One of these days, I need to sit my ass down and read up on this. I played around with the early betas but some time down the road more or less lost interest. I didn't exactly get my PS4's worth of entertainment out of my PS4's worth of dollars, but that was 50% expected and 50% too long ago to still matter.
Is there a convenient summary/timeline (beyond the obvious "step 1: idiots give Roberts money; step 2: more idiots give Roberts more money")?
I mean, this is the internet. Someone out there has to have a "CGI watch" blog or something. Even if it's only to chronicle their butthurt over lost gambling money.
Not to my knowledge. I mean the development has been going for years; the marketing is a dump of several hundreds 30mn+ videos, noise, chatter and more widely all communications about the game are filled with contradictory statements (if you look hard enough, you'll probably find 2 to 3 different responses to any question at different point in times by Croberts or senior management); the official website has plenty of obsolete or ambiguous info; the production reports are longer than a day without bread; up until recently there was no real synthetic graphic tracker for development then they had a production schedule for the multiplayer next version then it was dropped in favor of a bug burnout graph...
The main info dump I use are the official reddit, the Something Awful mega thread, Frontier forums and french Canard PC but you'll have the same issue : it's too cluttered or it's massive thread(s) unreadable if you're not already familiar with the flow. The SA thread is the most complete but not always open to public reading and filled with well... Goon stuff.
Frontier is good too and can be parsed but the arguments have been going in circles for many months now.
Both SA and Frontier are not very kind to the development, however.
This very thread condenses some of those mentioned in a somewhat manageable and abridged form
There's also the Derek Smart blog but you know
Walls of text, prose of dubious modesty and extreme bias.
The wikia has an up to date excel chart for the funding tracker (in the footnotes) which is very useful if you're interested in the raw numbers of the claimed funding. Rest of the Wikia is not very useful, it's a dump of lore and info for the bazillion ships.
The UK Companies House also have some fillings by the UK branches of CIG. As brief as legally allowed and difficult to understand without the full accounts (there's some corporate fuckery of money going back and forth from one companies to the next) but it's the most official and truthful peek you'll get into the finances.
There's an unofficial github tracking development, but Goons edit info on this so it might be biased.
Your best bet for a serious look into it is probably the following articles :
https://www.wired.com/2015/03/fans-dropped-77m-guys-buggy-half-built-game/http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2016/09/23/inside-the-troubled-development-of-star-citizenThe Kotaku piece was part of a larger series of articles released over a week, including a piece by a Swedish magazine contrasting Roberts & Smart to frame their feud.
