Players find ways to get special rewards in Star Citizen: They run ads on YouTube

The MMO Star Citizen sometimes takes strange turns. A player wanted to warn about fraudulent advertising, but many of the other founders of Star Citizen actually find the idea quite good.

This was the warning: A player of Star Citizen warned on the reddit forum about fraudulent advertising on YouTube:

An image of a ship promises: “Try Star Citizen for free” and advertises a “free ship for $40” if you use a code.

The player criticizes: The advertisement leads to an official site and creates the impression that it is an official and particularly good offer, while in reality a normal user merely wants to lure people to the site with his referral code and profit from it.

Players recruit players and collect nice rewards

What is it about? The “Referral Program” in Star Citizen works in such a way that you distribute your own referral link, through which new players register for Star Citizen: (via rsi)

• They then receive 5,000 in-game credits.
• The “recruiter” gets a recruiting point as soon as one of the people they have recruited buys a package for a minimum of $40.
• With these points, the recruiter can then purchase attractive in-game gifts, including a special warship, if they have accumulated 2017 points.

As if you were buying people drinks at a party where drinks are free

What is the catch with the advertisement? The advertisement promises to play Star Citizen for free. However, this is not a real offer, but simply the official trial phase of Star Citizen, which runs occasionally.

So it’s not a lie. Rather, the truth is packaged more attractively than it actually is. It’s like buying people drinks at a party where the drinks are actually free because the host of the party is paying for them.

The referral link pretends to be a very special offer. In reality, it is exactly the same as clicking on any other referral link.

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Star Citizen players use free advertising budgets and trials to obtain rewards

Is there any outrage about this? No, not at all. Because many users on reddit say that they also spread their referral link in this or a similar manner.

Apparently, clever Star Citizen players are using free trial offers from Google to get their codes out to the people:

• One person says many advertising agencies offer free advertising budgets for registrations, which can be abused by signing up with multiple accounts.
• Another says he used his Google advertising budget of $44 for this and made about 65 referrals. It wouldn’t pay off if spending real money, but free is definitely good.

This might be one of the reasons why Star Citizen has now made so much money: They cleverly invite players to benefit from the growth of Star Citizen. Even if they don’t exactly adhere to the truth: New package in Star Citizen costs 53,121 euros and 60 cents – More than a German gross annual salary