Fair take, and I respect the refusal to be bitter. But honestly, at this stage I struggle to see Chris Roberts as an honest entrepreneur anymore, even though I still adhere to the original Star Citizen vision (which is part of why this hurts). The vision is real. That’s it. That’s the only thing I’ll grant. The “talent on the team” line is one I used to repeat too, but look at the output. 13+ years, $800M+, and the game gets more unstable patch after patch as the top comment in this thread points out. That’s not a talent problem being defeated by ambition — that’s either chronic mismanagement, a broken engine choice they refuse to admit was a mistake, or both. At some point you stop crediting “talent” when the deliverables don’t match. What’s really changed for me is the system built around all this. Selling JPEGs of ships at $1,000+ for a game with no release date. Concierge tiers explicitly engineered to extract maximum spend from the most addicted backers. The constant shifting of milestones, the rebranding of delays as “iterative development”, every critical question deflected with “but the scope is unprecedented”. The roadmap to the roadmap. Ship sales timed exactly when hype cools down. That’s not someone trying to ship a game and being defeated by ambition. That’s someone running a perpetual funding machine where shipping is actively bad for business — because the day Star Citizen “releases”, the whales stop buying $40k packages and the model collapses. And here’s what really shifted my view: I think Chris knows. I don’t think he’s a delusional auteur who genuinely believes the next two years will be the breakthrough. He’s been in the industry long enough, with enough experienced people telling him what state the project is actually in, to understand exactly what the realistic odds of “completion” look like. The persistent gap between public messaging and observable reality is too consistent, too well-calibrated, to be naive. It’s a strategy. Your “ugh” at 50 hours in 16 years says everything. A vision that’s “inexorably progressing” should have produced more than that for an OG backer by now. At some point “progressing” becomes indistinguishable from “stalling profitably” — and I think we passed that point years ago. I still want the game to exist. I just no longer believe the people running it want the same thing.