After countless hours and dollars spent, a breakthrough was made: Realistic human movement is actually complicated. The devs decided the best way to reproduce the complexity of the relation between human motion and its vision would be to emulate birds, whose heads are able to remain stable as their bodies move. "But wait, isn't that just going right back to the way other FPS games have been doing it forever?" It seems like it? Anyway, the game's FPS mode only came out in a very alpha state two years after its original intended release, and the camera feels exactly like every other shooter. And just to remind you: $288 million.
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Refunds Are Highly Unlikely
One of the most interesting aspects of Cloud Imerium is its refund policy, which has a window of 30 days, which the they consider very generous. That's neat, considering the game has been in development hell for 85 times that amount of time.
In 2018, Ken Lord, an early backer and a player who'd spent over $4,500 in the game, started to get disillusioned, for some reason. So Lord filed a lawsuit to get back his money back. And while it would be great to hear that he stuck one to a company that is so obviously, terrifyingly disorganized, it didn't work out so well. He ended up losing.
But I guess it worked out for him, sort of, as he never ever stopped buying ships for the game anyway. (He's admitted he was addicted, and his poor impulse control was stronger than his ire.) Maybe customers who are sick of the whole thing should follow the example of the guy who in 2016 managed to sell his Star Citizen fleet to buy an actual car.