You guys want $500K for just a one solar system? Look at this:
http://en.spaceengine.org/index/funding_and_donations/0-26
$100 000 - MMORPG Sandbox Game
$100K is probably what CIG spends on Pizza… per month, HAHA.
Living cost in Russia is significantly less than Europe, but yeah, sounds optimistic.
If anyone can be bothered to make an account on that forum, maybe link to the video and ask how SE will compare?
The other way of looking at that is “wow, that isn’t very much money to accomplish a whole lot within one year”. Of course, like @hrobertson suggested, maybe Russia is just that cheap and with $100k he can hire 5 guys. shrug
To be blunt, this project has always looked like a dozen unimpressive demo scene entries duct taped together.
After $35k, for an additional $15k you get 4 features that could be put together in a couple days, or at least a week…
$15 000 - Freeware SpaceEngine 1.0 Planetarium
Fund SE development full-time for 12 months
lol, what? 15k for full time development for a year?
This is either sounding like a scam, or they already have the money they need and are just trying to squeese more because… hey… free money is free money.
I wondered about where Vladimir “SpaceEngineer” Romanyuk works, now I am even more dumbfounded of how has he been able to do all this. 
Vladimir graduated from St. Petersburg State University, specializing in “Astrophysics and radio astronomy”. Currently working in the St. Petersburg branch of the Special Astrophysical Observatory, located on the territory of the Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg. He learned programming by himself. SE is his first OpenGL program.
@Kichae do you have a Game Engine hidden in the backyard?
Nope. And if I did, it would be pitiful. I work in Fortran.
15k for having some guy do his hobby full time for a year, with him keeping all rights to further profit from it. Should be plenty to cover basic living expenses, especially in Russia.
Within one year? Everything past particle effects and scripting is clearly marked as “Long-Term Goals”. Of course, no one has ever heard of a one-man space MMO taking more than a year or two to fully develop, right? 
Wait… none of you have played Space Engine Planetarium? Oh… there’s always youtube… it’s not as polished visually as Infinity, but it works, is relatively stable (I mean OMG when it crashes because I’m attempting to travel at very unhuman speeds across entire galaxies in seconds I could just throw my computer out the window) and already is Infinity in a sense, completed. The universe is pretty much there, there is time controls (look into the future/past, or simulate long distance space travel?), a spacecraft & aircraft mode with inertia effects, thrust… there is an interactive HUD and you can view orbits, velocities, etc. It’s ugly as hell, the title, the options screens but all that space dust up to planets and stars look so gosh darn pretty.
Must not speak. Must not speak. Must not speak. Must… run off to the emergency room to have my tongue reattached.
No time, buy the game and play as soon as possible.
I noticed that Space Engine Early Access got released on Steam nearly 4 months before Infinity: Battlescape. Even though it got Greenlit way back in 2014. And also that the website no longer mentions anything about the MMORPG idea.
Instead, it is a single-player planetarium, not a game and people seem very happy with it. 1.5k+ overwhelmingly positive reviews. 
The MMORPG funding page is still available here. Funding goal was increased by 150% and got dropped as total accumulated funds reached no where near the goal. Competition from Dual Universe, might have also been a factor.
@INovaeKeith I just want to give a reality check as I feel that the mostly positive reviews of Infinity: Battlescape have blinded you, which is why you believe that a sudden bump in popularity is possible once I:B reaches v1.0. The number of reviews pale in comparison to this…
While Space Engine has no gameplay to call it a game, it is written in a custom C++ game engine and OpenGL by just one developer, Vladimir.
I guess you could say these projects are not comparable as Infinity: Battlescape is combat focused. Then again Vladimir also wanted to do a full on MMO though instead shortened his scope to a single player exploration simulator and was way more successful with it.
The only thing I can say is that there is a market for the exploration part of Infinity: Battlescape. And it is done mostly alone even in a multiplayer game. IMHO upclose, the planets in Battlescape are much better looking than Space Engine, even if @KotinrolL would disagree as he complained about ice of Battlescape. Even prettier than those planets and moons whose textures are obtained from real space photography.
Space Engine is a huge planetary database and surface imagery dump with planetary orbital mechanics… it’s more of a ‘software’ than a ‘game’.
But you are right in that, seeing now the success of Space Engine, INS could have released Infinity: Space Engine already like 5 (or even more) years ago and profit from it to fund Infinity: Battlescape
