CIG pay hundred of employees to make the game, where is the scam ?
I assure you that companies that, for example, engage in telephone fraud, hijack company servers, or send fraudulent emails, also pay their "employees" for their daily work.
If you want to run a scam, you can't scam your own employees...
And in many cases the workers are the least to blame because they don't even know they are inside a scam process.
In addition, SC can end up becoming an unexpected Scam... maybe not planned at the beginning, not premeditated, but a Scam in its final resolution simply because of incompetence of the developer to be unable to deliver what it had promised with "too much courage and without thinking about all the work involved...". Sadly it's not something that hasn't already happened in the world of video games and, above all, kickstarters.
Be careful with that "everyone can try the Alpha (or, better said, Early Access)...", because that does not meet the requirements to not be finally a scam; in SC every player has bought at least 1 ship (I repeat, everyone, some an Aurora and others an Idris), and some of them even for a very high price, and with some ingame functionalities announced and promised. Until all those ships are delivered, have the promised features, and are inside a fully functional game that allows me to do everything I was promised, the situation has the possibility of ending up being a scam.
And in the same way, if I announce my game (through advertisements, messages, conventions, etc...) promising a series of things to attract the buyer, and then I don't deliver many of those things, it can be considered misleading advertising, even if I try to protect myself by saying continuously that "everything is subject to possible changes..." I assure you that, in real life, it doesn't protect you from anything.
I think we are all aware that, even understanding the possible small changes that may be here or there, never publishing SQ42 would simply have no excuse, neither moral nor legal. Well, for "smaller" things that you have been promising and announcing for 10 years to convince people to buy your game, there is no moral/legal excuse either.
And let's stop with the nonsense that they are "donations" because different lawsuits in different countries have shown that, under the law, not everything is valid within a Kickstarter or a crowdfunding process.
But regardless of the legal part, I think it matters as much or more the morality of the developer, and with the history of lies, missed dates and content, and constant changes in policies and returns, each passing day the morality of CIG is more and more compromised.
