Wouldn't we all love a breakdown on how someone spends that kind of money. So far the game is solid. But I wonder if someone had their eyes on another WOW killer.
For instance one of best and largest games recently produced is Witcher 3. It's cost about $81M [1] (half budget is marketing and probably localization, not sure what is source on this) and more than 250 [2] in-home developers (and 1500+ [3] people in total include localization) worked on it. And this is developers from Poland with significantly lower salaries and overall burn rate.
Now for instance about year ago Chris Roberts announced [4] they have following studios working on game: Frankfurt (50), Manchester (180), Los Angeles (60) and Austin (50). So it's about 350 developers and even if you take something like $80,000 burn rate per employee it's going to be a lot of money and actual number likely higher than that.
[1] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/this-is-how-much-the-witch...
[2] https://www.develop-online.net/interview/the-wild-road-to-th...
[3] https://www.vg247.com/2016/01/13/over-1500-people-worked-on-...
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9T48l7Oq0Q&feature=youtu.be...
I still think some part of developers working time going on it. And due to how their marketing works they likely had to adjust usual development pipeline. In most of "normal" games there can be untextured models, unfinished animations until very end while on Star Citizen they try to show eye-candy updates all the time. So I guess this would likely drive development cost up.
I don't know about untextured models and unfinished animations driving up costs. At one point they showed a demo with early draft facial animations and got slammed for it (The Morrow Tour), and since then they've been hesitant to show things that aren't near finished. Stuff's getting to that level of visual polish either way, I think this is more likely to impact whether they publish early drafts of visual features, rather than having an impact on their actual development process.
Not that we don't see progress on stuff though. The procedural planets have been repeatedly featured in videos since back since the first teaser (Pupil to Planet) when it had a single material covering the entire planet. More recent demos are much more detailed and have shown what's slated for release in alpha 3.0, including the Levski landing area.
Other things like animations do get shown in untextured demo levels, and I remember recently seeing one with a person putting a box on a shelf and clipped his arm through a solid object. So they're not total perfectionists, but they're not 100% open about in-progress features either. If you show something too early and it changes significantly before release, somebody's bound to get upset about it.