That's right, star citizen backers don't actually care about the opinion of random joes without not real interest about their game.
Still, it's amusing to poke the holes in their pie in the sky theories and expose how little knowledge they have despite acting all wise and know it all.
By now, it's clear as day who are the ones who care about the game to those only in it for the drama. They probably wont ever have the hardware to even run it or the patience to learn the basic key-binds to learn how to fly. For them it's just an escape for whatever frustrations they have with themselves. A way to vent by hanging on drama.
Which is why they are easily target and manipulated by clickbait headlines and articles. They eat up all the blatant mix of misinformation hyperbole and half-truths and come out swinging thinking they know better. Which is when reality and facts kick in. Then they go dormant again until a later surge of pointless drama comes up.
I suppose I could, for the 100000th time bring out factual data and information about the project and it's finances that could help shed some light into the project, crowdfunding and game development in general.
Financials, easy as peasy concept.
Money goes
In(pledges)
Money goes
Out(Building/Maintaining/Growing company, Marketing, Running servers, Opening studios, Hiring Developers, Paying salaries, Buying Hardware, Tools Licenses, R&D etc)
Money IN along the years:
Money OUT along the years:
Source:
https://cloudimperiumgames.com/blog/...cials-for-2019
This misconception that CIG has a hidden stash of gold that keeps getting bigger and bigger should be dead long time ago. If only "gaming journalists" would still do some investigation they would understand that as CIG got more pledges they invested in their company and in making the games the best they can be. Quality is top priority above time/financial and even reputation gains.
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The variation in "Start of Development" is just a case of different perspectives and understanding levels of the project.
The early backers who've been following the game from the early stages know that there were several resets along the way as the funding/company/tech grew and evolved so did the game and it's complexity.
The TLDR: In late 2014»2015 CIG abandoned the instanced vision of small maps connected by instancing to accommodate full procedural planets and seamless planetary landings which forced them to abandon a lot of prior work and start all over to accommodate the new vision.
From 2014 to 2015 CIG managed to hire a big chunk of veteran CryTek/Cryengine devs. Crytek missed payments so they joined CIG who opened a studio in Frankfurt for them. Among those dev's was the main cry-engine developer which add done advanced work on planetary procedural generation tech for cryengine on the side.
When he became part of CIG that tech became available to CIG, it was so promising they abandoned the older scope (space and ground separated by instancing- small planetary locations instead of full blown planets and cities) and went back to the drawing board to accommodate such an increase of scope and the inevitable change of design for the rest of the year. By October they showed it citizencon 2015 and later released it to backers in December. That's the Star Citizen Online Universe main build which they've build and iterated upon.