As an act of gesture of the power of fan feedback, Cloud Imperium Games, creators of the epic space flight sim title Star Citizen, have revealed a delay in releasing their contentious “Flight Blade” ship components. This follows a widespread backlash from the game’s enthusiastic fan community over the feature’s original implementation.
The Flight Blades, where players could swap their spacecraft’s performance by sacrificing speed in order to become more maneuverable or vice versa, were first introduced solely via the “Pledge Store” of the game. That is, players could only get access to these game-changing components by using real cash, which resulted in blanket criticisms of “pay-to-win” mechanics from the community.
Long-time supporters of Star Citizen, a crowdfunded project spanning over ten years, lamented on various platforms. Numerous people argued that gating game-enhancing items behind a paywall with real money created a poor precedent for how the game would be monetized in the future and could have provided an unfair edge for players willing to dish out more.
As a response to the backlash wave, Cloud Imperium Games has acted on the issue that the community brought to the table. In a recent announcement put out shortly after the initial release of the Flight Blades, the developers stated that the components would be available for purchase with in-game currency (“aUEC”) with the company’s next monthly update in June 2025.
In addition, the studio indicated that they will be changing their strategy towards future smaller-sized gameplay items so that they are live in-game concurrently with availability in the Pledge Store. This move responds to a major change in their monetization policy for such gameplay items, in an attempt to minimize fear of pay-to-win and promote more balanced play for all players in the shared world of Star Citizen. Developers rue “missing a step” on initial rollout and emphasized that the choice to fund the project in the beginning through pledging should remain voluntary and not compulsory in order to access core game play features.
