For the future, he would like an adjustment of the money system in Star Citizen. Because the ships, with which Star Citizen makes money, would also require effort for the developers, which does not directly flow into other features of the game: “It would be great if I could say, ‘I love trading’, so how do I spend 700 dollars that go into trading?”
When exactly the release of Star Citizen will take place is still up in the air to this day. In the meantime, the development team behind Star Citizen has also grown: At the end of 2020, a further studio was brought in to help work on Star Citizen.
In the space MMO Star Citizen, which has been in development for years, players can buy spaceships for real money. A player known as “JP” consistently does this – and he has now spent in the six-figure range.
This is Star Citizen: The development of Star Citizen is a kind of never-ending story. Originally, the game was launched in 2012 with a very successful Kickstarter campaign, but it has not yet been fully released or completed.
The crowdfunding amount continues to rise, in March 2021 the game reached a funding of over 350,000,000 dollars. The money was raised among other things through the sale of alpha access and virtual ships that players can trade.
One such player is “JP”. The special thing: In an interview with “BoredGamer“, he explained that he has now spent over 100,000 dollars on the still unfinished game.
You can listen to the interview here:
“It’s like Pokémon – I have to catch them all”
Why do people spend so much money on Star Citizen? In the interview, “JP” explains that he originally started with Star Citizen in 2017 and really got into it in 2019. He is a software engineer and technology is one of his main hobbies: “What drew me in is the fact that it is still in development,” JP explains in relation to Star Citizen: “The hunt for bugs is fun for me. The only unsatisfying part is that I can’t fix them or see what changes in the code.”
At the same time, he has also become extremely fond of hunting for ships in Star Citizen: After initially pursuing just one specific ship, it eventually became more: “It’s like Pokémon – I have to get them all. Sometimes I hear about ships I don’t have yet. Then I chase after them,” says JP.
One of these ships is the 890 Jump, which was offered in a special edition for 1,130 dollars in 2019 and sold out very quickly at that time. One of these 890s is also JP’s main ship. But the ship purchase doesn’t end there: “I have to pay to repair it, to refuel it – and I didn’t know if I wanted to do that with in-game money,” says JP.
He also circumvented some bugs that would require an account reset due to a stuck ship with money: “You pay for a ship, it gets stuck and you can do a character reset – or you buy a new one. That was sometimes more interesting. A reset of the account would mean losing everything, and time is money.”
The effort is simply too high: “Sometimes I calculate against paid hours and then it’s cheaper to build a new spaceship.”
“I’m even afraid that I won’t like the final game”
This is what JP says about the amount: In the interview, JP points out that he is aware of how much money he is putting in: “Yes, that is a bit crazy. I don’t know if I already regret it. We will see,” he says, comparing it to another situation: “100,000 is not a significant amount of money when you compare it to Las Vegas.” There, players would spend 25,000 dollars on blackjack, which means nothing to him: “For me, it’s video games and spaceships.”
By now, he has pretty much everything together that he wants in the game. But an end is not necessarily in sight: “I always tell myself I won’t spend a single dollar more. And all they have to do is release a new spaceship and I’ll spend more.”
What about the long development time? In view of the development of Star Citizen, JP says that it has now slowed down to a speed that is “no longer acceptable” – yet he would still play: “There were times when I thought, ‘screw this game’, but I have never done it.”
Partially, he is also disturbed by things in the game that are not quickly resolved. But the ongoing development is what gives JP part of the excitement: “I’m even afraid that I won’t like the final game,” he says: “Maybe they will create the best game of all time and get all systems right, but I’m just afraid that in the end I won’t like it.”
For the future, he would like an adjustment of the money system in Star Citizen. Because the ships, with which Star Citizen makes money, would also require effort for the developers, which does not directly flow into other features of the game: “It would be great if I could say, ‘I love trading’, so how do I spend 700 dollars that go into trading?”
When exactly the release of Star Citizen will take place is still up in the air to this day. In the meantime, the development team behind Star Citizen has also grown: At the end of 2020, a further studio was brought in to help work on Star Citizen.
