I don't know, it could be CR was a worst case of counting chickens before they hatched or too much of a big gambler with a really bad call on the current state of mmo and gaming tech. Even ED is a hybrid compromise of mmo game world persistence where the fixtures are procedurally persistent, yet player assets are still mostly text or db pulls. Frontier tried their best and continue to work on it quietly without making a big commotion about it or needing to do "ATV"s as the game and the updates and patches speak for themselves as a great product. Looking back on CR's past games he was involved in, wiki hardly says he was a lead programmer, but rather a lead designer or that most of his coding was on 2D scrolling. sprites, and game interfaces. And later on his games became bloated with video cutscenes up to the wc movie. Cutscenes with actors was a decent contribution to gaming to be fair at least back then. I'd only played one of his games for a few hours (wc2) and maybe wc started the old trend of "grinding gameplay for the reward of a cutscene". CIG should have cut their risk down, worked on a semblance of gameplay, wrote their own engine etc., stopped asking or selling after 10 million or so was reached until they got something going stable. Instead, myriads of techdemos, expensive looking ads and a business of selling design .jpgs and now land plots, later, it's like a typical out of control ponzi. What bugged me particularly was the constant annoying references to SC over in the ED forums and shitizen videos about how ED was "dead" or would be dead once SC was "released". Thankfully the tide has turned in the ED-forum thread on SC as we anticipate the ELE soon.