Mtom

This is really a one sided view.
The "mental" amount of funding paid/paying for the full build up of 5 studios and development of 2 games.
So it's not that mental if you put it into perspective.
Same for the delivery of the game/ development time.
500 employees seems a lot just like the 8 years development time...but if you put it into perspective again, GTA V took 7 years to PC with more than 1500 ppl working on it, and having all the infrastructure/team/funding from the beginning. RDR2 took 8 years again having everything from the beginning and around 2000 ppl worked on it altogether. 
Meanwhile CIG had to build up everything from zero and they are working on 2 games one of which is a big MMO. And they didn't have 500 devs from the beginning.
 
So asking a startup to push out a singleplayer and an MMO while building up the whole company on the fly and have fraction of the team (on average over the dev time) in the same timeframe some big established studios spend on single player games is not really fair.

Look a completely unoriginal and uneducated post. Yeey

Look a completely unoriginal and uneducated post. Yeey

Look a completely unoriginal and uneducated post. Yeey

Look a completely unoriginal and uneducated post. Yeey

About development time in general:
WALL OF TEXT INCOMING!
 
I think people needs to get a bit of a perspective on things here.
CIG is making 2 games not one. A single player and an MMO which is vastly more complicated than any other MMO out there.
Having said that they just reached the development time of a bigger single player game at 4 years - and those other games are made with an established budget, team, engine, and most of them is just an improvement on its predecessor.
CIG needed to build the studios, the teams, gather the budget, completely rewrite the engine (as theres no engine out there which can do what they need), and they are shooting for tech that hasn't been tried before.
 
Also we need to admit there was some wasted time in the development, but again if we put it into perspective its understandable: CIG did not know how much funding they have in the first two years so they worked their way towards a smaller scope-smaller team etc.
After a while it seemed clear that as they have a steady income, and much more funding they dreamed of, they can go full out, so they boosted up the team (now ~370 strong), the scope changed (this was the backers choice they voted to continue the funding, and add more features), and ofc this brought changes in the development as well, they needed to change the pipelines, and set up again the development roles, and ofc this took up some time, but as a result they are much more effective now. 
 
As of now what we can see: the engine conversion was done early this year, ship- and assets pipelines are simplified and pushing out stuff faster, planetary tech jumped in from nowhere, Star Marine is coming in.
The teams are now set up for pushing content, they have a clear sight on what to do and how, the foundation of the tech is done. So after 2.6 will come 3.0 in a few months and that will be the first "game like" iteration of SC. After that they will start to add game mechanics (mining, salvaging, etc), and assets (bases, planets, etc).