It was kickstarted a decade ago with release dates which they’ve never kept thanks to a constant modification of what a release looks like - namely splitting the MMO-like Star Citizen out from the single-player blockbuster Squadron 42 - as well as scope bloat. A lot of people originally kickstarted the game (mostly for what we now call Squadron 42 + some multiplayer thing) but now a decade on, the MMO-like Star Citizen is seemingly the priority project and most of the people who are currently funding the game are primarily interested in that.
After hundreds of millions of dollars of funding, it seems clear that Squadron 42 in particular is in development hell as it still can’t seem to make it to market. Star Citizen, while playable, teeters back and forth from basically unplayable to playable and all “progress” is subject to wipes.
Just some context: from 2017 until last year they had the majority of the development staff working on SQ42, which they declared feature complete last year and now we have a planned release of 2026. Most of the development staff has been moved back to Star Citizen which is finally seeing a lot of tech come online that was promised years ago. Definitely has a ton of scope creep, and it’ll probably never have an official release, but it’s definitely a cool tech demo that you can play.
