No.
There's bad management that's obviously bad management.
There's stuff that could either be bad management or deliberately dodgy.
There's stuff that's definitely dodgy.
EDIT: Clarity. "Definitely dodgy" = a deliberate scam.
So now your back-peddling and by trying to make a slight more nuanced distinction between what is invariably called a scam and dodgy practices.
ANOTHER EDIT: You also need to look at patterns and consistency. Is a particular bad practise a one-off or is it systemic? Also, how transparent is the other party? CIG are actually quite opaque in many ways. Yeah, you see the dev stuff, but that's basic. What about the massive, ongoing, mocapping? WHat about the milestones? What about basic financial openness to the people who's money they'reusing?
Got it?
The only pattern that I have observed is CIG telling us what decisions that have been made and why. Most of them I agree with and make a lot of sense when you factor in everything else.
CIG is more translucent than opaque and why even bring up the financials when you aren't an investor nor are you a shareholder so your rights to know that information is forfeit; it is 100% CIG's right to decide what they want to show and they have decided to not show any financials simply because armchair accountants will cherry pick anything within to justify their position when they have no context for why a thing may have costed so much.....end of discussion. The sooner you can get that through your head the faster this conversation can proceed to it's inevitable conclusion of you writing all this off because you cannot fathom that what you arguing isn't at all what is happening and go back to calling fans of this game cultists or proclaiming the other myriad of accusations levied against it.
Now, when a company does things that look like bad management but do it for a prolonged period then it starts to look deliberate.
Me? CIG got the benefit of the doubt on the honesty question (so, basically, aiming for something more then they're competent to do)... until I saw a recent interview with CR who mentioned that goals were linked to current income: here at 9:21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvule1cD_zk. This implies that they now know that promises that they are yet to deliver were not deliverable when they said that they were (aka all doable at $65 million) which is dishonest.
No that is called underestimating things. What you are up in arms about is CIG not tempering your expectations by coming out and saying something like "due to the burgeoning scope, what was pitched will take longer and cost more to make". Why do you need a company to acknowledge that; why can't you put it all together and come to that same conclusion; why does there have to be a conspiracy?
Now, dishonest doesn't necessarily mean that they're scamming - aka taking money off you without providing what they promised - but it's a very bad sign. Very.
Which goes back to what I posted earlier, all of this stems from your subjective sense of what is right and wrong. Calling something a scam because it goes against what you value as honest is disingenuous and furthers a narrative that is completely false and supremely muddies the water for an honest OBJECTIVE discussion about this game. If there is evidence that undeniably shows CIG malfeasance then post it and allow the evidence prove the claim and dictate the conversation.
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