Between what’s real, what’s caught up in development limbo and fans debating if the project is worth supporting, one thing is clear: Star Citizen is still raking in a ton of investment cash.

Over in the land of Gamescom last week, the Star Citizen crew invited some of their most loyal backers to join them for an intimate dinner in Frankfurt, where SC big cheese Chris Roberts would be present for some QnA. The catch? This event was only open to Concierge members of Star Citizen, people who had spent at least $1000 on the game. The seats, or flat pieces of wood that their butts were crammed on top of in sardine fashion, cost $275 each.

It’s now past the halfway point in April and the 3.5 Alpha still hasn’t popped up in Star Citizen. While the original goal was for developer Cloud Imperium to roll out the update to top tier and normal backers, take a break from social publishing for three weeks and crack on with content for the Alpha 3.6 quarterly update, none of that has actually happened.

One game that you probably won’t see released in a complete format this year? Cloud Imperium’s Star Citizen, which is currently still limping towards an unknowable finish line while shedding modules of minor content to appease the few true believers, like some sort of space-leper. What little Star Citizen content is out in the wild, does have one benefit though: It kind of looks visually neat. Even without Nvidia's fancy Ray tracing technology.

Opinions on Cloud Imperium Games’ Star Citizen generally fall into two camps. You have the loyal backers and defenders who’ve patiently waited for it to come out, who rush into forums and comments on articles to rubbish any claims of the game or its developers’ impropriety. Most everyone else thinks that the world’s most crowd-funded game is little more than a long con; a game so beleaguered by feature creep that it’ll either never come out or will fail to live up to its expectations when it does. It’s become increasingly difficult for those in the former camp to find fault with anything surrounding the game, thanks to confirmation biases and other bits of errors in inductive reasoning. A new change to the game’s economy has, however, riled some backers up.

Star Citizen today is no closer to realising its goals than it was five years ago, and that’s a shame for the people who provided the fiscal ground support for the project. Even worse, Star Citizen isn’t the game that many people backed, as its various modules have created something entirely different to what was originally envisioned and promised.

I’d still err on the side of caution when it comes to taking a plunge in Star Citizen. Or if you feel different, you could just jump right into Star Citizen with a hangar full of spaceships to marvel at…for the low low price of only $27 000.

Last month, CryEngine maker Crytek launched a lawsuit against Cloud Imperium Games and Roberts Space Industries, makers of Star Citizen and its more narrative-focused Squadron 42. They've hit back.