I tend to think of SC more as a cult than a scam, but here's the other side of it.
People spent $50 or whatever on Kickstarter because it was going to be a spiritual sequel to Wing Commander. That was 12 years ago. The spiritual sequel to Wing Commander is not out yet. That is longer than Duke Nukem Forever. It is highly sketchy to change focus and focus on some enigmatic "open galaxy sim" because of some dodgy internet poll after your campaign but that is just what they did. I don't know what you call a Kickstarter that hasn't released after 12 years but "scam" is definitely one of them.
So, twelve years later. We don't have the spiritual sequel to Wing Commander, we don't have the game they promised, we don't even have features they promised years ago, and it all gets pushed back constantly.
They could have done like Elite Dangerous and say its "released" but then it would have aged badly.
Like I said, many times, you can even dig up on this very forum, their promises of releases was borked. No way in hell. Mismanaged, whatever you want to call it. I'll agree. Had it not been for the online game, I believe the single player campaign would have released a while ago. But it makes no sense to have a huge leap technology wise for the online game and have the single player like 2014 where it was on-rail landing sequences and fake loading with cutscene/whiteout.
Fact is that well damn, it seems making a space game with good tech is a lot more work isn't it?
Let's take an example that was hidden from constant drama because their roadmap was not public :
$400M & 8 years for Starfield from a team that was already in place, with a hierarchy and known inhouse engine with the vast majority of the devs having a decade experience with the inhouse tools. A developer who had huge amounts of money pouring in from Skyrim/Fallout and didn't have to stop doing what they're doing to make marketing campaigns to keep funds in. And look what we got out of that, a fucking fart in the wind full of loading screens.
They just added fauna to the game, right? Well, they started talking about it in 2017:
Seven years for fauna! And as usual the implementation is a small fraction of what they talked about in 2017. Meanwhile people just keep shoveling them money. IT seems obvious that this company has this crazy business model where they wring money from whales by promising features at "CitizenCon" (lol) that are nowhere near release or, really, have no reasonable timetable either. This company is telling you to pay money for features that may or may not be in the game five years later, if they get around to it, meanwhile they take that money and work on other stuff. It, maybe is not an actual scam, but has a ponzi-esque smell about it. Does anyone realistically expect this game to turn into the thing they promised? I doubt it. They're also in this DNF-esque doom loop where they have spent so long on this game they are having to go back and redo assets they already did, and once you get there, it's a really bad place.
I don't give a shit about the past. I've slept on my original whooping $45 backer funding in 2013 until last October. Online peoples were angry at CIG for focusing on SQ42, the PU was basically in a state of minimal support until very recently. You would take a snapshot of 2016 PU and 2023 PU and it's the same renderer, same UI.
As for features, do you think the community does not keep track of it? They're more OCD than EVE online players FFS. As of now, 24 out of the 57 listed features of Citizencon 2023 have been released in 3.23 LIVE, 6 months after the event. A lot more were tested in test servers and coming in 3.23.x. They're on track to have most if not all of the features by Q3 4.0. They came to Citizencon 2023 and said all you see today should be released approximately 1 year from now.
I know its full of missed deadlines in the past.
I don't care. Citizencon 2023 was a totally different vibe. They showed the tech and they are delivering,
right now.
You can sleep on it in the meantime, nobody is trying to convince anyone to join or pay for the game. You're not satisfied with the $45 2013 funding? Refund! I'm just trying to be impartial to all of it. Dogpiling constantly on the project because of the past is getting tiring.
Also, not you per say but the "they promise .jpg ships!" argument is tiring
143 flight ready/drivable. 77.7% delivered. Already outdated list as the Hornet MK2 is in.
With mostly the old guard (2016 and under) ships being capital ships, which make no sense to deliver until server tech (server meshing) makes it possible to have 40+ peoples aboard to run things. Some of them are fine tuned for SQ42 (Idris as an example), and as of the past week, you can visit it.