can comfortably get $ few tens of millions per year of revenue indefinitely. That is what "filling a hole in the market" means.

*Sigh*

That's not what *I'm* expecting. It's what you were predicting.

ED has no space legs, so it simply does not cover what SC wants to be. Now I realize this is a Freespace forum, where the player is firmly glued to the pilot seat, so many of you may not see this as important. But the reality is, as long as there is no other AAA MMO spacesim where you can go on a walk, SC will have quite a large niche for itself, and the money will likely continue to flow, too.

That's your post, wasn't it?

Anyway, let's talk game economics and how you have no idea what you are talking about.

But as long as SC is filling this space legs hole in the market, they can comfortably get $ few tens of millions per year of revenue indefinitely. That is what "filling a hole in the market" means.

You keep talking about a hole in the market with no actual evidence that a) that hole is big enough to fit a production the size of SC into it and b) that CIG can actually fill it adequately.
Now, a few tens of millions of revenue sounds like a lot, and it is. It is a LOT more than what the market can provide. As an example, FDEV, with three games in flight, manages to earn just 37 million pounds gross revenue in the last year (you see, the nice thing about FDEV being a normal company and not a scam dressed up like one is that they have to provide hard numbers for this stuff). The financial statements aren't broken down by game, but from the text of their statements, the release of Planet Coaster and its derivatives brought in a lot more money than ED does right now, since pretty much everyone who wanted to play ED is or has been playing it.

You probably missed it when I said it earlier, but CIGs big problem is that actually releasing the game represents an enormous risk for the company. Right now, all of the revenue they get (at least, the revenue they admit to getting) comes from people thoroughly convinced that there is a game at the end of the tunnel that they may get to play and who for some reason think that imagining how much fun you could be having in this game is equivalent to actually having fun in the game. When SC releases and isn't what you and others imagine it to be, the money SC will have made up to that point is it. No long-term revenue, no way to keep the dev team on board at the size it's at currently, no money to run the infrastructure SC depends on, nothing.
As long as CIG manages to keep the illusion alive that SC will be the greatest game ever made (in its particular niches), they can survive. As soon as they have to make that illusion a reality though, they will die.