Highly anticipated $800 million video game branded a 'scam' as players give up on it ever being released
We all know that patience is a virtue, but when it comes to one certain industry, fans know it more than most. The world of video games has taught us time and again not to get our hopes up until the title is actually in our hands. Even then, you can probably expect day one patches, developer apologies, and even refunds.
The gaming scene is no stranger to a delay, and while there's disappointment that Rockstar Games has pushed GTA 6 to 2026, we'll allow it because it genuinely looks like it could be the biggest video game of all time.
Still, that doesn't take away from frustrations that the likes of The Elder Scrolls 6, BioShock 4, and Mass Effect 5 were all announced years ago and have seemingly slipped into the depths of development hell. Even though we'll have to wait 13 years between games for GTA 6, that's nothing compared to the drawn-out development of Star Citizen.
Advert
Developer Cloud Imperium Games finds itself caught in a flurry of controversy after raising over $800 million for a game that some are convinced will never see the light of day.
Star Citizen was announced in 2012, but in reality, pre-production started all the way back in 2010. A successful Kickstarter raised an impressive $2 million, and since then, the dollars have kept on flowing in. There's just the slight problem that there's no sign of a Star Citizen release date.
The latest furor comes from the introduction of 'flight blades', which serve as a modification to in-game ships that make them faster and more manoeuvrable. Star Citizen has already left jaws on the floor by charging up to $48,000 of real-world money for its Legatus 2953 package, but with the addition of flight blades, it's again caught in pay-to-win woes.
Instead of being bought with real money and Star Citizen's in-game auEC, Cloud Imperium is making you stump up real-world money between $9.60 and $42 to purchase your flight blades.
The team scrambled to make a quick non-apology on the game's forum, but this only made things worse as it was met with thousands of negative responses.
Notably, it highlights a bigger issue that Star Citizen (somehow) still doesn't have a release date, despite its funding making it one of the most expensive video games of all time.
Responding on Reddit, one angry gamer raged: "It's been a scam for years now. At some point I suspect they realized they were making a sh*t ton of money off of people without having a product, and decided not to release a final product at all."
Another fumed: "According to *a senior QA employee, he played the entirety of the game in Beta back in 2016. It was ‘feature complete’ at the time. 9 years, and it's crickets."
Saying that Game Director Chris Roberts has likely become the tool of his own demise after Cloud Imperium Games was sold to Microsoft and Star Citizen became far more ambitious than its original idea, a third suggested: "So if Roberts could just get the hell out of his own way, maybe Star Citizen could've been pretty good 8 years ago. Alas, it crossed the line from 'crowdsource-funded game' to 'outright scam' years ago."
Monopoly Go!'s $1 billion marketing budget makes it the most expensive video game of all time, but as Star Citizen's numbers continue to creep up, something tells us it'll take the record before/if it's ever released.