I read through the lawsuit on Kotaku. It looks pretty damning, but doesn’t include the actual contract Crytek made with CIG - only references to it.
It’s worth noting that Crytek itself has had a lot of money troubles over the last few years, so this may be motivated by financial woes as much as by the actual contract breaches.
Whatever happens in the lawsuit, Star Citizen can pay it off through microtransactions, so no worries.
Or maybe an Indigogo campaign.
One particularly interesting complaint is copyright infringement: that the CryEngine was licensed for the development of a "single video game called ‘Star Citizen’, and that the license did not extend to “any content being sold and marketed separately”. And then CIG spun Squadron 42 off as a distinct product, still using the CryEngine. On the face of it, that sure looks like a license violation to me. We’ll have to see how this goes. If CIG takes the lawsuit as seriously as software development, Crytek may win on default judgment. 
After reading some more, there are a few very interesting points, which reveals some information not previously public.
Crytek seems to have been involved early; in fact, the original development on Star Citizen may have mostly been Crytek doing the job. The company, now mostly defunct, apparently licensed out its engine on the cheap due to the close level of sharing and to further that sharing with an eye towards expanding their market. This would probably not have been cheap, and may have drained the company’s resources.
One backer has been refunded $17K of his $25K, wants more (translated from German by Google; here’s the original).
Alpha 3.0 review: Nice, but still full of problems (original German).
This thread is now over 2 years old. I’m assuming that there has been some progress over that time.
There used to be a projected completion date, which turned into a projected completion quarter, which turned into a projected completion year, which turned into a projected “soon”, which turned into a solid “We’re not going to talk about it”.
From the BILD review:
And that’s only if they stop adding new crap to the game…which they won’t since that is what is keeping the long-conned and the newbies interested.
“We’re not going to talk about it, but we have some “land” to sell you. (And don’t forget to buy our second game!)”
Some more stuff.
The 3.0 alpha was apparently released just before the new year.
The Star Citizen folks have filed (pdfs ahead) a motion to dismiss the Crytek lawsuit. The full text of the GLA is here. An article is here.
If you have 95-725 [del]space[/del] earth dollars to spend, you can get tanks.
At some point in the near future, I expect a sequel to be announced and start-up funding to start.
Yeah, I saw a review which says that Alpha 3.0 is still so full of holes that it won’t be ready for Beta until at least 5.0.
My expectation that Mr. Roberts will be indicted for a crime related to this only continues to grow.
Nice one at Forbes.
Crytek has responded to CIG’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
Dan “Kamikaze” Adams, former lead technical designer, has announced his own space combat sim. Have the rats started jumping ship?
Two million [del]suckers[/del] backers and still no end in sight.
When you stick that much time and money into a project it becomes next to impossible to back out of the deal without looking the fool.
