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.