I think fundamentally, KS companies should be run like public companies and all of their finances fairly open. All they show is the amount collected, at least as far as I can find. Can you find any evidence that Chris is running the business well? I'm sure I'd be tickled to death if he has only spent 1/5 the money in 3 years of development, but I don't think so.
I can't fundamentally disagree with that view. I have no clue what the laws are around this. I suspect there aren't any as KS is a new thing and like anything new will need to be regulated. Even if Chris ran his company 100% efficiently we know for a fact many other companies fold like a kite almost as soon as KS is over or they stop supporting their games after releasing an early build. I remember seeing a pie chart on Steam Early-Access games and something like 43% of all games either failed to deliver or the developer stopped supporting the title. That's a shocking number IMO. There should be massive red flags posted about it explaining to people that the game is not guaranteed to release. I know they already do it but I don't think it's sinking in with people. It's an all around shitty situation.
As for how much he has spent I have no idea. He has talked about it to some degree but never drilled down into the exact numbers. We do know that it costs CIG upwards of $80,000 a month to support people playing the game online as is. Which to me is a shockingly high number considering how few people actually actively play. I don't think that includes the cost of bandwidth for pushing patches but it might. I know they talk about that sometimes and it's very expensive.
I remember someone once asking if moving to Google Cloud would be cheaper and the answer was that it's even more expensive but it's the only way to go if you want to provide users with decent connections across the globe since it uses dedicated Fiber lines once you onramp to Google Cloud from your ISP.
So my concern is less about the cost of production and more the cost of live-ops. They also need to keep production going once the game launches to add more chapters post SQ42. Those are the Mission Disks that won't be required to continue to playing but they will be available to help fund the game. I'm guessing they will go for about the price of a Season Pass which is perfect for something with 15-25 hours of solid single player gameplay.
They have some 300 people in house and about 200 contractors working on the game but that's recent. It would be wrong to try and measure their costs from the beginning with those numbers. For the first year of pre-prod it was basically 3 people (Chris, Dave (writer) and Sean Tracy) and a few more from CryTek off and on working on the "treatment" for a year mostly pro-bono and it still cost about a million and a half to make. I'm not sure if that's when Chris purchased the CryEngine or if he did that after. I'm going to say he did that much later and it aint free.
And this is why I agree with what you said. There is no way to really keep track of costs from those early days onward.
What I do know is they are currently looking for 35 3D artists to work on ships. They lost some as artists tend to be more free spirits and that's pretty much how the industry works. Chris is not paying these guys top dollars so once someone has had their artistic side filled they move on to greener pastures. It's still nice to know that guys like David Hobbins that moved from Guardians of the Galaxy to Star Citizen to Star Wars is once again doing contract work on Star Citizen.
So the problem of paying massive salaries to 500 people is non-existent for good and will. It causes issues with retention of staff but they can't compete with EA that pays 2-3x as much for the same positions. CIG can't afford it and Ben has said so numerous times. They do have a budget we just don't get to see it.
One last thing Chris mentioned. He was asked more than once by the media and elsewhere what would happen should the funding dry up. He has said that he has enough put aside to complete the project as is but a lot of ships and some features would need to wait post release. Which is what you and I think they should have done from day 1 anyway. How much of a padding does he have? From what I recall it's somewhere around 15-20 million. The rest is budgeted to try and get the game done but he does budget ahead of time counting expected pledges (he and Ben said they can gauge it well enough now to do this). Which means he has spent money on his budget he doesn't have. That leaves me worried a bit. At least he put money aside which is good contingency that other studios don't do or they sell out (CDPR).
