I played this a lot a few years ago and got a hankering recently to try it out again. One of the dev team posted on the SM steam forum
Title pretty much sums it up, i've seen some pretty cool stuff online on the roadmap but was wondering if Schine was even still developing it because I haven't seen an update in a while...
steamcommunity.com
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We really do have a passion for our game, schema worked on StarMade for 10 years. 8 of which it's been sold on our website and 6 of those sold on Steam. I've been around for 7 years now. schema the creator and lead dev for StarMade has spent countless hours working on the game. It was never for the money. In fact, StarMade has been free to play the entire time it's been out. The demo on Steam is the full version and anyone is free to download and play the full version from our website.
Unfortunately, we ran out of funding and had to switch to part-time. Development slowed down. Now we all have part-time or full-time jobs elsewhere, other projects to sustain ourselves.
We haven't had the time to work on StarMade as we liked in the last 8 months. schema has been busy with other work to secure more funding for StarMade, but we're really not sure when or if that's going to happen.
We are looking into opening up the code for community contributions, but this also takes time and money.
TL;DR We didn't take the money and run, it's been a 10-year project that ultimately has been more than we can handle.
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So from the above it's fairly clear the devs have bills to pay and passion isn't an acceptable currency. The point about making it Open Source requiring time and money underlines where the Devs find themselves.
I feel if Schema turned to the community for help he would get it though.