Sorry, but if CIG delivers on 35% on what it promised, it will only equate to what EA/Sony/Activision/Blizzard deliver. That is the truth. CIG is now on the same level of "promise" and "hype" as Bungie had behind Destiny if not more and it has a lot more to lose than Bungie ever could if they fail to deliver a fun and enjoyable game.
First, with the Hangar and AC, CIG has already gone above and beyond what almost every other major company in gaming has achieved in the past decade. From correct modelling to not afraid to use high res textures, to 64bit, to Oculus Rift support, to actually figuring out how to do stuff instead of recycling 10 year old+ engines with new and lifeless levels. Plus, they have announced a couple of things that are only logical to have, and have been demanded by the community and never cared about by other game developers, such as having multi monitor support.
Second..a lot of people, like me, haven't heard of Destiny until it was released. We were surprised that a number of magazines released in-depth articles hyping a game that apparently no one has heard before. After reading those articles, the hype quickly settled down as it was discovered that it was released for consoles only. And the gaming mechanics were not innovative, so it was clear that the game was nothing special. That was reflected in the reviews afterwards.
And yes, you can go above and beyond with consoles as well, hooking multiple of them together via LAN, using multiple TVs as output, manually providing drivers for additional input peripherals, using tablets as MFDs etc. pp. With Bungie's budget, nothing less would have been acceptable in my eyes. Instead, I assume most of the money was used up for marketing.
So after reading a bit of both games, the destiny hype should settle down quickly in my opinion, while SC definitely shows potential.
But you are paying for a finished product. That is the nature of how kickstarter works. Somebody pitches you an idea, if you believe in it, you donate your money to it, the earlier you donate, the cheaper it is. As a result of that donation you receive the finished product. It just so happens that CIG chose to develop the product as an "early access" sort of game, like you know a million other companies have been doing it on Steam.
I haven't been with CIG on the kickstarter campaign, but I believe it didn't contain all the extra items from the pledge store and VD. Plus, projects on kickstarter have to be developed, so there is always the possibility of failure. It is common for projects to overshoot their budget, people should be aware of that.
The bottom line is, you already paid for the full product itself. The part you mentioned earlier was that it was "ok" for developers to continue to charge people further money for every single piece of development, in this case equipment from VD store instead of giving it to your user base to use and play with in the Arena Commander. Yeah we all get it, it will be available in the PU, but we are all testing their game and balancing it now in the Arena Commander and CIG is charging people to use that equipment. If you will, they are trying to double dip into the money. That is as low as you can get in the gaming industry in my opinion. CIG promised 8 months ago that you will be able to earn the items in the AC test bed for testing purposes. Then 8 months later nothing has changed, they continue to charge people $15-20 per item. That is what we call greed.
It no longer is about funding the game, its about squeezing the donor base for every little penny they can get. Oh and guess what? Ben commented the other day on reddit that "he was surprised" peopel considered AC "pay2win" and that SC is getting a negative rep about all the "monetizing" of the development....*eye roll*....that very same comment coming from the guy who also stated not long ago that it was "Ok" to mislead the general populace about their marketing.
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Personally, I don't take the VD store very serious. It is clear that the AC part is very much in active development and they are constantly rebalancing it. So I don't see the point in getting competitive with addon weapons and the ranking system. But there are people who enjoy that and are willing to pay for those items to further fund development, much in a way as I occasionally buy a ship or extend my subscription in the pledge store. So honestly, I don't see anything wrong with it. The premise being that you are not having a "pay2win" game, but foremost are funding development. The thought should never be: "I must buy this missile type to get a better ranking in AC", but "hey, I have some money left to donate, what fun item can I get as a thankyou?".
Speaking of funding:
To my knowledge, CIG has somewhere around 200 to 300 employees. If you assume a 100k$ p.a. salary (including all the expenses on the side), that means going through 20 to 30 Million USD every year just for the staff. And those people are needed and will take several years to complete the game. Collecting 70 Million dollars in little over two years is not excessive or "greedy" for an ambitious software project. It should be clear that the level of ambition has risen considerably from the initial kickstarter project to the current state.
So it still is about funding the game. In addition, there are genuine concerns, for example I currently find it hard to piece together the relevant information about the project if I were new to it. And CIG doesn't communicate the business numbers openly, which makes it more difficult to estimate how well they are doing.
