I've not tracked this project since its huge Kickstarter 7 years ago, it's just now reaching an Alpha state? Did the dev bite off more than they can chew?
As one might imagine, an unbounded project takes infinite time to deliver.
And they seem to be keeping to that schedule.
tl;dr - Don't give artists unlimited time and budget. Bad things happen without constraints.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
Currently at ~300 MILLION dollars? imagine if this game broke the 1 Billion $ barrier in funding.... that would be insane!
At this point its almost a "meme" to donate to this project. Like rich crazies on wsb's throwing money around, this projects donation button, probably hits the dopamine receptors too
But that's not so much for such a game, for comparison:
"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" - $200 million
"Grand Theft Auto V" - $137.5 million to $265 million
"Destiny" - $500 million
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-most-expensive-video-gam...
Star Citizen 215+
But again if you compare SC to SW.....
They are both pretty much failures?
Expect only one of them took money from customers before having anything to show for it.
If something is not finished you cannot tell :-)
But one of them are a failure.
They also had a failed attempt at Squadron42 developed by a partner agency that was thrown away.
Could someone explain this, please? Is that wall street bets or something different?
But it already went way too far in scope before they stopped scope creeping.
Not a scam, just bad planning IMO.
Kinda extreme but still not a scam IMO.
But it's ultimately unprecedented, and we are all learning as we go. I doubt there will be a crowd funded game like this again for a while.
They actually hired and empowered a PM to ride herd over the project (including Chris Roberts), and that's helped with forward progress.
Previously, it seemed there was a lot of unnecessary technical churn for artistic reasons. E.g. the "We can make this thing 5% better, but it will take a 50% increase in time because we'll have to rewrite a lot of code" request.
Problem is there are still so many bugs that it is completely unplayable. Every time I've given it a chance over the last 7 years it's been the same story. As much as it pains me to admin it, it is likely they will run out of money before they can achieve stability.
Also it's a bit of a misunderstanding with the use of Alpha, it has been in Alpha for years now. It is a perpetual alpha, more like a WIP not an initial release of a full game.
What is out today would have been really promising in August of 2013.
I make no claim that it's done, mind you. Only that it is playable, and that it is a game.