Star Citizen without all the baggage surrounding the game captivates 1,000,000 viewers. For this, a YouTube channel had to cut out only Chris Roberts.
It is a phenomenon: Under every article about Star Citizen, the controversies take center stage. One reads:
- Backers have invested 163 million US dollars to finance the game – Why should the developers even keep working on it? They have the money, are lounging with umbrella drinks in the Caribbean, and are laughing at their fans.
- When will Star Citizen finally be released? It will never be finished, is totally overambitious, is constantly postponed, and nothing progresses.
- No, everything is fine. These are just the same old haters who complain and are controlled by a jealous troll who has never accomplished anything in his life.
Discussions about delays, internal work processes, loans, visions, and details often threaten to overwhelm Star Citizen under a pile of baggage. It is easy to lose sight of what makes Star Citizen appealing at its core.
The effect Star Citizen has on people when the game is freed from this baggage is shown in a recent video on YouTube and its immense success.
The channel specializes in graphics and superlatives
The channel Titanium Track (55,000 subscribers) has nothing to do with Star Citizen, it is a YouTube channel that uploads impressive videos of games and boasts about graphics. Most of its videos are about “great games that will be released in the future”, the channel actually just edits trailers, placing emphasis on expressive images and presentations.
Many of Titanium Track’s videos hover between 20,000 and 100,000 views. However, there are always outliers, and some clips break the million mark. It seems that the channel’s fans especially enjoy RPG and open world genres.
In the past, Titanium Track’s million-hit successes have been compilations and variations of “These 10 or 20 great games are coming and look bombastic. Check them out.”
The promise of “Next Gen” and “realistic, fantastically absurd graphics” seems to fascinate gaming fans on YouTube. People love superlatives; they are clicked.
1 Million viewers for a neatly edited CitizenCon Keynote
Recently, the video “Star Citizen – New 42 Minutes of Open World Gameplay – Most Realistic Graphics Game Ever” has achieved this. In about 10 days, the clip has accumulated over 1,100,000 views on YouTube. Since the video is now set to private, here is another source that shows the same material:
The video is essentially just an edited presentation of the CitizenCon Keynote. It had only 377,000 views on the official Star Citizen channel.
Without Chris Roberts’ opening speech, the Titanium Track video starts right with the city tour and captivates three times as many viewers. Essentially, Titanium Track has merely cut out the first 20 minutes of preamble in which Chris Roberts provides context for the flight through the city.
One can see the fascination of the impressive images from Star Citizen when they are freed from the controversy and context that the title typically carries.
More about the keynote at CitizenCon:
