A Tempest In Star Citizen's Teacup

A couple of weeks ago the Cloud Imperium Games' marketing department dropped the ball and conducted a walk-through of a new version of the Siege of Orison. The nearly two hour stream went rather poorly.

The AI generated summary gives a decent description of the stream.

Jared Huckabee hosts a session with the Star Citizen development team to showcase the redesigned Siege of Orison mission. Using an internal build, the crew demonstrates the intended gameplay flow, group dynamics, and technical goals for this updated encounter.

This is what Huckabee had to say at the beginning of the stream...

Uh, what I was going to say, oh yes, so uh, as we announced earlier this week, we are playing Siege of Orison. There's been a lot of conversation about whether we're going to be playing live on the servers or on a private build and whatnot. We recognize the current state of the PTU. Let's just say that. It's why Siege of Orison was originally scheduled for 4.9 uh, last month. It's been delayed a whole month. It still needs time to cook. 

Uh basically we know we see the reports we play it ourselves we hear you what not. Uh playing today on the PTU doesn't really do what we wanted to do today. So we will be playing on an internal build. This is the game as it's designed to work uh as the wonderful engineers of the project work to harden the brand new instancing system which is the current source of the various performance issues that you're experiencing with Siege of Orison.

The nearly two hour stream went rather poorly, attracting a lot of attention from people outside the usual Star Citizen community. I think the first major YouTube creator to notice the stream was Kira. If one wants to hear about sketchy video games, Kira is a much watch.

Kira took the time to type out his own description.

Star Citizen is going super well. They're likely to reach 1.1 billion dollars of public crowdfunding by the end of 2026, their live version of the game has massive netcode problems and they decided to run an unscritped live gameplay demo of a mission on a private server dev build...The result was one of the most cringe, self destructive events of the game's history.

Kira's video caught the attention of Charlie White (not to be confused with The Space Pope Charles White who retired from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)). From the videos I've watched, Charlie represents the common person with little knowledge of Star Citizen. 

Also known as MoistCr1TiKaL, his rather critical take shook many in the Star Citizen community because of his 18+ million subscribers. AI added onto White's short description of "This is the greatest Star Citizen stream of All Time."

penguinz0 analyzes a recent promotional live stream for Star Citizen that showcased severe technical instability. The broadcast featured uncomfortable interactions between developers as they attempted to demonstrate mission gameplay, highlighting ongoing concerns regarding the project's long-term development status and its unconventional crowdfunding model.

Next up is a segment from Phillip DeFranco's daily news show. 

If the Star Citizen community didn't appreciate Cr1TiKaL's take on the stream, then they probably hated DeFranco's description of the stream as a "sadomasochistic humiliation kink ritual". His comment about "Never mind GTA 6, GTA 5 hadn't been released yet" to reference the project's age certainly addressed a defense used by many Star Citizen white knights to justify the development costs and time of Star Citizen so far.

Finally I want to bring up a video by ObsidianAnt.  The YouTube creator with over 330,000 subscribers usually concentrates on sci-fi video games that feature spaceships.

ObsidianAnt actually points out some of the things in his video that have bugged me about Star Citizen. His description of his video I think points out, if not an issue, then the irony of the current situation.

The dream space game has been something people have chased for decades. Star Citizen is at the front of the pack for trying to achieve that dream.  However a recent livestream ended in disaster, going viral to millions of people, and not even showing any space content.

But despite the controversy, does anyone in the general public really care? Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to release in less than 3 months. Take-Two has suffered GTA 6 leaks for 6 days in a row. With initial sales data starting to make its way public, the studio has sold 4.38 million units for $429 million in preorders. Analysts are estimating preorders could reach 20-25 million units, bringing in up to $2 billion in revenue. One of the biggest video game stories of 2026 & 2027 will be GTA 6.

So that begs the question. Is anyone really going to care about Star Citizen, a game that will launch sometime in 2032 if things go right? Squadron 42? Sure. That may launch in the next 6 months. But 6 months is a huge difference from 6 years. Unless SQ42 is a disaster Star Citizen still has a long time to cook.