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
I would imagine that any multi-hundred-million project has had unproductive branches, pivots and starts. Star Citizens has been been more public, so it's harder to compare, but I don't think many of the others on the list had a straight path to what was released.
I only tangentially follow the news (original backer for the $35-whatever-tier), but last I checked, there was a reality check ~1 year ago.
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.
> The DID stop adding stretch goals/scope creep.
Probably because it drew major criticism and they simply found out people would throw even more money at them if they simply kept "releasing" new ships (or rather their concept art).
I think it's an unfair comparison only because they make it clear that a "pledge" is to support development of the game. Like getting a keychain from a patreon artist.
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.
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.