I’m not sure what you’re saying here but if it is that CIG has a vested interest to not finish the game, that’s a conspiracy theory that doesn’t make sense. Most gamers will not get involved with a game in Alpha. Once SC is released, those paying and playing will take a leap in order magnitude. Currently there are about 10M players. Once SC releases it’s expected to immediately go over 100M. By way of comparison, WOW Online has 126M. SC is very next gen over WOW and could easily leap to 200M in very short order. At $50 a pop that’s about a $1B payday for reaching beta.
CIG has very strong interests to bring in beta, but also a commitment to not bring in a buggy mess, and freedom from a publisher that will allow them to get it right. So don’t think they don’t want to reach beta. They certainly do. Just we’re still about 4-5 years away.
wow, even CIG didn't know there were about 10 million of us playing the game right now! lol
screenshot taken right now. And that's only registered accounts as far as I know, not necessarily paying customers, although I'm not sure on this one. Someone will correct me.
Your numbers are all over the place. WOW had the all time highest concurrent active player count of over 12mil in 2010. They stopped reporting on player and sub numbers since 2015, so every number since then is a very rough estimate. The over 100mil player count is all time registered accounts, since 2004. It does not equate to any sales as it includes free trial accounts, which I had 4 of over the years besides my payed one, and I know of 3 of my friends who tried the game via my invite code but never upgraded to a payed account. TLDR.:SC won't just get 200mil paying customers out of the blue when they go to Beta. I kinda wish it were true, because it would ensure the upkeep of the project for a good while, but it's just a ridiculous number.
Regardless, it has been stated multiple times that SC will Not use a subscription model, so at the moment, it's hard to see how they want to keep funding the games development, or even the upkeep costs associated with running a multi-million-player MMO once they stop selling ships, which they intend to do when the game moves out of Alpha, or at release.
Cosmetics and direct sale of UEC are on the table for now, but we don't know much else, and that doesn't seem like it would be enough.
Thus it's easy to believe that for CIG, it's best to drag things out, but those who think this usually forget that keeping around 500+ devs and operating multiple studios also costs a shitton of money. So I don't see how it would be worth it to CIG to keep all these employees if they don't actually want to give us a finished product. Having around a 100 in just one place would be enough to keep up with the ship sales. Either it's the worlds most inefficient scam, or we are getting a finished game sometime in the next two decades, hopefully.
I wonder how the sales numbers for Starfield will go, will it hit the jackpot like I expect it to, or is there still a lot of apathy/hate towards Bethesda since F76 failed so hard?
