I still don't understand all the hate you guys are posting about this game. Sure they are funding it in a new way. If they hadn't started funding it this way, the game would have never been made and space combat sims wouldn't be a genera that is coming back again. 2 years ago there wasn't a publisher on the planet that would sink $1 million into backing a space combat sim, let along $20-80 million that a AAA title costs. Now, well, every publisher that passed on Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous are kicking themselves and looking for anything they can find that might be competitive for the market that just voted with their wallets to fund these games themselves since no publisher would touch them.
For the peanut gallery that keeps on attacking have any of you ever worked in software development? Have any of you worked on game development? What about in publishing or even project management? I highly doubt it based on the comments made. AAA titles take 2-5 years to make, longer when you are defining a whole new game (i.e. this isn't COD : 20, which was really just COD : 19 with a couple new skins, vehicles, and new maps). It is one of the main reasons they cost so much, because they take that long.
Sure, RSI has essentially made all the money they need to release the game and then some at this point. The extra funding now allows them to really do just about everything they ever wanted to do in a space combat sim, and do it right. Will that happen? I don't know. So far it certainly seems that most of it is being done the right way (i.e. releasing modules makes sense, especially when they are a part or a whole section of end game content, like a look at the combat instancing, or racing instances, or boarding/FPS mechanics, etc., things that will be directly used in the game as a whole with binding code to seem them together). It made sense to delay the Dog Fight Module release when they did to get all the backend in place so that they were not coding a second product that was going to be completely thrown away just to hit a self stated deadline. Throwing away code like that would have been wasting our donated funding, and irresponsible act of project management.
Everything seems to be moving at a proper pace to make release in 2016, which is what they have been shooting for from the beginning. The feedback they have been getting on flight and combat from the modules that have been released so far has been constantly being used to tweak and fix the game. They have been slowly introducing the original ships into the Dog Fighting Module and been balancing them against one another so that the ships fit the roles and positions they felt they should.
We will probably see the first iterations of the first person shooter combat module within the next couple months, along with the release of all single person/pilot ships (base ship, not necessarily all variants). Multi-person ships have been work in progress in their developer code-base, with some previews already shown a month or two ago, so we know that they are getting there. There is tons of information constantly being put out to let everyone know what is going on, what the different studios have been working on, etc., so that everyone can be made aware of status of different things.
There hasn't been any major changes to the game itself since initial inception (additional planets, and ships are not major changes, just level/vehicle design). Boarding actions with FPS combat always planned from the beginning (check the original kickstarter, it was one of the reasons why a FPS engine was chosen in the first place). A dynamic market was planned from the beginning. Oculus Rift support was in the kickstarter... In other words, all the stretch goals have amounted to just additional art/vehicle/level assets, with the sole exception being the creation of a team working on procedural generated content to deal with exploring planets/moons (since mapping out millions of square miles of planet would be impossible from both level design arts time requirement as well as from a computer games disk/memory space requirement, but simply storing a planet's "seed" value to a MakeMap function, with a global hash table of discoverable items/etc., that are currently located at coordinates x,y,z getting looked up from the global servers is very possible).