My time is almost up so, perhaps in a couple of sentences, I'd love to hear you answer your critics. The game has a lot of fans but also a lot of detractors, and for every missed deadline those detractors' claims are proved more correct. What would you say to reassure them?asked by Tom Phillips

I mean, you're a gaming journalist, I've been in the industry a long time. How many times do you hear that another publisher like EA or Ubisoft or anyone that's creating something big or new or ambitious, even after four or five years of development, where they've promised it for this year and then when the time comes they say 'actually, it's going to be the following year after all'. It happens a lot. A lot of titles get killed along the way. The game business is unpredictable - there's a lot of R&D which happens, people are just not particularly aware of that because they don't see how the sausage is made a lot of the time.

Sure, although the difference for you guys is that people have already put in their money, as opposed to a Ubisoft game which isn't crowdfunded.

Yes, but we do say it when people put in their money - there's a load of disclaimers on it. The beginning of our schedule page if you go to it is a load of caveats - quality is always the number one priority, so if we need to redo something versus staying on schedule we will redo it. That R&D is quite unpredictable and even if we've scheduled something out we may have missed some things. That when you're in bug-fixing phase, you could fix it in a week, you could fix it in an hour, you don't know. So we have all these caveats to our schedule, we say it has been built very traditionally by people who have been in the industry for a long time. Our production group is over 30 people, who have worked on everything from Grand Theft Auto to World of Warcraft, Halo, Destiny. They are not amateurs. It's stuff I've done for a long time, but the project is just so large, there's so much R&D, so many interdependencies, that as you get into things there are aspects which have a ripple effect on the schedule. It may be taking longer than we want, longer than we thought it was going to take, but our goal is to communicate at least where it's at all the time. And our schedules legitimately are internal schedules, the ones we share with the community. Now we're in the bug-fixing phase of 3.0 we've shared out bug count and you can see our fix rate against the discovery rate of new bugs.

People still say 'Chris, you lied to me', even if I did give all those caveats for our predictions. People forget all those qualifiers. I am fed up of giving someone an estimate - I'd rather say, here's the data I have, here's the schedule I see. This is what we are hoping for. Software developers at all levels tend to be optimistic - you have to be to build big things. But I hope that with what we're doing, show what we're doing every week, we can educate a fair amount of people about the process. There will always be cynics. And we're big - I grew up in Manchester when United weren't great, Liverpool were the team of the time. Now people hate United because they're the big team of the 90s and 2000s. There are people who love to show up in the match report in the Guardian and rile up their rival supporters. There's definitely an element of that which happens in Star Citizen - there's an element of investment and passion in the community, and when you're invested in something it's easy to get rises out of those people. There's a subset of people who say 'this thing is never going to come out, it's a scam'. Which is plainly not true. It would be the worst scam in the world. We're hiring all these people, we're working really hard. We're showing what we're doing every week.

You could say 'I wanted it to be this big [small gesture] instead of this big [large gesture]. That would be a legitimate complaint. But some of the stuff is literally just like a fan trolling a match report for their rival team. It happens. I see it on Call of Duty versus Battlefield, or PlayStation versus Xbox. There's an element of gaming culture which plays into that. The majority of our gamers, by our metrics, are happy. They don't really care, or pay attention to it, or read the comments. We know on our stuff, we know the people who are joining us and playing the game. We know how many people of those then are active in our community, who go to our forums. Then there are the people who are really loud to get their opinion across. And they are a fraction of a fraction of a fraction [of our playerbase]. It's a long term challenge for, in general, the world - there's a lot of loudness which gets over-amplified through social media. Maybe five per cent of people cared about that issue but it gets blown up. Noise can seem like it comes from a larger amount of people than it does.

That was more than a couple of sentences!

It's not an easy thing!