You do realize that the only time Microsoft was involved at Digital Anvil was after they bought out Erin & Chris Roberts right? You make it sound like Microsoft was already giving them tons of cash and owned the studio. Before the buyout, they had no involvement with the studio. Digital Anvil did not have the funds to continue developing the game due to the needed push back in game delivery, that is when Microsoft came in and offered a buy out and a fat wad of cash to work on the game, the Robert's brothers took it and CR was retained as a consultant, and he departed 6 months later. Then 3 years later game was delivered with a reduced feature set.
I backed SC in 2012 and backed Elite to the "Premium" level, I can say I am pretty satisfied with both games. I am enjoying playing Elite right now while SC is being developed. I just don't seem to see all the hate that CIG is getting, but maybe because they have raised $125 million and still have yet to deliver the game. But what I am wondering is, what did people expect? CIG was only a team of 11 people at end of 2012 when they got $6 million. Do you realize what that means? They had no studio and no workforce, they had to build everything from the ground up. That takes a lot of time, especially the hiring process. Here we are now, almost 4 yrs later and they are sitting at 350 CIG people and I believe 150 contractors. They lost a ton of development time, something you can't just catch up on by throwing money into. Not to mention they are developing a brand new IP from the ground up, when you do this, it takes even longer than building your standard game, because you have no assets/universe/etc. to use in the new game. On top of that, they are spreading their resources between two games, a single player game and an MMO. I think looking back, even a much smaller game, would probably take a longer period of time to finish for them, not because of complexity, or other factors, but simply because they were not even a studio.
Although they have had plenty of hiccups along the way: They are pretty bad about communication, setting expectations, delivering on time and sometimes game design decisions. They built ships before they had a solid flight model down, they built ships before they nailed down console work, cargo and many other items. It could very well be they did not have the people at the time to work on it.
But in general, I think at the end of the day, as long as CIG is able to deliver a fun game, it will be fine. If they fail, there are going to be some big consequences for the crowd funding industry. Right now, at least in my opinion it is still way too early to tell which way the game will end up, its basically in its early stages for the MMO part and that can change a lot between now and release.
Personally, I think too many people here get hanged up on "But they are missing their promised delivery schedule" and do not look at the bigger picture. It's two games being worked on at the same time, by a brand new studio which did not even exist 4 years ago, oh and they started with 11 people. I think people are expecting miracles to happen here.
I think if CIG/CR is guilty of anything is that their initial pitch time line was extremely unrealistic, even with a much smaller game, when we had <$10 million, they would of not been able to push the game out in the timeline they promised, they had no studio and they had no developers. That takes a long time to build and find the talent. Just look at what Frontier managed to push out with the initial release of Elite and that was with 90 developers working on it from the get go and some unknown number of years of prototyping by a small team. I think that speaks volumes to development time.
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