While this is just one more article on SC, I cant find anything in it really new or breaking ground. A better journalist would have probably poked in a few more controversial and interesting areas of the SC development I reckon.
Be that as it may there are a couple things worth mentionnig wrt the ED references:
1 - The journalist wording is a bit misleading as it may suggest to uninformed readers that ED only has those 5 MM USD in kickstarter as funding for the game. Nothing more far from reality.
AFAIK the kickstater was initiated in Nov 2012 right after Kickstarter(tm) was actually approved by local regulators to open for use in the UK. That kickstarter´s objective was primarily a proof of concept both for FD and private investors also interested in participating in the project. Following the KS success, FD also launched an IPO in 2013 which attracted around 6.7 MM GBP (11.5 MM USD) and a revolving credit facility from banks for around 3 MM GBP (5 MM USD) for a total of around 17 MM USD in addition to kickstarter funds. To that we need to add all new pledges made between the end of the KS and the IPO and today...
Now, not all of the IPO and credit funds will go to develop Elite as FD has also other projects ongoing but it would not be a too wrong guess to asume that a majority of them will.
If we add to that the fact that FD already had a solid infrastructure, a proprietary game engine that can be adapted for ED and a team in place, it may not be too far out to guesstimate that teh equivalent for a comparison to SC can easily be in the 20-25 MM USD range (including infrastructure and staff).
Now from 5 to 20-25 MM USD goes a big stretch and the journalist simply and probably didnt know or couldnt care to check.
Now, with 20-25 MM USD plus anything coming from new pledges and after launch I d imagine FD can perfectly already rival in vision to SC. Funds in both cases are more than enough to get to any kind of "ambitious vision".
At those levels of funding for independent and relatively low overhead teams, the success in fulfilling an ambitious vision will come down really to project management, execution, profit margins / returns on investment and follow through.
2 - The article wording is also misleading as it suggests to uninformed readers that David Braben was only inspired and simply a follower of Chris Roberts in doing the kickstarter. Also wrong. One of the main reasons for the delay in the kickstarter was simply due to its availability in the UK, it opened up in Oct 2012
https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-in-the-uk
and there are other sources on record completely independent from SC where DB and FD already showing considered KS at that time (min 4:04):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJBwlxHLfLc&feature=player_detailpage#t=244
(thanks to Totallity over at reddit)
3 - Last but not least it is interesting to note that Chris Roberts decides to bring up Elite in his answer to the "vision" question without the Journalist mentioning it. This suggests Chris Roberts is actually worried about the competition and feels the need to inject some level of explicit differentiation (weather justified and fair or not) when talking about his product...
Although I think competition will be good for both games (I am a happy backer of both), it worries me somewhat that CR feels he needs to do this, shows a bit of a lack of confidence in his own product.
