When some customer decides to spend money into a product, they must up to some point trust the company that produces that same product. If I am to buy car, for example, I must trust that the company makes good cars. I do not want to buy a car and that two months later it breaks and leaves me in the middle of nowhere (we're going to leave insurance and warranties off this because they are not the point here). This is something that is the base of commerce. For example, I consider myself some kind of amateur game designer. I love to make small indie games and play them myself or even upload them to itchi-io. A few years ago, I mostly used only Unity. It is a great engine, almost free and very accesible. Lots of people used it, from amateur individuals just like me to even big companies that develop entire AAA+ games on it. But at some point, the marketing/legal team of Unitny decided to change the way the lisences worked. They wanted to (and feel free to correct me on this as I don't quite recall it exactly) charge the developers for each installation of their games. Not diving into what this really meant and the questionable way they should have implemented to "count" those installations, this immediately blew up amongst the Unity users' community. It was so hard the blowback that Unity actually had to stop on his tracks and rollback the changes. However, the trust in them was lost. Nowadays, lots of companies have switched to another engines when they can, from Godot to Unreal, and Unity has suffered a great loss in users. This is equal to what CIG has been doing this year. The paladin has stolen Redeemers and Corsairs niches in the game, and we're ot going to talk about the 400i and Galaxy's base building module abnd how the Starlancers have been released suspiciouslyt in the same timeframe. We have to only look at this years's funding to see what the effects of these dirty moves have had on the community and the money we are willing to give to CIG to make the game. Yes, it's still a year better than 2021 but it shows a worrying tendency... It's the first years funding has been less than the year before. The community is begining to lose faith in the game. And the real problem is the loss of trust. We have had delays for years and money kept comming into CIG pockets. We did not care. We wanted the DAMN BEST SPACE SIM EVER and although we would like to have it now, we understand things take time and keep hopes up for it. I feel betrayed and lied to, I feel like at some point CIG has gone from the company that wanted to fulfill our dreams to one that feeds on them And I, as many other people, will no longer support this project until it changes... or the project fails. I sincerely hope CIG realizes this before is too late and apologizes to all of us. Because CIG is where it is thanks to all of us, and no the other way around. I am starting to think that Chris Roberts has forgotten that we're the ones helping him make the DAMN BEST SAPCE SIM EVER. TLDR: If customers stop trusting a company, they will stop buying their products no matter how good they are.