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Now though, the market is much more complicated.Ĭurrently CIG sells ships with insurance that lasts only for a set period of time, for example six months. Typically, you would advertise your desire on the Star Citizen Trading sub-Reddit, pay money, usually through PayPal, to someone who answered your call, and through the in-game gifting system an exchange was made. Some even set up their own auction house websites. To accommodate this demand players began listing their wares on Reddit and eBay. You were considered a Star Citizen trader if you had a ship to sell to someone for real world cash - and there were plenty of potential customers. "In the beginning it was very simple," Star Citizen grey market expert and occasional middleman Sean "Drevan" Smith tells me. It's clear that when it comes to Star Citizen's virtual spaceships, the stakes are high. The answer? In-universe insurance that protects players' investments. Two, in the final game your ships can be destroyed. One, the developer sells certain ships for a limited time or in limited numbers, creating a demand for products that aren't available to all players at all times. The Star Citizen grey market emerged out of a couple of important design decisions by CIG. While the official shop lets players buy ships from Cloud Imperium Games, players can't officially sell ships to each other. The $10,000 Wing Commander Combo package. Oh, and you also get a day with Chris Roberts. This includes all five pledge ships, a custom Constellation skin, 20,000 UEC starting money (that's the in-game currency) and exclusive access to the 1 Million Mile High Club, a private facility that you run in the game. On the other end of the scale is the $10,000 Wing Commander Combo. The Constellation Andromeda, a multi-person freighter, costs $225. The Anvil Hornet costs $110, for example. But there are scores of more elaborate ships and packages available, and some are pretty expensive. The $45 Arena Commander Starter package includes immediate access to the dogfighting module as well as the Aurora MR ship. Star Citizen's "in-universe" store sells many ships for use in the game. How is this possible? Why do people keep throwing money at Star Citizen? At the time of publication an incredible $56m had been raised - a figure that has scored Star Citizen the Guinness World Record for the most amount raised by a crowdfunded project of any kind ever. We can even see developer Cloud Imperium Games' coffers swell in real-time. There's a ticker on the Star Citizen website that tells us just how much money. Its Kickstarter ended in November 2012 with an impressive $2.1m raised, but the money keeps rolling in. When it comes to headlines, though, you'd be forgiven for thinking Star Citizen was all about the money.
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Star citizen review Pc#
It's also a poster child for graphics-card-melting PC gaming, looks the business and is made by one of our favourite sons: Mr Wing Commander himself, Chris Roberts. It's a hugely ambitious space simulation driven by a massively multiplayer online persistent world with a first-person shooter portion and a single-player story bolted on. Star Citizen is one of the more fascinating video games in development right now. Kane is just one of many making money out of a grey market fuelled by that promise - and it exists underneath the covers of Star Citizen's gargantuan success. They're just £1000 ideas, the promise of that most base fantasy: exploring the galaxy in your very own - and very exclusive - spaceship. But what makes Star Citizen's grey market special is that in many cases the spaceships that are bought and sold can't be used in the game yet. These days, the second-hand sale of virtual goods is a tired story. "These transactions are helping me in these difficult times," he says. Like so many Spaniards affected by the economic crisis, he was recently made redundant, but the bills keep on coming. "Kane" won't tell me how much he's made as a Star Citizen middleman.
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