An interesting take. I have some of my own points of view. Firstly, don't overestimate how great AAA titles are right now. It's only the select few that are worth playing. How many World of Warcrafts are there? How many DOTAs? How many EVEs? There are a handful of successful online games, and half of those are FPS arenas that don't have any breadth of play.
You want to know what modern AAA games look like? The Order: 1886, COD Advanced Warfare, and Alien Isolation. All three are horrible in my opinion, and I'm trying hard not to digress into the various reasons why. All three are FPS, a genre that is far from the most complex in the industry. You'd think they'd have that formula perfected years ago. And for those three prolific examples there are dozens of would-be contenders with full publisher support that flop because they're terrible. Even The Elder Scrolls has been having a hard time!
When's the last time you saw a multiplayer space piloting game? Not a lot of prior experience to draw from. So it's only fair to expect even less of a proven formula than the FPS!
The total development cost of E: D is right around $10 million, much of that provided by crowdfunding. WOW cost $65 million just for vanilla 1.0 - and that's 2004 dollars. Vanilla 1.0 was more of a broken heap than E: D is by an order of magnitude. This game has been built on a shoestring. And before you bring up EVE and its sub-million pricetag for 1.0, take a look at how much money they've spent on their game since then. Comparing E: D 1.2 to EVE in 2015 is not apples to apples.
Another thing to consider is that, unlike WOW and EVE, this game does not use a subscription model. FDEV makes money by selling copies and expansions, with a hint of cash store. That's more like Skyrim. In that model, you don't even try to get players to put in hours week-over-week. That's the sort of thing you do when you want them to renew for another month. Rather, you have a certain number of hours of gameplay content that you dial-in. Hopefully enough that people are left wanting more. Then, when your next expansion comes out, people buy it, because, as I said, they wanted more. That gives another burst of gameplay-hours, and those are then spent and the players want more yet again. So you sell another expansion pack, and the cycle continues.
I'd call this game a resounding success. Setting the bar too high is going to lead to disappointment no matter what game you're talking about. If you ask me, "Is E: D worth paying $40 for?" I'd say, "Heck yeah, I've put in something like 1000 hours. I don't play like I used to, but, man, what a ride!" If you ask me, "Is E: D an EVE replacement?" I'd say "No way."
