Any other examples? On the contrary, Elite Dangerous was received quite well. There is hype and scams all around in crowdfunded games, not just space ones, like Yogscast and Godus.
Before Star Citizen, Chris Roberts was working on Space Exploration/Trade/Combat game for Digital Anvil and Microsoft Game Studios - the Freelancer. He was ambitious, the features planned for game involved:
- dynamic economy based by station/planetary production of goods, demand and supply (influenced by distances and space piracy)
- known actors lending their voices to characters
- hundreds of items and ships
- massive universe filled with mysteries and lore
What happened instead was Microsoft stepping into the project and forcing changes to make ship plausible within a year due to continuous delays. Chris left the project. Universe was cut to 50 systems, bulk of characters gets killed off quickly after appearing in the plot, or have few spoken lines. There are omissions in items, like only only single top-class shield, whereas in every lower class there were three types of shields. Some commodities are sold on planet or few, but not bought anywhere in the universe, being useless for trade. Engine supports ship animations and plenty of ship models implement those, but they were eventually disabled. Etc. ect.
But game shipped, and besides cut content, it actually delivered quality experience, and even if it lacked replaybility, content or sandbox features of X-Universe games, it contained stateful multiplayer that resulted in game having long live in multiplayer thanks to Role-Playing mods and communities build around those.
I once read the Freelancer Wikipedia article, and started poking around. When Roberts announced Star Citizen a few years later, I recognized that it was what he had wanted to do about 12 years prior, before he wanted to do movies instead. I enjoyed Freelancer, and I joined in. All I've ever given him was $60: the price I would expect to pay for a very nice game.
Imagine what CR could do with ample time and money... Aaaand that's Star Citizen! It's been very exciting watching CR work, and playing the stuff he's built and released already for Star Citizen. Absolutely incredible opportunity to be a part of. I'm very happy.
I'd challenge the "received quite well". Profitable maybe, but the developers infamously walked back a promise to have single-player gameplay (after taking money on the kickstarter where that was stated) available.
There's a litany of bugs and brokenness that have been around for months, even years, but in the meantime, development effort is expended on Shiny Stuff to sell in the cash shop, and half-baked Shiny Stuff to release in expansions. Game-breaking bugs are fixed in weeks and months, rather than the traditional hours and days of any other MMO.
Communication with the devs is spotty and increasingly infrequent.
Sadly, it has no real competition either. And Frontier Developments knows this. E:D is a phenomenal and unique game, but it could be so much more if the devs would actually act like they gave a toss.
