Star Citizen is one of the most ambitious games ever attempted, but it’s also one of the most chronically mismanaged. After 13 years it’s still in Alpha because the developers kept expanding the scope instead of locking down core systems. They’ve essentially rebuilt parts of the game multiple times, chasing new tech while never fully finishing the old foundations.
It isn’t a scam, and it isn’t hopeless — there are moments where the game looks and feels like the future of space sims. But it also behaves like a massive tech lab that keeps growing faster than it stabilizes. With over half a billion dollars raised and almost no traditional deadlines, progress has been more iterative than goal-oriented.
I think Star Citizen will eventually hit a “1.0,” but it will always feel like a living experiment rather than a clean, finished product. It’s beautiful, impressive, frustrating, and stuck in its own ambition all at once.
Perfection is the enemy of progress….
Sad Hilmar noises. 
The saddest part is that I still would play the game I pledged for in the first half of the road to five digit supporters*. 
But that game will never be done and whatever Scrap Citizen is now, I stopped caring years ago. You know that a piece of entertainment software is beyond hope when not even Derek Smart can be arsed to keep holding a grudge against it…
*that means I was one of the first 5,000.
Right…and over here EVE is still “dying” as per usual. Also churning out expansion after expansion…and still some people don’t know better than to complain…
If i funded a game and 13 yrs its still not complete id call it a scam.
I’ve never played it or heard of it, but I recently came across this:
It just makes me wonder – if a guy has that kind of dedication and enthusiasm for it, why not just go and learn to fly an actual plane, rather than pretend ones?
It’s playable, it’s progressing and it’s fancy. There are worse scams in history. It is a shame, however, that it is not better sooner because it would give EVE a run for its money and would force CCP’s hand to come up with a better game design themselves. SC is our only hope for better EVE quality.
The masses aren’t going to go out and buy a $4,000 rig just to play SC at a decent frame rate. Meanwhile, EVE has worked just fine for over 20 years and can be played on a shitty $150 Wal-Mart laptop…
If you funded a game 13 years ago and only now think it’s a scam, that’s not corruption — that’s you finally catching up to reality. Star Citizen didn’t scam anyone; they volunteered to be milked. They saw a decade of delays, scope creep, feature bloat, and still kept believing the marketing fairy tales. Calling it a scam now is like waking up after 13 years of ignoring every red flag and acting shocked as if they got played.
I could play SC just as fine/poorly as EVE on my 1500 € PC. And for EVE, not even a 10k € machine is enough to handle tidilagfests client-wise. I think, both have lots in common and could become mutually better if SC was progressing faster.
We respect that guy and we respect Princess Aiko as we never moved away from Eve Online with our spare funds minus beer money!
I actually wonder what became of CODE.'s excursion into SC. They had a sig there for a time. Were they banned? Could they not find enough unwitting targets to gank?