Are you guys hoping that you can get 2.0 out by the anniversary sale, so that people are brought back around the time that all ships are available?
TL;DRThey are not specifically aiming to release 2.0 for the anniversary sale; releases happen when development says they are ready, and they won't rush or ship a shoddy product to hit an event.
Not necessarily. I feel like anyone who wants to buy ships at the anniversary sale knows about it and cares already. We do not plan our releases in such a way that this is going to bring the most people into my ships. It's very much the opposite. We plan releases when dev says they're ready. We would absolutely love that moment at the event where Chris Roberts could flick the switch and the cool new update goes up. But if you look back at the history of Star Citizen, you'll find that it's never happened. Despite the fact that every time we ever have an event, there are always angry trolls who go on about how we're just holding back this release to put it out at the event. And somehow after three years of never releasing anything at an event, that still happens. So it would be fantabulous. It would be fantabulously fantabulous if we had it go live for the event. But we are not whipping developers until that happens. We are not releasing a shoddy product to make sure that happens. It happens when it happens.
I think the closest we ever got to that was the Glaive the day before Gamescom. But that was such a small thing. It was a very tiny thing, so it wasn't a major content patch. We sold the Sabre at an event; we did not patch it into the game. That's not the same. The Sabre's not in yet. But it's coming soon. We sell things at events all the time.
Yeah, for something like an artwork of a ship, or even a 3D model of a ship, you can plan that out pretty well. Well, sometimes there have been points where we've said, okay, the ship is not ready for prime time, we want it to sell, but we can't. That's happened many, many times. But in general, we can say, okay, it takes six weeks to do a concept ship, we can have that delivered in time for this event. So that's easy. But when you're working with the whole universe of a game, where any tiny change can break six other things, it's a lot harder to predict.