I'd like to welcome Newbest - and differentiate this forum from an echo chamber like Reddit in doing so. Respectful discourse is best.
Newbest - nobody thinks the production companies are fake. Obviously they're staffed with passionate people who want to make this game reality. The disconnect is only in one place - Chris. Aside from Wing Commander (a game made so long ago it shipped on 5.25" floppy disks) his history is mixed at best. Once he milked the good will out of his original franchise, he ran everything else into the ground. Even Freelancer, his last reasonable foray into gaming, had to be taken from him and released by a real production company. That was in 2000 - 16 years ago.
Since that time Chris has not been in the gaming industry, and has not learned anything during his absence. Now that he's back, he's literally reinventing and rediscovering almost two decades of gaming lessons first hand, not because gaming best practices have failed to evolve, but because he doesn't think any game developers over a near 20 year period have anything to teach him.
That arrogance led him to commit an extraordinary amount of his backer money into lavish offices in 4 countries across the world, filling them with the accumulated bric-a-brac that actual development companies, such as Blizzard, had to earn over decades of hard work and actual produced, shipped, and commercially successful products and IPs. He skipped all that and went straight for the appearance of success. CIG, as an entity, has no games to its name, shipped or otherwise.
There is no documentation or plan for what the actual game systems are, but instead, what we have are nothing more than potential game assets, that Chris, being out of the industry for too long and refusing to listen to people who know more than him, thinks will plug together like Lego bricks and a game will pop out. The engine is a Frankenstein's monster of garbled code that's barely holding at the seams. Rather than being the typical state of a pre-alpha, CIG's engine, in contrast, gets weaker and more prone to catastrophic failure with every patch.
Chris, in short, has no idea how to turn the ideas in his head into the game he's promised. He knows where he wants to be, but has no idea how to get there. That makes him an inappropriate steward of backer cash. Regardless of whether or not he came up with the idea, whether or not he's the visionary, all that is secondary - if he can't turn that vision into reality, and hand the reins of development and leadership to a competent individual and retain a position as lead designer, rather than CIG godhead, it's extraordinarily unlikely that Star Citizen can fulfill its potential.
Consider other large companies and how close they can come to the edge of oblivion based on leadership decisions. Netflix was doing great, and with one bad decision, nearly ceased to exist overnight. Fortunately in their case they course-corrected in time. And Netflix had a product. How many bad decisions can CIG make, back to back, and stay in business, when they have yet to design a business model built on residual income?
So you see it's not really a question of "is it real, is it a great idea, is it visionary" etc. - sure, it's all of those things. Nearly everyone here is and/or was a backer of this project for the same reasons the most diehard fan bought in. But there comes a time when you have to think - is Chris actually qualified to be calling all the shots, and micromanaging this down to the shoelaces on the spaceman models, with his track record? Is it that important, even if it's "his idea", to let him crash and burn if that's his tendency?
Remember, it's not his money. We might know that, but I don't think Chris Roberts knows that. Or cares.
