Star Citizen will make history in economics classes as an ideal type regarding the failure of 'free market' environments
It is a very interesting situation:
- Players can buy virtual items at the moment, especially star ships are the most important item
- These items enable you to interact with the game world and, most important in a game about killing other players/npc, posession of virtual items directly influence your chances for survival and exploitation of other players (you could start a marxist analysis here by viewing virtual items and especially space ships as the means of production)
- The ideological basis in Star Citizen is a radical free market ideology --> everybody can work themselves up the hierarchy, you just have to be clever enough or play enough to successfully participate in the free market environment [btw, everything in Star Citizen is connected to economic practices, even exploring and similar stuff, you do everything for the cash. There are no core-gameplay-elements that are not oriented towards that]
- ! The free market myth is often used to argue against Pay2Win like "yes you can buy virtual goods now, but you will also be able to free yourself by working hard in the game! You can work as crew on ships until you can pay for your own ship and the insurance costs for it." This is basically like telling a factory worker that he should let exploit him/herself for a few years until he/she can buy a factory him/herself to exploit others. So work as a turret gunner in my connie for 3 days, you will get a small share of the huge profit I make with these cargo runs, then you buy your own connie and I buy an Idris, fair isn't it. In short, it doesn't work, look up (neo)marxist criticisms of capitalism and you will see the light.
- What is actually happening is: Wealthy people and crazy people with some wealth (or on credit) already equip themselves with mighty virtual items, especially space ships (there are even space ships that carry space ships that carry space ships; you can't do anything in a starter ships against them). This gives them a huge advandage over the poor in this universe who then can choose: exploitation, losing their lives or hiding (and not being able to move freely in highly lucrative spaces controlled by the wealthy). The wealthy with the big machinery can by capitalist principles make loads of cash while the poor can not. Like in the real world the gap between rich and poor will become bigger over time. There you have the Pay2Win, it is a structural/systemic Pay2Win; and like in the real world capitalists will still tell you that everybody has equal chances on the market.
- The real revolution would now be to crash the very fundamentals of the system. In this case there are no states who uphold the systemic rules of the 'free market' environment but a company owning the game and server infrastructure. All the real world values connected to the virtual world Star Citizen are based on the assumption that the system is working as intended. A cheat tool as seen recently with the wall hack wrecks this system very effectively. The wealthy have no advantages through fancy spaceships anymore, the poor don't have to bend down anymore to the will of the wealthy (or being killed otherwise), they very fundamentals of power in Star Citizen are shaken then. In other words: With the cheat tool everybody has similar chances of survival, the cheat tool gives one thing (besides taking all the fun out): freedom.
