But why?
Why? I mean yes, update the community makes sense and it’s ongoing marketing, but that sounds like a silly amount of stuff to produce.
I was literally just reading the Wikipedia article. I googled “Star Marine” and didn’t get many relevant hits on page one, which is probably telling. The video I found (by searching directly on YouTube for “Star Marine Star Citizen”) looked like a pretty ropey team shooter on an enclosed map with terrible animations. Basically just “run around and shoot people in corridors”. I don’t know if it was really representative (it was from this year), but it looked bad.
I was curious so went to look for some gameplay of the Persistent Universe stuff today as that seems to be the meat of what’s playable. There’s a game there and it looks…shiny. Nice environments with fancy CryEngine lighting, and it is pretty impressive to see someone go seamlessly from huge open environments on a planet with detailed architecture into a space ship, take off and go to a different planet. But it looked sterile and lifeless and none of the gameplay looked particularly fun or special aside from the scale and seamlessness.
And I came across one video where someone was just talking about pros and cons of the game, and he broached the ship sales, admitting that he found it hard to control his impulse to buy ships for more money than he should. Not that it had ruined his life or anything, but he sounded troubled by it. It made me a little sad. It’s a shitty business model.
Cloud Imperium seems an apt name. I don’t know if there’s similar in English but in Swedish we have the expression “building air castles”, meaning making something imaginary or intangible, getting lost in daydreams. Clearly they’ve actually made things, but the dreams they’ve been selling still don’t seem to really exist in any tangible way, 8 years later.