I’ll dunk on actually calling it a game. It’s an alpha version of a game that’s been in development for over a decade. They came up with the idea of securing funding past the kickstarter phase by selling ships with the promise that pledges wouldn’t be in the final version. The end result is that every new player after release will start from zero in a world full of players with massive fleets. Huge disincentive to start. Additionally, release would stop the flow of pledges from the whales they’ve already hooked (assuming they even keep the promise to stop pledges). With that in mind, why would they ever release? They’ve made nearly a billion fucking dollars and people will buy shit no matter what they shovel out. Pretty sure they’ve even sold ships they weren’t created yet.

They’ve expanded and revised and removed the road map so many times, but the game is still less complete than elite dangerous and infinitely buggier. I occasionally drop into the SC subreddit once every 6 months or so to look for release date cope, though it looks like most of them are reaching the acceptance stage and either quitting or enjoying the game as it is. I won’t knock that per se, but spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a buggy unfinished game is… Worrisome. Especially since the scale is so damn huge, I’ve even met people that said they “only” spent 300 dollars on ships.