The Invictus Launch Week free-fly occasion of Star Citizen is often meant to be a time of celebration; a method to check out ships and see newly launched autos. Nonetheless, some objects launched to the sport’s money store through the occasion have incited some intense fury from even the sport’s most invested gamers as accusations of pay-to-win and predatory practices fly throughout the sport’s boards and social media.
The firestorm was ignited with the introduction of blades, a purchasable piece of ship gear that instantly improves the velocity or the maneuverability of particular web spaceships at the price of a discount in one other a part of a ship’s efficiency. These things are being offered within the money store for between $15 and $35 relying on the ship, although CIG does level out that they are going to be out there for in-game credit this summer time.
On high of those ship blades, the money store is now additionally providing particular person ship elements for real-world cash, together with bomb racks, weapon kits, and cargo modules, a few of which embody in-game insurance coverage. We level out right here that these money store elements don’t specify their availability for in-game credit of their merchandise descriptions on the time of this writing.
Gamers are completely incensed because of these new store choices. The official publish asserting blades presently has over 4,300 downvote response emojis (and practically 2,800 clown reactions), and the official boards are alight with a number of threads that decision blades pay-to-win, fear that these money objects are simply the beginning of deeper nickel-and-diming, and calling the monetization predatory and more likely to push away new gamers.
“My dudes, one of many guarantees of Star Citizen was that it will by no means go pay-to-win,” writes a backer of 13 years and $5K in whole spending. “I believed you wouldn’t do something stupider than what occurred with the ATLS. You’ve managed to interrupt via the unobtainum flooring with that weapons-grade stupidity. Congratulations.”
Followers aren’t letting the sunny bulletins about Invictus on Twitter get away with out open revolt as followers assault the studio over “P2W” ship blades, and followers on Reddit are additionally expressing alarm on the merchandise choices.
That is, in fact, not the primary time that Star Citizen has pushed the persistence of long-suffering backers of the alpha title. One of the current kerfuffles was associated to the ATLS loader car, which gamers categorized as a begin of P2W shenanigans because it was able to doing individually what required two gamers to do, and we’ve beforehand chronicled CIG’s overtly aggressive therapy of previous backers. How this newest habits will have an effect on wider gross sales received’t be an answered query for a short while, however it has utilized one other wound to the studio’s total credibility.
Nice job screwing that up pic.twitter.com/kz2NnwFaWv
— Kevin (@KevinMckoolio) Could 15, 2025
