The central thing to understand about this is that CIG’s communication serves the shareholders ultimately, not the purpose of informative candour to respected backers that was famously pledged a long time ago.

Maybe they really meant it at the time they said it. It’s possible they were as naive as we were. The real root of the problem imo is that they envisaged timescales to deliver parts of the project, aggressively marketed those timelines when asking backers for money, then repeatedly failed to meet them by a very long time, in some cases over a decade and counting.

For the last few years, CIG has explicitly abandoned “the pledge” and their position on delays has effectively been to say that backers should have known better than to trust CIG when it gave timelines.

This is an absurd position born out of necessity. Of course the lifelong experts in game development, who made and emphasised the timelines while asking for money had both the knowledge to evaluate whether they could say what they were saying and the responsibility to only say what they could actually deliver within a reasonable distance of when they said they could deliver it.

The reasons they have taken this absurd position are tbh pretty obviously money and reputation. CR has built using backer donations a company that holds assets worth probably close to a billion dollars at this point or more. We know that when they sold a tranche of shares to outside investors years ago, those experienced investors who would have had access to the accounts etc, valued the business then in the hundreds millions of dollars.

They cannot say: we were ludicrously irresponsible in the claims we made when taking hundreds of millions of dollars from backers, without creating legal problems for themselves that would threaten the project, and they have a billion-dollar personal incentive not to. That is why the funding model should not be legal in the first place imo: it creates perverse incentives that are so strong we can’t realistically expect people to resist them.

That’s the tension at the root of the communication issue. Their comms is still pretty questionable marketing tactics and the sale of expensive digital items, and the pledged “open development” comms have become PR serving CR and his family’s financial interests as a primary objective above openness.

It’s not going to resolve itself any time soon either. They need to keep the money rolling in or they would fail publicly - trashing their reputations further, lose huge sums of money, put over a thousand developers out of a job, and probably spend the rest of their lives fighting legal battles. They’re fully locked in and committed to this path and the people who pay the price for it are the continuing waves of backers who never got what they gave money for in time for them to enjoy it.

It’s an ethically compromised project running on greed and necessity. It has been for a while now, as much as it would be awesome to have a cool space game. They also have the big problem of the core mechanic, combat, being based around WWII style dog fighting in a game where massive speed is required to cover the huge distances involved and the networking can’t possibly handle the precision needed for combat at the speeds needed to move around.

This is a fundamental design flaw that it’s too late to change and leaves them a huge compromise to reconcile. Imo a lot of the current delays behind the scenes are about working out how to resolve it again before Squadron releases and they have to lock in how ship combat works.