As someone who has spent a pretty significant amount of money (not compared to some, mind you, but pretty far up there) and is heavily involved in following the

As someone who has spent a pretty significant amount of money (not compared to some, mind you, but pretty far up there) and is heavily involved in following the game's development progress, I have two things to say that I don't think almost any article correctly addresses (this one touches on the first, but doesn't really lean enough into the point and it's buried towards the end of the article): 1) Most fans who are dropping more than about ~$100 have no expectation that the money they are spending on ships is going to be equivalent to the effort that they would have spent in game on acquiring said ship. Most of those fans would probably really rather have that conversion ratio be extremely "poor" just because if it isn't, then the game is pay to win, and absolutely not a single lick of us want the game to be pay to win. I bought a Constellation, which is kind of an in-universe equivalent to the Millenium Falcon. Since it's a multi-crew ship, I would expect it to be about equivalent to when someone gets access to player housing in a MMO. If it takes a player who hasn't dropped a dime more than the basic purchase fee of the game at launch much more than 15 to 20 hours of effort including setbacks to get into one of their own, I am going to be really, really worried about the long term prospects of the game. 2) Star Citizen has had the single most open development of any major title ever. Short of indie developers who live-stream the programming of their entire game, I don't know anything that comes close. If nothing else comes out of it, we've all purchased some of the most interesting inside-baseball content on video game production ever.