I may be misunderstanding too, but every time I read another story on Star Citizen's development, it certainly seems that way, and Robert's own comments suggest he will keep spending every dollar to make "the best possible" game. It certainly suggests that even if he isn't legally on hook to spend it all, he will try.
He's arguably painted himself into an unfortunate corner by not imposing a fund raising cap - morally/ethically you could argue he has no choice but to try to spend all the dollars - to simply pocket 'the extra' cash would leave a bad taste in backers mouths I imagine, especially when they are effectively donations.
I can't help but feel that when he reached 9 figures Roberts maybe should have considered closing the donations for a while...
I understand what you're saying, but... Why should it, though? The Linux kernel is an example of a project that's been ongoing for decades. If Star Citizen puts out a product/service that fulfills the basic requirements -- and they will; at some point they'll reset the persistent universe and it will be very much "live", even while they continue development -- why should they stop iterating on top of it to add new features or other bells and whistles? I would much prefer a situation where Chris Roberts is the good king (a la Linus) of a project that evolves over the rest of his life into a truly remarkable and unique and world-changing game. How fun would that be? I think there's a lot of pressure from industry insiders who have LOTS of money riding on The Old Way of doing things that want to see CR fail. I'd love to see not only CR succeed -- and in many ways he already has -- but to continually succeed for as long as possible.
But couldn't he have done iterative releases instead? Give all the backers more that just a little demo, but a real mini-game that demos the tech and can keep gamers occupied for a few days. Slowly add more onto it?
Or maybe release the game in 3 different parts?
I haven't played any of the demos but it does look like a really impressive game. I probably won't play it as I don't like MMORPGs, but I did really enjoy his earlier work in the Wing Commander series.
That's pretty much what the current Persistent Universe Alpha is. An actual playable version of the Star Citizen MMO half, with the currently built technology.
Heh. I don't think "rapid" is the right word. Last year they had said they were hoping for monthly-ish patches, but that went by the wayside pretty fast around Alpha 2.3 or so, when they began integrating the backend persistence systems.
The Persistent Universe Alpha is currently at 2.6.x. It currently includes one "limited" area of space around a gas giant in one specific solar system. (Note that "limited" here means that it's only a fraction of the planned final solar system, but thanks to CIG's 64-bit map size technology, it's legitimately several hundred million KM^3.) There's a few space stations, several quests, and some limited economy. All fully playable, but gameplay-wise, it's still mostly at the "tech demo" level in a lot of ways.
The "holy grail" version that we fans have been waiting for since last fall is Alpha 3.0. The /r/starcitizen subreddit has a ton more info on what it's supposed to include, but off the top of my head: a larger chunk of the Stanton solar system; several moons or planets that will be 100% "see it -> fly there -> land there"; the first iterations of several professions; and a whole lot more.
The current production schedule for Alpha 3.0 is at https://robertsspaceindustries.com/schedule-report . They originally projected it would come out around June 29, but just pushed it back a couple weeks. Realistically, I would expect them to bump it back into August. Once that's out, they'll probably get out another couple good-sized updates later in the year.
So, definitely not "rapid", but given the scope of what they're doing, not surprising. (Besides, my laptop actually can't even handle playing the game right now, so I've just been watching the development progress. I'll probably upgrade later this year sometime after Alpha 3.0 comes out.)
He's arguably painted himself into an unfortunate corner by not imposing a fund raising cap - morally/ethically you could argue he has no choice but to try to spend all the dollars - to simply pocket 'the extra' cash would leave a bad taste in backers mouths I imagine, especially when they are effectively donations.
I can't help but feel that when he reached 9 figures Roberts maybe should have considered closing the donations for a while...