If you thought that CIG spending money on a theater-style briefing room or creating deformable bedsheets was money being lit on fire, wait 'til you see the life-sized F7C Hornet model that was part of a video reel from the recent Squadron 42 gameplay event, which readers may recall was held ahead of the single-player title's 2027 launch [...]
Nah, the success of the studio isn’t so correlated to Squadron 42. They make two products. This one is designed to look good in trailers and promotional material. The other is designed for perpetual revenue, and they’ve got a contingent of players, who average a higher spend than most other audiences, who largely haven’t left after all of these years of a work-in-progress product (that has problems with basic functionality). Not only that, but this game was built with (what might be record-breaking?) crowdfunding from their customers rather than taking on massive debt or investment and wondering if they’ll be able to sell enough copies to recuperate it. CIG’s biggest crowdfunding years are behind them, but I don’t see the continued existence of the company depending on Squadron 42 doing well.
I really want to like Star Citizen, but every time I try to play it I waste 2 hours getting everything set up, only to run into a barrage of game-breaking bugs the minute something interesting happens.
If Squadron 42 isn’t a perfect 11/10 after all this time, I’m never giving SC another chance. There are likely others who feel the same way.
The MMO portion of it that I played was pretty uninteresting to me and, like you said, required a lot of runway to get going. I had a lot more fun in their dogfight and FPS deathmatch modes, which you could just queue into without engaging with the MMO, but that was years ago now.
I dunno, i think the gaming populace is a different beast. The community for SC is way more invloved and voiciferous. I think there are likely many SC players that would happily not bother with SQ42 (though have likely paid the pledge) but if the game fails or doesnt sell well then this hurts CIG and hurts any future investment and they simply cannot rely on players funding the game alone.
I don’t have a horse in that race, but I’ve seen a few people saying SQ42 was what they really wanted out of this. Probably Wing Commander nostalgia.
No idea how much of the player base that represents though. And I assume in terms of how much they’ve paid CIG they’re most certainly dwarfed by SC ship buyers.
They’ve got stiff competition from ACE COMBAT which doesn’t spend 15 years developing a single game they said was finished 10 years ago.
They don’t exist in the vacuum they think they do.