I see the internet doesn't know what the word "scam" means yet.

It's funny to see people defending it by saying "it's progressing, the alpha is playable".

After 8 years and more than 200 millions spent in it, having a playable alpha, still in progress, is less than the minimum.

Technically not a scam, maybe, but between incompetence and dishonesty, surely.

Originally alpha meant having most of the code working, but no 3D assets, sound, or animations. A true alpha should look like little more than N64 style rough models running around. Alpha means "Oh, we have 10% of the game done." Beta means the game is complete minus bug testing/fixing. Gold = it's ready to ship. 

I remember in 2015 I had one of my friends show me gameplay footage for Star Citizen and telling me how hyped he was for the game. We are now 4 years later and it only seems like with the expanding scope, the game has a lower %-complete than it did back then.

So most of that money has already been spent on the game and they are reliant on people to invest more money into it to see it maybe released at some point.
Once that money stops the project is doomed to fail.
Yeah I don't see them releasing a final product.

Originally, maybe. But today, companies make the first players test or demonstrations on alpha versions, the games are already playable (in a part) in this state.

But for Star Citizen, it might be the original meaning: it doesn't sound like 10% of the game is finished yet..  

Haven't there already been well received limited gameplay previews? Not sure if it's a scam but they might suffer heavily from feature creep. There is some chance it will either be released incomplete because they ran out of time or it'll get picked up by a major publisher and then gets released incomplete because that's what big publishers do.

yeah I dont understand what the fuss is about, you can already play the game and everyone that plays it likes it alot. The community is strong apparently and its just the outsiders that do not understand it that are coming in every few months calling it a scam.
This just brings in negativity that benefits noone.

A game of that size and scope, with a team a lot smaller than what AAA studios have nowadays, the was to be expected from the get-go.

I didn't invest any money into the game because the genre ain't my kind of tea. But knowing fully well what they were planning (and still doing), I knew that it would take a long while to get there.

For the scope and size of the game, imagine all 4 Mass Effect games rolled into one, , double it again, and have higher production value as either of them. How long did Bioware need for 4 Mass Effect titles? How many are working there and how many on Star Citizen?

The game is regularly updated with new features, bugfixes, what have you. If that's a scam, then every game which promises a roadmap of new features, aka every fucking GaaS (Game as a Service) is a fucking scam too, as they don't do anything different on that front, and you can go right out and sue the shit out of EA, Activision, Bethesda, etc... But how come nobody calls them scammers? Even though they don't just do the same, but on top of it rip you off in legal daylight robbery with microtransactions, lootboxes and whatsnot?

Well according to Forbes they have 537 employees.
Don't know how long it took them to recruit that many, but I doubt they all came within the past few months.
That's quite a bit bigger than most AAA studios.