There is a group of players on Spectrum who just want faster action gameplay, who don't really care about space flight and are not interested in immersion. They want fast practical design solutions, no matter how unrealistic and gamey ("Just spawn it where you stand"). The arguments are that "It is just a game" or "Just make it fun". The problem is this: Star Citizen will never be better at Call of Duty than Call of Duty is. It can't beat Fortnite at it's own game. It will never flow like Doom Eternal. It will never be as quick and precise as Counterstrike. No matter how many beams SC has, Overwatch will still be better at it. Building a fast action shooter requires you to build it from the ground up, every little detail has to be built from the start to be a fast action shooter. There is only one single hook where Star Citizen is better than all other multi-player games: It is more immersive. If we allow that hook to slip, if we let immersion fail, Star Citizen will inevitably fail as well. There is no way around this: The world is full of really, really good fast action shooters. There is no way SC can compete on their terms without rebuilding all of it. For the past few years, Star Citizen has changed it's focus. It has moved towards Easy flow, No blockers and Faster action. This has been incredibly damaging to the mood of the game and popularity is slipping. The image below shows number of new players per year and month, taken from https://ccugame.app/star-citizen-funding-dashboard/funding-dashboard which in turn takes it's data from CIG's own numbers: Despite the flagging numbers in new players, CIG has been buffered by existing players still hoping that the game returns to it's former glory, contributing more and increasing the income per player. However like a buffer in chemistry, a buffer will ultimately saturate if pressure is kept up. When a buffer saturates it fails fast. Star Citizen was a winning concept! Abandoning that concept was a terrible move! We must return to Chris Roberts' core game design rules: Immersive, tactile, grounded, diegetic, visceral, systematic, emergent, skill-based; all must be fulfilled. If the game doesn't, the slip in popularity will just get worse. This must happen, not only in the game design that gets presented (presenting gamey solutions like the recent equipment insurance is outright destructive), but in the marketing messaging as well. CIG need to be proud of the immersion of Star Citizen. To reverse this trend, it will be necessary but not enough with a return to immersion-focused game design: Marketing has to understand that a real problem has arisen in the way players perceive the game and make a proper effort to turn it around. CIG's marketing has to double down on immersion and present grand plans for more immersion again! When less immersive design ideas are presented, they can only be a temporary measure and a clear concept for how they will be replaced with something properly immersive must always be presented at the same time. Trust in the focus on immersion has to be rebuilt. Star Citizen has to return to the only justification for the existence of the game! EDIT: @Tesseract made this counter-argument that I think holds a lot of truth: Gameplay is being held hostage by missing features conducive to immersion. Latest design directive let's them add gameplay, bypassing missing features. I think this might be the reason CIG are doing what they do. Possibly also because CR is focusing so hard on SQ42 that there is too little attention left for SC and bad design decisions are being let through. However, I believe that the trust in the development direction is even more important. If people no longer believe that the game will become that immersive "Life in the space faring future"-simulator, if people believe it will just be another rather mediocre fast action shooter, the game will not survive. So, though doing such a stop-gap seems sensible to begin with, it turns out to be extremely dangerous and player numbers are failing as a result. If they are doing such a stop-gap measure, the lack of trust in the game direction might be solved with marketing, however, since reality is going away from immersion, that marketing has to be very carefully thought out and the messaging has to be strong, directly connecting the stop-gap measures to the missing features. EDIT2: Though I use the recent equipment insurance idea as an example in the post, I want to explicitly say that this post is not about equipment insurance. It is about a trend over the last several years where different gamey solutions have been presented by CIG. It is almost as if they are trying the community's limits to see what they can get away with. Though Star Citizen's implementation is famously buggy, the game design has always held the highest standards; it has been known as one of the most ambitious games ever. The last several years CIG have started presenting cheap, gamey suggestions to solve game design issues, and that solid trust that CIG design used to hold has been hollowed out. Regaining that trust is essential for CIG at this point.