In February, Roberts was saying in interviews that Star Marine’s release was imminent - but behind the scenes it was a different story. “A lot of things were ready to go and a lot of them were at 85%,” my source says. “CIG didn’t want to pull the trigger.”

One time it was because when Illfonic first started making Star Marine, CIG's workflow called for extremely detailed environments. “Anyone who has made environments before will know this is a huge resource hog,” a source explained. “You're not going to get a good frame rate. The assets need to be cheap to run to get more effects and lighting in.”

“I started [backing] about three years ago,” says John, a US Navy serviceman, who has spent in the region of $13,000 on Star Citizen so far. “I was on deployment at the time. The first thing I bought was the Rear Admiral package. I remember, because it was like $250, I was like, ‘that’s insane! That’s an insane amount of money for a game! Hell no!’.

“I don’t consider myself in the ‘1%’, because there’s guys who plopped down $10K that first week back in November 2012, whereas I grew to the number that I’m at with every sale, every purchase, every subscription down the road,” he says. “So I don’t see myself as a one-per-center… [I’m] not wealthy, by any means, but I’m comfortable enough that I can spend money, monthly or weekly, on things that don’t matter to normal living, like games, travelling, etc. So, that’s where I’ll put my ‘fun money’. Whereas some guys will spend five or six grand a year on their favourite sports team, I prefer to give it to my passion, which is gaming.”

“It was easy to do over the course of four years,” says Tom. “Some of this is my own pocket money, but a lot of this is used equipment that I would sell through PayPal. I’ll sell used equipment on eBay, the money shows up on PayPal, then I would use it for games or hardware - ‘fun money’, if you will. So, it’s easy to spend that money on Star Citizen, because nothing else is really piquing my interest [right now].

Maybe that’s what’s unique about Star Citizen: that for at least some of its backers (the happy ones) it’s not a product they’re paying for, but the experience of being a backer. Like that age-old piece of advice to gamblers heading out to Vegas for the weekend, the people who come back happy aren’t generally the people who go to win, but the people who can see their losses at the tables as the price of a good time.