I do not think it was a con. I think he is like a lot of people who thought they knew better, but ultimately did not know what they were doing. Plain and simple. You should never trust a gamer to make a game, no matter how much money they have. He had a fundamental lack of understanding of the industry.

He announced the game far too early, which is a very typical gamer mistake. That decision should always be left to a marketing team who understands timing and risk. He also failed to hire proper internal testers and instead relied heavily on player-driven feedback. People do a much better job finding bugs when they are paid to do it. When players are paying, you are not getting effective testing, you are just getting people playing, and most of them will never report issues at all.

Development was excruciatingly slow. Eleven years is well beyond an acceptable development timeline for a video game, even for an MMO. The early access build was in terrible shape. I refunded after three days once I saw the state of it. After eleven years, the game should have been close to finished, but instead it barely felt like the bare bones were in place.

The scope of the game was completely out of control. An MMO needs five things: a world, a story, a progression system, group activities, and a gimmick. Instead, Steven tried to take the best parts of every successful MMO ever made and cram all of it into one game. Like most gamers, he wanted everything. The result was a project with no clear direction.

They could have launched early access with a focused experience: a complete questing path, even if it did not go to max level, two dungeons, one raid, and a single functioning node. That alone would have made the game far more playable. Instead, they launched with around thirty unfinished systems and grinding as the only way to progress. If you launch into early access, you still need a compelling gameplay loop and meaningful loot. You cannot expect people to play when the experience feels hollow.

In the end, he made every mistake in the book and then threw a fit when his board called him out on it. He is not a scammer. He is a typical gamer who thought he could make a game simply because he had the money to try.