First off, please refrain from just memeing about “Scam Citizen” or similar terms.
I’m not even going to pay you any attention if you do, I hope people here can be mature enough to have a conversation about this project.

So, Star Citizen. A game that is in development and after its recent announcements made last month, have gained a lot of attention online again which of course have sparked a new wave of people shouting misleading claims in the form of the name “Scam Citizen” from the top of their lungs.

I think that a lot of this is based on misinformation or lack of education about the project, which is why I wanted to chime in to the conversation by making this post and giving people a chance to ask someone who have been backing this game since April 2013 pretty much any question they have about the game and I’ll do my best to answer them.

To start it off, I’d like to address two of the biggest topics of this conversation, the funding and development time:

A lot of people seem to point towards the amount of money that the game has raised as a sign of it being a scam, and to that I wanted to clarify two things:
The first thing is that the only reason CIG has made roughly $630,000,000 is because people have chosen to pay that. Getting access to Star Citizen and a ship will not cost you any more than $45.
That’s less than most games nowadays, and anything above those $45 is additional funding that people choose to pay, because they believe in the project.
Pretty much every ship that you can fly in the game can be bought with the in-game alpha currency aUEC, and on release every ship will be purchasable with the in-game currency UEC.
Also, let’s not forget an often forgotten but very important point as well;
CIG is actually developing two games, Squadron 42 which is a standalone singleplayer game set in the same universe and Star Citizen which is the space mmorpg we’re all waiting for, so that’s technically $315,000,000 per game, which is still a lot but reasonable compared to the biggest AAA franchises.
Also, up until this month (literally), most of the workforce have been working on SQ42, creating features and polishing the engine in a closed environment before releasing things to the PU (Public Universe aka Star Citizen).
They have now “completed” SQ42 and are currently working on polishing it, which means that up until this very month, Star Citizen has been working with a very limited team and that is changing now thanks to the completion of SQ42.

Another point people like to mention is that it’s still in a buggy alpha state even though it’s been in development since 2013, and while I understand that a game having been in development for 10 years still having such game breaking bugs seems bad, we have to remember that while 10 years sounds like a long time to work on a game, 99% of the people who aren’t a “Citizen” don’t even understand what they’ve achieved during these 10 years.
Most AAA studios who are developing a large game have to put in considerable amounts of time, and sometimes they shorten the development time by probably at least a year with “crunches” i.e. long hours and a lot of pressure, and to make a comparison in development time, just look at RDR2 which took Rockstar about 8 years to complete. That’s 8 years in an engine that they’ve been working with for many years.
Now compare that to “Star Engine” that CIG has been BUILDING from scratch while they have simultaneously been developing two games, not to mention the hassle of having to abandon CryEngine that it was originally supposed to use, in 2017 and then porting everything they’ve already made in CryEngine to their new platform that they’ve built their engine on.

These are just two examples of points that people often miss when calling out Star Citizen for being a scam, or that it’s stuck in development hell or whatever.

Does CIG use marketing and methods to push more sales? Of course, but does that make it a scam? No, not really because it’s standard business practice to want to sell things and make customers feel like they need the product.

Anyways, if anyone wants to discuss the game with someone who probably knows more about the project than most non-Citizens, I’m here.

If anyone here is also a Citizen with knowledge about the project and wants to chime in, feel free to do so.