This week’s episode of Star Citizen’s Around the Verse is all about shopping, and I mean the fun kind of shopping where you spend pretend money in a video game, not the kind where you spend real money on a video game. The episode deep-dives the in-game shopping kiosk, which has to feel immersive as the player is using it as well as informative without being information-overload. The team says base functionality is already there, as a branch of other types of kiosks, but of course, it’ll continue iterating the item kiosks into their own unique experience.
Meanwhile, Star Citizen fansite Relay has a provocative piece out on whether or not the game is pay-to-win. In recognizing the term’s definition isn’t widely agreed upon, author CommanderLlama settles for simply examining “how much wealth inequality from the real world are the developers allowing to leak into the game world” and whether “the real-money-paying player [is] in an advantaged position compared to the non-paying player.” Ultimately, he concludes, while Star Citizen isn “somewhere on the pay-to-win spectrum, it isn’t “an egregious example yet” in spite of the fact that the game would’ve been untenable without the ship funding model. “But the final structure is also non-existent, so we can’t exactly place it,” he concludes.
Eight hundred Reddit comments later and the Star Citizen community has thoroughly dissected the article’s ideas, with many of the backers admitting the game is pay-to-win but just as many picking it apart. Take some extra popcorn if you’re heading over to peruse!
