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 like 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 cuz I want to see just what is actually available to those people who have spend 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 manner of ways not only is it technically speaking a very very impressive package here 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 hanger 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 of orbit and if I flip the 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 to blast off and and go higher and higher and higher this will continue to get even even crazier let me just uh 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 like 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 uh 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 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 to 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 and uh it would make me feel ooey gooey inside so do that and I'll love you forever okay back to it so if you go to the actual website for staris and development and then 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 5 million roughly citizens who have bought into this program and you can see they even break it down by hour so an hour ago they made about $75,000 in an hour and then here this uh like two hours ago they made $87,000 in an hour like the amount of money they're pulling in is Wild on the 28th they pulled in probably $1.5 million same with the 27th 26th was a pretty good day they made maybe 2 million maybe 1.9 million the day before on the 25th though that day popped off just under 3 million ion dollar raised in a single day and no matter which way you look at it weekly monthly whatever 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 to view we've actually physically traveled this far and when we get there we'll see if we smash into it and there we go there we go we are actually at this planet surface and you can see that there's actually like mountains off in the distance and there's there's like clouds drifting off as as you can see there there's God Rays coming off of those clouds it's crazy and because this is an actual simulation of a solar system effectively all of these areas in dark are in nighttime and all the areas in the sun are of course daytime and if 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 plane 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 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 like 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 the headlights maybe that's the uh maybe that's the Strat h 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 surface now of course that took a little while to do this game again is trying to go more like 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 spend $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 that's totally totally viable but you kind of have to make your own fun there are other systems that play here there's for example contracts and stuff and these are sort of like you know delivery you can see mercenary contracts with like all sorts of of um combat built into it because there are guns and combat dog 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 or 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 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 and 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 like the roleplay of being a space pirate or this or that and that's all great and fine and dandy but I have had a lot of fun just making my own fun around 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 start 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 like 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 the landing gear and to 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 uh 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 and 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 uh Kaya star you can see like 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 space fairing like Adventure sandbox it is a game that opens itself up to you and lets you kind of make your fun and that's not not for everybody but if you are somebody 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 has not 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 like 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 or legatus I don't know 2953 pack seems to only be available to members of a certain tier of star citizens chairman Club one 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 it with 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 as a quote 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 lagus 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 I mean it it's $48,000 I I feel like I don't need to explore this too much more to just like come to the conclusion that this is like 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 it's cuz 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 like $48,000 and in order to get it you need to have spent $10,000 on creation Club credits sound 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 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's uh bunks and all sorts of crazy hallways and 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 bucks and 7 years ago they have a CCU value of $3,000 now like now now days it's even more it 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 it basically was 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 warped 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 $2,000 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 and clear the air still a lot but not quite thousands at least not yet so since we have our resident expert on sares and Gus on the line we do have to ask you a question Gus why did you spend $2,000 on this video game Who whoa whoa let's be honest let's just call it let's calm down here I 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 game I can't really play yet yeah that's true uhhuh 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 up 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 crashes you all sorts of problems like if I just pull up performance stats uh 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 that upscaling goodness we're still crawling with with frame rates and that only gets worse when more stuff is going on more players are appearing on screen 9 years ago just imagine the state that the game was back then I don't think you can 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 a 26-year-old man like that's that's fair can't really blame you for that one kind of set you 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 cuz 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 and 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 to wrap all of this up I think that Star Citizen is wildly impressive in many 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 mountain side and you leave play 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 drop that water water bottle and it will still be in the game at that location that's cool the other 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's all sorts of cool systems that they're adding in and weaving in using the tech that they've developed and it is crazy crazy impressive but the reason they're able to do that is because they monetize the game in this hilariously outrageous way and if literally any other company in the world tried to monetize their game like this they would be mocked into Oblivion but with Star Citizen it's been around for so long that we're all just kind of used to it so to break it all down I don't think Stars citizen fits into the category of like a scam where they're just taking your money and not giving you anything for it they have made a lot of progress and there is a product there should you be spending $2,500 or $48,000 on microtransactions for a game that doesn't exist yet in my humble opinion no but if you were to do that they do have a decent track record of delivering on those things that they've sold to people it can take a while but there's examples of people that like Gus in that video back in 2015 bought ships those ships that they bought in 2015 are as far as I'm aware all in the game now they're just adding more and more and more as time goes by and then those take years to develop and eventually they see the light of day but usually only after they've sold it to people but no matter what Star Citizen has its Defenders because it does offer something that no other game does it offers players the fully open-ended exploration of a galaxy in a grounded way that no other game has been able to to even approach delivering other games like Elite dangerous no man's sky or even Starfield have tried to do things somewhat similar but Star Citizen is the only one that does what it does as well as it does it that was a mess of a sentence but the point is there is a reason why Star Citizen players are so entrenched in this world in the purchases in the game in all of that and there's a reason why for some people Star Citizen is their hobby it's not gaming it's Star Citizen specifically it's like this one girl I knew in college she played The Sims so freaking much it was like worrying you know like all the time some people out there might watch the NFL or FIFA or or chess championships whatever you you happen to watch all of those moments that you've spent doing that she was spending playing The Sims like she had thousands and thous thousands and thousands and thousands of hours in The Sims and it was like at this point you're not even a gamer you're a simser like you just play The Sims and that's your hobby that's what people are like with Star Citizen they don't just play video games they play Star Citizen specifically and that's all they play and that's how they can justify spending so much money on this one game because for them it's not one game of many that they play it's their hobby it's like for me going and buying an upgraded graphics card for my gaming PC like to me that's part of like increasing my enjoyment of my hobby so it's something I can justify to myself for some of these guys they can justify spending 500 bucks on an in-game ship because it enhances their enjoyment of their Hobby and again if you're an adult more power to you I don't think that's a great use of money but you know what more power to you but all of this to say if you want to try the game you can pay 40 bucks and it's almost like a Kickstarter or Early Access you don't have a full or finished game on your hands but you do have the chance to play a version of it and play it as it develops and changes which is cool this is the only package I've bought I've had fans donate in-game currency that I've spent on other ships and stuff but every time they do a big balance update those ships go away um which is how they force you to basically buy it for real money because those don't go away when they do balance updates and stuff but whatever but as far as I can tell Star Citizen is not a scam it's just a really weird thing that goes on sort of adjacent to the gaming industry it's almost bigger than any single game at this point it's its own thing it's not being judged or evaluated by the same standards as video games because it's being treated as its own hobby that's separate it's very very interesting and very very weird and I don't think it's stopping anytime soon just when we think they've raised half a billion surely people have run out of money they raise another 100 million and then another 100 million and before long I have no doubt that within a few years they're going to hit a billion doll raised for this game it's just wild and if you don't believe me on some of the crazy Tech stuff that they're doing just go watch this video of their star engine demo they did they dropped this shortly after Starfield and it was just so dirty the way that they played them like seriously this engine is everything that the creation engine is not in the best ways possible and it's just outrageously impressive so if you ever want to see what hundreds of millions of dollars of coding can buy you that demo is a great great example of it but listen that's going to do it for me thank you for watching I could keep rambling about this all day but my voice is going out cuz I've been streaming for the last like 6 hours so I'm going to call it quits there thank you for watching I love you all desperately make sure to go sub to my second Channel Luke Stevens live and maybe you could play Star Citizen with me one day when we boot it up just for for fun that could be cool but with all that said thanks for watching I love you all like the video If you enjoyed it and subscribe I'll see you in the next one hugs and kisses bye-bye
