On December 15th 2015, the game Star Citizen reached $100M in crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is the process where ordinary people who support an idea donate money to the founder in order to help them reach their goal. It seems ludicrous that people would invest $100M in a promise someone made over the internet, but the results have been astounding. The footage shown in the trailer above is all in game right now. For the uninitiated, Star Citizen is attempting to develop a game that has never been done before, not just a space simulator, but a living, breathing universe. The game connects players to the ‘Verse (Universe) where they can explore in a completely open world environment, you buy starships, fly them, get out, raid stations, steal other ships and more.
The games ambitions are called ambitious for a reason, a game to the scale of Star Citizen has never been done before, the persistent world has been done before, yes, in games such as Elite: Dangerous , the rival of Star Citizen. However, the features packed into Star Citizen have never been done before, especially graphically. Players can get out of their ship, walk around stations, then get back in their ship. They can raid other people in an FPS (First-Person-Shooter) style. All of this packed into one massive game, which isn’t even finished yet. Yet, this is where people are skeptical, at first Star Citizen felt too good to be true, and earlier this year, many people who backed the game originally demanded refunds due to lack of progress, or lack of progress showing. However, after the 2.0 release of the Alpha version which included the persistent universe, many players regained their faith in the game, and its developer Chris Roberts. That doesn’t mean all speculation and criticism is gone though. Many people still criticize the company for its notoriously money hungry donation system.
In order to play the game players must buy a “package” which ranges anywhere from $30-$15,000, and no, that isn’t a typo. The “Pay2Win” aspect of the game confuses many, but the developers insist that the game isn’t Pay to Win because all funds can easily be earned in game by running missions (or robbing other players). What is even more ludicrous is the fact that some of the features people are spending literally thousands of dollars on, AREN’T EVEN RELEASED. While Star Citizen is a promising game, it isn’t without harsh criticism, for obvious reasons. Star Citizen’s current download size is 32GB, and the game isn’t even close to being done yet, with an estimated download size of 100GB+. If you want to download it without hogging all your bandwidth, do it now in small chunks, but be wary of the mystery surrounding it.
