The hard lessons people need to (but won't) learn from the star-citizen fiasco
While being excited for some upcoming product itself doesn't have to be bad it's typically a bad idea to give a company money for a promise of a good product later. The big issue with that is that then you as a consumer are taking on all the risks investors would otherwise have to take on without getting any acceptable return on the money you 'invested'.
It's very easy to create a trailer that makes people excited for a game but that does not mean the game is actually going to be good.
I do suspect that we are going to see history repeating itself with starfield. Sales driven by hype and excitement only to see the game launch with loads of bugs, performance issues and underwhelming gameplay.
If you backed a game for say 50$ and it then launched at 60$ and you enjoy it your return on investment is just 20% which is not enough to compensate for the risk. The ability to buy the game later (often even cheaper) means that you do not actually get any acceptable ROI from backing a game (doesn't matter how much you end up liking the game itself).
What does stand out with star-citizen is the large amount of money people 'invested' into it. Sure some people just paid the minimum 45$ or whatever but far to many people have spent over 1000$. When you are dealing with that much money and there is significant risk involved you very much need to do an investment calculus and if you do you will find out that spending 3000$ on space ships you cannot even fly yet is very much a bad idea (you don't need maths for that, it's super obvious).
A lot of star citizen whales probably started by spending just 45$ only to later fall victim to predatory monetization/whaling resulting in them spending far more than originally planned. From "it's just 45€" became "now i have spent 2000$".
It's also important not to trust developers when they say "we will fix the game later" sure often that happens but that relies on the developers actually being competent and the publisher being
If people were less willing to pay for a game until it was actually in a decent state it developers would have a much greater incentive to actually make their games great. If people spend loads of money on broken games just because of promises then why should they bother ever actually making the game good?
Some people claim that "without crowdfunding many games wouldn't get done" and sure that's true but when you look at the quality of games in terms of gameplay it has generally gone down over time and crowdfunding hasn't changed that trend. It's very difficult to find new games with better gameplay than metroid prime 1 and 2.
The altruistic argument here doesn't really hold since games like star-citizen are not open source, it's closed source with very predatory monetization.
