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Comment by CoastalCoder | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like the definitions of "playable" and "alpha" really matter here.

When I funded the original Kickstarter, there was a pretty clear delineation between "released" and not-"released". And not-"released" generally meant that only a limited pool of outsiders (i.e., beta-testers) could even use the software.

I get the impression that "StarCitizen" is benefiting from the modern fuzziness of this concept. I don't know if they're intentionally equivocating to give themselves the best of both worlds, or if they're just a happy beneficiary of a customer base that thinks in these terms.

From my own personal perspective, Chris Roberts defrauded me by taking my money but not even trying to deliver the product in the timeframe we Kickfunders reasonably assumed.

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Chris Roberts discovered Steam-by-another-name: it's more profitable to make hats than games.

And in a world with NFTs and crypto being shilled to sports fans, it seems quaint to berate someone for building virtual dollhouses and overpromising to their buyers. It's a lie, but it's not nothing, and is less egregious than other modern lies.

> it seems quaint to berate someone for building virtual dollhouses and overpromising to their buyers

I admit there's a subjective aspect regarding what's worth calling out.

Personally, I judge Chris's actions to be worth calling out.

Absolutely, but with about the same fervency I use when a $2 taco sucks.

It really is an interesting phenomenon. The game has released several versions. A game that rolled out at a similar time, Elite Dangerous, declared itself released a ways back, with a drastically narrower feature set, and since then has constantly moved towards adding what Star Citizen claims to be. In theory, if both continue to develop in perpetuity, their feature set will eventually be pretty aligned, but one calls itself pre-release and one calls itself receiving updates.

I am not sure there is a lot of difference besides the certain expectation of polish.

There are parts of Star Citizen which, if released standalone, would be indistinguishable from release-grade games. Arena Commander is excellent, and plenty of full games are comparable to this sub-feature of Star Citizen, and Star Marine, the built-in FPS probably only really lacks in terms of playerbase: It's excellent and the touches in it's game mechanics are amazing.

I think your'e mistaken, In my mind its unlikely that Elite will ever get a new expansion again? The last one was not.. lets say enthusiastically received.

Also Elite is built in a way where they have a lot of parallell systems that _do not interact_. This makes the game very shallow with a few gameplay loops, but they are really more akin to mini-games with the universe as background, than real proper games. And I don't see how they could ever make the universe more realistic without having interactions that was never foreseen, and prboably cant be fixed. For example the economy is all fake, its not based (much at all) on what users do. "Powerplay" is a totally separate game system that I at first thought was connected in some way to the rest of the game, but no. You can rank up inside separate factions, and sure it does affect some things such as which ships you can buy, but its all still very shallow. A lot of things is not interchangeable using money, which in reality almost everything is. You can't transfer wealth between players etc.

The sad thing about Elite Dangerous is that its still a totally fun game with other players providing some content, but the netcode is just not made for "massive" multiplayer but instead sort of randomly caps out at a few players interacting at the same time, with no fix likely ever coming.

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