No I call it a scam because it's a scam. This isn't hard. It's no longer about putting out a game. It's just about keeping the money flowing. It's just promise after promise with no real progress. And everyone knows the truths except for the suckers who are still buying into this nonsense and try to convince others (and themselves) that they have not be had. There are people in this very thread who bought into it years ago and even they are calling it a scam. There are backers who have put thousands into it that have gone on to call it a scam. So it's not just me.
Well, there's just no way I buy an ingame ship for the price of a PS5 or a down payment on a modest home these days. They lost their minds and they have these whales that actually get this stuff. Not one more penny from me.
What makes this a scam is expectations vs. reality.
If your expectations differ from what you're seeing...that includes pricing of ships, length of development, roadmap concerns, etc...then you're gonna see it as a scam. I bought into the game maybe 3 months ago? I wanted to see what it was really about. $45 was a small price to pay to satisfy my curiosity. My expectations going in was that this is still in alpha so there will be bugs but in general it would be playable. For the most part that is true. So do I feel scammed? Not necessarily. I got what I paid for.
If we are looking at this from the eyes of the developer though and if their goal is to keep money flowing...you have to ask yourself does the game justify the amount of money that's been poured into it. Last I checked it was over 400 million dollars. This is over 10 years, mind you. The second question becomes, where is the money going?
I think that's where the notion of scam comes from. When you have that much money and this much time, how do you justify this? It's difficult for me being a relatively new player to understand why this happens. Even with the absolutely amazing things I mentioned earlier in this thread, it still leaves the question about why we don't have more?
It doesn't help that patches are first filled with tons of things CI plans to implement and the m maybe 70% of those plans don't make it into the patch. At that point it feels like they are dangling the carrot.