Yeah. At the time of the kickstarter the details breakdown of their financial was the thing that gave the project credibility sicne I knew nothing of Chris Roberts.
I did know at the time the amount he was asking for seemed low for a game and bug free all in one product was down right white lie in mymind.
Of course, at the time of the Kickstarter, Chris Roberts was claiming he’d already done the
difficult work, had a working prototype already, and that it was almost ready for Alpha Testing already. Also, the scope wasn’t
that ambitious IMO. Elite Dangerous had similar, but far more ambitious, plans after all, and they were planning a far more iterative process to get there.
What he claimed he mostly needed the money for was the
expensive process of creating high-quality assets. Sadly, I was only familiar with his game production portfolio, and not his history at game
development, especially the Freelancer Fiasco. Which is why I backed the game, figuring that it would give me something to do while I waited for ED to at
least come to a rough parity with the sequal to Elite, Frontier: Elite 2.
And yes, that makes me a member of the first generation of Star Citizen Refugees.
Of course, it was revealed
years later, during the Crytek lawsuit, that what the Wastrel Roberts claimed to be a “prototype” was really a Crytek machinima video, and he had just been pretending to control things on screen during the Kickstarter pitch. So I got my money out while I still could, and used to to buy other games.
