You can call it what you want, but at the end of the day who has access to the game doesn’t change the fact that this is essentially an alpha product. The main focus of this stage is still on implementing core technologies into the game engine and expanding upon them. Things like large world maps, netcode, instance…

There’s both a singleplayer campaign and an MMO portion.

Their numbers have gone up since August at least (From 260 to 270ish based on the live stream) so no huge layoffs.

I think the original plan was to release a singleplayer campaign and a small multiplayer portion, then use the money from that to build the multiplayer sandbox part out (Probably something more on the level of Freelancer).

You do know that Star Citizen is an MMO like ESO, ToR and GW2? Not only that but it has a full singleplayer campaign. There’s no way a game of this scale could be pumped out in 18 months, that’s absolutely ridiculous, this isn’t CoD.