Star Citizen Launcher Issue

I decided it was time to check out Star Citizen for Alpha 3.0. I created an account, paid my money, and downloaded the launcher. I was greeted with this:

Electron! Cool! OK, so what now? I googled around a bit and searched the forum to see if anyone else was experiencing this. Nope, just me.

I tried uninstalling/reinstalling and rebooting in various combinations. I tried it on another computer in my network and it worked normally.

What should have been obvious somehow wasn’t. I went to bed.

With a fresh mind I reviewed the evidence. The error was screaming the answer to me the whole time.

Failed to load resource: net::ERR_CONNECTION REFUSED http://localhost:9000/app/cig-launcher.js

1. The launcher was trying to load a JavaScript file from localhost:9000.
2. Chrome dev tools were open

All of a sudden it clicked – I’m in development mode! Doing node development on that machine I had set the environment variable NODE_ENV to Development. Removing that environment variable was the solution.