A big part of your responsibilities here is coordinating these production teams around the world and keeping development on schedule. Famously, Star Citizen originally said release 2014. We're in 2019. Why is it taking so long?

I answer this question a lot. Basically, the scale of what we were trying to do at the beginning, what Chris was trying to do, is very different. And the main driver of that was actually the amount of backing support we got from the community, and the amount of people who really wanted to have not only the Squadron single-player experience they had with Wing Commander, but also the big universe they could live in. As it became very evident quickly that there was a massive amount of support in that, and also a huge amount of money came in to support that, it just became very obvious that we weren't going to be building the game that I think Chris thought of originally, where he was going to do something which would be much more like the old-school stuff. Obviously nice story and so forth, but not the full first-person dynamic universe. We didn't even talk about the planets and the procedural techniques, all that kind of stuff. Now it's in the game and people are loving it. And it's a matter of trust. Because we believe that every single penny that comes in is going to be spent on development, and that's what we want to do. We'll build this incredible experience. And it just became obvious that we need to build something to support something that's going to be groundbreaking and change games in a way, not only how we funded it, but how we built it and everything like that. So it just came to a realization that we had to basically go and make something better. What comes with that is you can't just suddenly go, oh, okay, well, we'll build a few more ships, we'll do this over here. You actually structurally have to change the way that all the tools and tech work. And that was what happened very early on: we said, right, well, if we're going to support doing this, we're going to make this incredible first-person universe in which you can do all these different things, you need to then go in and really spend a bunch of time doing all the work, which the community sat through with us. People know we went through and changed the physics system. We got the local physics grids working, which is a big, huge deal. We changed to 64-bit. You probably forget, but there's been so many huge things. And then, of course, the object container streaming came in last year as well. And you've got all this work that goes on behind the scenes that you need to do, because you can't just do something and say, okay, it's kind of ready. And then when you want to get more dynamic and make it better, it just won't work. It won't scale. The only way you can make it scale is by having the underlying technology and the tools to support that. And so we basically said, all right, screw it. We're going to go and invest in the tools, in the tech. We're going to do this work. And the beautiful thing for me now: it's paying off. And as you said, it's been a few years; people have stuck with us. But the beautiful thing is, because of all that work, now we actually move pretty quickly, and I think people can see it now with the quarterly releases: we're getting more content out, we're going to get the feature stuff, and you can see how the game moves along. And it's not just a normal experience. It isn't like a cool old-school space combat simulator. It's something which is completely immersive. It's a huge world. You can see how it's all going to come together.

I think it was very easy to see somewhere around mid-2016, quarter three 2016, we definitely hit content phase. We weren't done building tools by any means. We're still building tools to help us make the game. But we got to a point where we could really start cranking out an actual tangible game that people play, and the experience that you see on YouTube, on Twitch, at Mixer, is vastly different today than you saw.

Yeah, and it goes for Squadron as well. It's the same thing. When you make those choices, the same technologies are in Squadron as in the Persistent Universe, and so I'm sure there's the same discussions about, well, Squadron has been delayed as well. It's the same deal: you've got to get the technology, you've got to get the tools and stuff to make that work. So even though early on we actually had a bunch of the missions working, once we went and changed up a lot of the tools and tech, we actually went and revisited those things and remade them.