The Enigma of Star Citizen: Development, Funding, and Gameplay

Star Citizen captivates players with its ambitious open-world space sim, raising over $700 million despite not being fully released.

### The Enigma of Star Citizen: A $700 Million Space Adventure Still in Development
* 🚀 Star Citizen has raised over **$700 million in funding**, despite not being fully released, highlighting the game's **massive financial backing** and the community's **anticipation**.
* 🌌 The game offers an **expansive open-world experience**, allowing players to **explore a simulated solar system** and engage in various activities, from **trading to combat**.
* ⏳ Travel times in the game are designed to be **realistic**, with estimated journeys taking **several minutes**, contrasting with quicker travel mechanics found in other space games.
* 💰 The game's funding model includes high-priced bundles, such as a **$48,000 package** available only to players who have previously spent **$10,000**, raising concerns about **accessibility and monetization**.
* 👾 Despite its impressive technological achievements, Star Citizen can be overwhelming for new players, requiring them to **learn complex systems and mechanics** to fully enjoy the experience.
* 🤝 The game's sandbox nature encourages players to **create their own fun** through emergent gameplay, often resulting in **unique stories and interactions** among the community.
* 📈 Star Citizen's development has been both praised for its **ambition** and criticized for its **lengthy timeline**, with many features still in progress and the game **evolving continuously**.
* 🛠 Ultimately, while Star Citizen is not a scam, it represents a **unique intersection of gaming and hobbyist culture**, appealing to those willing to **invest heavily in their space exploration dreams**.

Well, everyone, here we are in Star Citizen once again. This is the game of all games that has currently raised over $700 million. I'm not even making that up; they have raised $700 million, and this game isn't even out yet! Like, I'm not joking; you can't

like, go buy a retail version of this game; it doesn't exist yet. It's been in development for over a decade, and who knows when we'll actually see it really launch, if it ever does. But I am playing it here today because I want to see

just what is actually available to those people who have spent so much money on the game. Now, I've done videos covering Star Citizen before; it's a game that I find just fascinating in all manners of ways. Not only is it, technically speaking, a very, very impressive package,

and there is a reason why they've spent and raised so much money, but also it promises to be something that I do think a lot of people connect with. As you can see, I'm flying around a city; this is a very large city. I actually collected

this ship from a hangar, and then I took off after waking up in a small apartment I lived in. And as you can see, I can actually climb up into the atmosphere, and I can go mad trying to get out of orbit. And if I flip the

view around here, you can see I'm just going straight up and leaving the city behind. And you'll notice something interesting: I'm leaving the atmosphere; I'm actually taking off and going into space. And as I continue to blast off and go higher and higher and higher,

This will continue to get even crazier. Let me just show you. [Music] [Applause] [Music] And just like that, we are actually in high Earth orbit of this planet, and we can actually look around and literally anywhere on its surface, we could travel.

To there are no limits. It is literally an open-world game, but not just an open-world game; it's an open Solar System game. It'll eventually be open galaxy, I guess. It's supposed to be a massive universal sim game, effectively, and it's just ridiculous, like as you can see.

Right now, I'm on this planet, and if I want to go over maybe here, I can select that route to it, and then it calculates the route, expected travel times, and all that, the fuel needed, all that good stuff. And then, if I'm good to go with

that, I can close this menu down, and then I can start to basically warp there once I'm out of orbit. Okay, so once we are calibrated and spooled to that point, we can actually warp there. And if I go and zoom out just a tad, assuming the

game doesn't crash—which it might; it's not a great sign—there we go. Okay, there we go. 700 million, ladies and gents. You can see I'm actually warping in real time, traveling to this other planet as we go. Now, if I pull up that

menu again that showed the little map, you can see how far we're actually traveling, and you can see the distance we're going is quite vast, which will buy me a little bit of time now because this game is trying to do more of a realistic

Space sim thing, it's much more grounded, so it will actually take you a long time to travel places. In this case, as you can see, it's telling me that journey I established was an estimated 4 minutes and 22 seconds, roughly. And that means it

will actually take 4 minutes and 22 seconds to get there. If I play the game, get materials, upgrade my engine and stuff like that, that can go much, much faster, and you're capable of going to much farther planets, much more reasonably and not having to spend so

much time in travel. But this is not like a Starfield sort of light sci-fi sim where loading is a second or two, and then you're there, and it's all about quick travel. This is a game where, if you want to play it and you want to

experience a space sim, it's going to ask some stuff of you, namely that you take it relatively seriously and you spend a lot of time in it. You can tell in this time that we've been talking already, we've traveled this far, but it's going

to take another few minutes to actually get there. So while we're there, let's talk about Star Citizen as a whole. Also, just real quick, make sure to subscribe and like the video if you enjoy it; it helps me out a ton, and uh, it would

make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. So do that, and I'll love you forever. Okay, back to it. So if you go to the actual website for Star Citizen development and funding, you can see down here is the actual total funds raised to this date.

$73 million as of the moment this video is being recorded, and that's across roughly 5 million citizens who have bought into this program. You can see they even break it down by hour; an hour ago they made about $75,000, and two hours ago they made $87,000. The amount of money they're pulling in is wild!

On the 28th, they pulled in probably $1.5 million; same with the 27th. The 26th was a pretty good day; they made maybe $1.9 million. The day before, on the 25th, that day popped off—just under $3 million in a single day!

No matter which way you look at it—weekly, monthly—in November they had a big event and they raised $28 million in a month. It's crazy! And again, this game isn't even out.

You can see here we're approaching our destination very quickly. We're coming in; maybe we'll get there in a second. You see the planet actually come into view.

We've actually physically traveled this far, and when we get there we'll see if we smash into it. There we go! There we go! We are actually at this planet's surface, and you can see that there are mountains off in the distance and clouds drifting.

As you can see, there are God rays coming off of those clouds. It's crazy! Because this is an actual simulation of a solar system, all of these areas in dark are in nighttime, and all the areas in the sun are, of course, daytime.

You go to the threshold, you'll see the sun setting and all of that, and that's not crazy novel. That's something like No Man's Sky or even Starfield had, but what they didn't have is the ability to land on a planet-sized planet, not a little one.

Like No Man's Sky, or a sort of collection of fishbowls like Starfield, but to be able to do that on a planetary scale and also do it in real time. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to effectively point my ship down and we

are going to just land on this planet's surface somewhere where the sun will be setting, and we'll just do a time-lapse so you can actually see what this looks like in real time; no cuts, no edits. You can actually see that we can just land on the planet, and I think it's going to

be a long, long time till touchdown. Brings me around again to find I'm not the man they think I am at home. Oh no, no, no, I'm a Rocket Man, Rocket Man, burning out his fuse out here alone. Ryan, look out! And here we are, down on the planet

surface in real time. Nothing, nothing tricky about it. We just went from another planet down to this planet, and if I just gently drop down, you can see we can land anywhere. It's a full-sized planet, and I need to try not to, uh, to crash; that'd be a good idea. And if I

just gently drop down... thank God for space headlights! Right? I can just gently plop down, and then if I go back into the cockpit, I can turn off the power to the ship, or maybe I leave it on for the headlights. Maybe that's the, uh, maybe that's the strat...

No, I'll just get out. I'll get out. Okay, so we hop out of the ship, and I'll go and show you you can actually walk around the planet's surface now. Of course, that took a little while to do. This game again is trying to be more like

a realistic space sim as opposed to a gamified space sim. So it's not trying to be hyper, hyper, like twitchy or catered to the ADHD crowd. This definitely is a game that's more grounded and targeting an older group of players. But you can

see just how impressive, technically speaking, that is. Now the big question, if you think anything like me, is now, cool, what's fun about it? Like, what do you do in this game? This is a cool tech demo, but like, what do you actually do? They spent $700 million just making

procedural planets and a game that doesn't run very well. They have done that, and they've also added in a bunch of other gameplay systems. Now your mileage on these is going to vary a lot because, honestly, the game is kind of what you make of it. If you want to be a

space trader and you want to collect materials from one planet, travel and take them to another planet to sell them for more, and you do that to grind up and get better and better ships and weapons and stuff, you can do that. That's totally, totally viable, but you kind of

have to make your own fun. There are other systems at play here. There are, for example, contracts and stuff, and these are sort of like, you know, delivery. You can see mercenary contracts with all sorts of combat built into it because there are guns and combat dogfights.

fights stuff like that in the game. Delivery, salvage operations; that's one of the new things that they have. Research priority, bounty hunter, all sorts of different missions, even down to racing, where you can actually race your spaceships against other players' spaceships. It's really cool and to be

clear, it doesn't have to be the most realistic or, like, miserable thing possible. You can actually streamline a lot of this. So, for example, I was just trying to demonstrate how you can do all of this in real time if you want. The game actually does let you travel from

planet to planet uninterrupted, and it works. However, most of the time you're probably going to be using the warp drive to go pretty much from orbit to orbit and then down to a planet city or a landing zone that you're looking for. You're probably not going to do it in

this way that I did for this demonstration, but I think for demonstration purposes it at least proves the point that the game empowers you to travel in that way. But without a doubt, you kind of have to make your own

fun if you want to have a good time, and that's where sort of emergent stories take place. So, for example, I've played this game on stream where I've opened it up to anybody to join me, and I landed on a random planet and before

long, a bunch of other people from our chat came in and started showing off their ships and their collection of different things that they had found and their escapades and all sorts of cool stuff, and they started showing all that to us, and then we did missions together.

And at one point, somebody died in the course of our fun, and we took them up in the back of the ship and did a little space funeral. I'll just play some clips of that here for you to see. We had a really, really good time, and none of it

was like carefully scripted, linear cinematic stuff or carefully calibrated missions. We just kind of had fun in our own sandbox, and that's honestly where I've had the most fun. I know some people get really into the roleplay of being a space pirate or this or that, and

that's all great and fine, but I have had a lot of fun just making my own fun [ ] around and being an idiot that way, you know? But like, this is a great example of how you can quickly warp to things if you want to, so

I warp to that spot, I can uh, do the little warp drive, and then it's actually going to effectively fast travel, but it's actually physically moving me through space at a faster rate using the warp drive on the ship. Now, because the game has so many moving parts and

mechanisms that intertwine, it can be an extremely overwhelming game, and I think that's one of the major, major downsides of Star Citizen right now. It feels like you need to have a PhD in how this game works to even start playing, and I think

that's just unfortunate. Like, I would not have been able to really get into this game unless I had my audience there in chat to guide me, because it can be so freaking overwhelming. But once you get your feet under you, it's much more doable, but just understand this is one

Of those games, you're going to need to look up guides. I mean, even when I started filming this video, I couldn't get the N button to raise my landing gear, so I started Googling ferociously, trying to find what I was doing wrong. I

was like, I could have sworn it was N to lift the landing gear, and to... oh, I crashed! I didn't see how close I was to the ground; that's my bad. I was distracted talking about landing gear. Anyway, even somebody like me who has

played this game a fair bit, I've needed to go in and look up some of those guides and stuff just to figure out how things work. So don't give yourself crap if you have to do the same thing. But I mean, you can see some of the

crazy stuff players have pulled off while playing together in this compilation from Kaya Star. You can see just some crazy, crazy stuff that happened while they were doing missions, while they were working together. It's just outrageously cool what dynamic moments can happen in this

ultimate space sandbox, which is really what this is. You know, some people will ask, "What is Star Citizen? What is it trying to do? What's it trying to be?" And it's tough to explain because it's trying to do so much, and it honestly has not fully delivered on much of it. It's

like 80% there with some stuff, and then 90% on other stuff; other things are at like 10%. So it's varied and it's difficult to describe, but fundamentally it is a spacefaring adventure sandbox. It is a game that opens itself

It's up to you, and lets you kind of make your own fun. That's not for everybody, but if you're someone that likes the idea of being able to get a spaceship and just fly across a galaxy and play with your friends and buy massive ships that

have pools and basketball courts inside of them, you can do that and live out that space fantasy. And I think that that's pretty cool. One thing that is not super cool is just how expensive this game can be, especially when you consider that it's not even technically fully out

yet, or anything. You can play a data effectively, but it's not fully released, and yet that hasn't stopped them from selling a $48,000 bundle containing many ships that don't exist yet. And in order to buy this, you have to be a member of like the

top tier of the Chairman's Club, which is basically just a fancy way of saying that you have to have spent over $10,000 in order to enter into the top tier of players that would be capable of acquiring this. IGN did some reporting on

it, and they described it as adding even more to the price. The Legatus 2953 pack seems to only be available to members of a certain tier of Star Citizen's Chairman's Club, which requires spending $10,000 on other

in-game items to achieve. So it's $48,000, but you need to have spent $10,000 before that to be able to purchase it, which is wild. And they continue saying that this is far from the first time that they've done this. Star Citizen has

been selling high-price bundles to these guys for a long time, with each New Year bringing an updated bundle including even more new ships and a higher price tag to account for them. The intention of the bundle, according to Cloud Imperium back in 2018 when they

talked about it, isn't necessarily to be an individual purchase for just any old Joe. Instead, it's a "package" that players will use to deploy ships, items, etc., across organizations, corporations, and guilds, with many players effectively rolling over credit from buying cheaper

prior bundles to get the new Legatus (or Legatus—I don't know) bundles for just a few thousand. Like, I understand they have all of these microtransactions available; I get that. Um, but I mean, it's $48,000! I feel like I don't need to

explore this too much more to just come to the conclusion that this is kind of outrageous. I understand they're not expecting people to just add this to their cart—you know, you do not have access to this item because I haven't

spent $10,000 on other stuff yet—but they're not intending for just anybody to buy it. But still, it's crazy that in a game that doesn't exist yet in a final form, you're selling a $48,000 microtransaction. And even then, if the

game had released, that's still crazy! Imagine if *Starfield* came out and they're like, "Yeah, we're adding the Shattered Space DLC, but we also have a collection of all these crazy cool ships, and it's only $48,000! And in order to get it, you need"

To have spent $10,000 on Creation Club credits sounds good. Sounds good to me. It's crazy. Now, one thing they did allude to, which you might have caught, was that they intended this to mainly be purchased by organizations, corporations, and guilds.

As I wake up from a hospital bed, I will talk about this. Basically, in Star Citizen again, it's supposed to be a bit of a galaxy simulator, so they expect that you are going to be like interacting with other players in multiple different ways.

You might be interacting with them just to do missions together, but you might also be interacting with them to go and like join guilds and corporations and businesses. And what those would basically be is a group of 100 players that work together to, like, save up money for big ships that they can use to

go out on even bigger and more lucrative missions. And so, just like in real life, you would be creating kind of small gangs or guilds of players that are working towards common goals. And that's a cool concept. I get that. And even if you had 480 people as part of a guild

and they each pitched in a hundred bucks in order to buy this $48,000 bundle to get all the ships their guild could possibly need, it's still $48,000. Like, it doesn't change that fact. And a lot of that cost is inflated by ships

like the Javelin. This is like a specialty, in-concept ship currently being built and tested for implementation in-game, so it doesn't actually exist yet. You just have like concept art photos and stuff of it. But as you can see, there's like in-game

Cafeterias, there there are uh, bunks and all sorts of crazy hallways and places for you to explore on the ship. And it's just huge, it's massive. You can see that there's a physical ship that you're flying, and then within it there's

all sorts of extra rooms and places for the rest of your clan or guild or whatever to be, so you can all be playing together on this one gigantic ship that expects you to have like 50, 60 people on board. And 7 years ago, the Javelin

Destroyer was about $2500, and 7 years ago they had a CCU value of $3000. Now, nowadays it's even more. It's just crazy expensive, and you might think like, who on Earth is actually doing this? Like, yes, they've

raised $700 million, but that's probably just a money laundering thing for drug lords. Like Gus Fring is probably responsible for most of that. Surely people aren't actually spending that much money, but they are. Just today on stream, we were looking back at an old

clip from uh, the Rooster Teeth crew that ran the No, which if you don't know, the No was basically like a gaming YouTube channel that did gaming news and stuff years and years ago. It eventually changed to like Inside Gaming and it's morphed a few times, but back in that

video from 2015, the crew is openly discussing one of their co-stars that, at that point 9 years ago, he had spent over $2000 on this game. 9 years ago. Here's the clip. I'm not making it up, so real.

Quick, fam, I misspoke when I said that Gus had spent thousands of dollars in Star Citizen at that point in 2015. He had not. I had seen later clips where he talked about spending even more on top of that, but in this particular clip I'm showing, he says he's only spent

$350 at that point. Just to clarify and clear the air—still a lot, but not quite thousands, at least not yet. So, since we have our resident expert on sales and Gus on the line, we do have to ask you a question, Gus: Why did you spend

$2,000 on this video game? Whoa, whoa, whoa! Let's be honest; let's just call it—let's calm down here. I've only spent $350 on the game, all right? You know games are $60, right? CZ, you're aware that it's $350

for what—a picture right there, dude? Oh God. A game I can't really play yet. Yeah, that's true. Uh-huh. You paid for an idea. Uh, what do you—what are you hoping the game will be? I believe I drank the Kool-Aid. I'm going to fly around; I'm

going to get my friends and my giant spaceship, and we're going to go [ __ ] [ __ ].  All of that to say, if you're wondering who spends that much money, we know for a fact somebody like Gus, who is

a public-facing figure, has admitted openly he spent thousands of dollars. Yeah, two grand, dude! Two grand! It's wild, and that was N years ago. Like, the game right now is pretty clunky and broken; doesn't run that great, and even like when it is running, you'll run into

Causes all sorts of problems. Like, if I just pull up performance stats on here—I'm running this thing on pretty high-end hardware, if I do say so myself—and you can see that we are at like 50 frames, and this is with DLSS turned on.

And all of that upscaling goodness, we're still crawling with frame rates, and that only gets worse when more stuff is going on, more players are appearing on screen. Nine years ago, just imagine the state that the game was back then. I don't think you

could even download a beta; I don't think you could even play any of it. People back then were spending thousands on it, so nowadays, those same whales that spent that money in droves back then, they are still playing the game today and spending even more money until it just

piles up and piles up. It's sort of like the sunk cost fallacy; they don't want to admit that maybe they shouldn't have spent thousands on a video game, much less a video game that hasn't released yet. But if they stop spending money on

it, then they're like admitting to themselves that they shouldn't have done that, and that maybe they wasted that money. You know, it's it's rough. And listen, I don't mean to throw shade at anybody. If you are a grown adult and you want to spend your

hard-earned money on a video game, go for it. I might disagree with how you're spending your money, but the great thing about America and the world today is if you want to waste your money on LEGO sets and video game collectibles, you can.

Do that, or if you want to spend it all on microtransactions for a game that doesn't exist yet, you can do that. But I do think it's fair for us to make fun of each other. If you want to make fun of me for having a bunch of Lego sets as a 26-year-old man, that's fair; I can't really blame you for that one. You kind of set me up for it. But then again, if you go and spend thousands of dollars on a video game that hasn't released yet, I think I also get to poke a little fun,

you know, because it's just video games; we're having fun, it's not that serious, you know. But if you're ever wondering if people are actually spending this kind of money, they are. Like, that's how they got to this level; that's how they raised

$2.9 million on a single day. Like, that's wild! So many studios would kill to do that total, much less in a single day. And then you go back through the stretch goals and stuff. 2012 is when they launched this with a goal of $2.5 million, and

that we're going to add like one ship. And in the 12 years that have passed since then—or I guess it's like 11 and a half at this point—we have hit every other goal they could have possibly hoped for, and many, many, many more, and

they are still just on the grind, raising more and more money. One day the game, I'm sure, will launch. Squadron 42, their single-player variant, and they'll get the game running more stable, and there will be lots more stuff. But it is a behemoth in every way, shape, and form, but

they are still just on the grind, raising more and more money. One day the game, I'm sure, will launch. Squadron 42, their single-player variant, and they'll get the game running more stable, and there will be lots more stuff. But it is a behemoth in every way, shape, and form.

To wrap all of this up, I think that Star Citizen is wildly impressive in many ways, technologically speaking. They have rewritten entire engines to support the free travel across galaxies as they currently have it in the game. They also have other systems I haven't even

mentioned yet, such as persistent entity streaming. Meaning, if you drop a water bottle on a random planet, in a little groove next to a mountainside, and you leave the game for another year and a half in real-world time, you should be able to go back in a year and a half to

that same spot where you dropped that water bottle, and it will still be in the game at that location. That's cool. Another way they're using that is like if a ship crashes, like I just did there, and that shipwreck is on the planet surface,

that becomes a scavenger mission basically for somebody else. So if they want to go and clean up that ship, they can get all sorts of scrap that they can then sell or use to upgrade their ships and stuff like that. There are all sorts of cool systems that they're adding in and

'Star Citizen' has raised $700 MILLION... So I tried it again...

A channel committed to deep diving into the intricacies of the gaming industry. Game news, reviews, game critiques, analyses, and extensive rants.

Luke Stephens

Introduction to Star Citizen and its funding

Star Citizen has raised over $700 million in funding.

The game is not yet released and has been in development for over a decade.

The game is technically impressive and has a unique appeal.

Gameplay demonstration begins, showing the vastness of the game world.

The game features an open solar system, eventually to be an open galaxy.

Route calculation and warp travel are demonstrated.

Realistic travel times are emphasized, contrasting with faster travel in other games.

Travel time can be reduced by upgrading the ship.

Detailed breakdown of the game's funding, showing daily and monthly income.

Arrival at another planet's surface is shown.

Gameplay activities and player experience

The game's fun is player-driven, with various activities like trading, combat, and delivery missions.

Various missions such as mercenary contracts, salvage operations, research, bounty hunting, and racing are available.

Emergent gameplay examples are given, such as a space funeral.

The game's complexity can be overwhelming for new players.

The game's high cost is discussed, particularly a $48,000 bundle.

The $48,000 bundle requires a prior $10,000 investment.

The bundle is intended for organizations and guilds.

The game's design encourages player interaction and guild participation.

The high cost of in-game ships is highlighted, using the Javelin as an example.

Player spending habits and the sunk cost fallacy

Anecdotes of players spending thousands of dollars on the game are shared.

A player's justification for spending money on the game is discussed.

The sunk cost fallacy is discussed in relation to player spending.

The presenter's perspective on player spending is given.

Star Citizen's technological achievements are highlighted, such as persistent entity streaming.

The game's monetization is discussed, contrasting it with other games.

The presenter's opinion on the value proposition of high-priced microtransactions is given.

Star Citizen's unique selling proposition is discussed.

The game's status as a hobby for some players is discussed.

The game's unique position within the gaming industry is summarized.