It isn’t a scam, just incredibly mismanaged. Chris Robert’s has a very hard time saying “this is good enough” and that makes the company bleed money as they repeatedly remake things. People then don’t tell Chris no. They weren’t making a good space Sim, they were making the best darn space Sim evah! Their wages aren’t great and now they are trying to push illegal levels of crunch time till they got caught.
They’ve completely redone the flight model several times to various levels of success. Time frames get so damm long that they have to go back and remake huge chunks of the game in order to keep things up to snuff graphically.
I get the feeling that they never felt the need to stress out about timelines as the funding kept rolling in, in fact the funding accelerated over time! The game has 183 different ships all designed down to the tiniest detail in the game right now. That’s a fuck ton of work hours, but ship sales gets the funding rolling so they have to keep cranking out new ships.
I do really like playing the game, but it is really a shitshow for management. There was one point where they had to throw away a massive amount of work because one studio was making things that didn’t fit the metrics for scale and animation of the rest of the game.
Edit: and ships are a dumb thing to buy anyway! You can earn them in game anyway for really not all that much work. It’s the most cost inefficient grind skip I’ve ever seen in a game.
I have a bunch of ships in the game. The most fun I’ve ever had in the game was after a reset I ignored all of the other ships I had and just focused on starting with the cheapest ship in the game and earning my way up. I had a blast.
I haven’t touched the game in probably 3 years, basically just waiting for more things to get finished before jumping back in. But it is hard to get excited for the game with how long it has been and how… not good things have been in the company.