In short, the most extreme cart-before-the-horse development the world has ever seen. Chris Roberts paid several A-List Hollywood actors millions of dollars to get on camera next to his unfortunate wife, and paid tens of millions of dollars for motion capture before they had a functioning game engine and before they knew if they could use any of it.
He spent millions more creating, throwing away, recreating, re-throwing away, and creating yet again several spaceship assets before he had a functioning game engine, and with no consideration as to whether or not those assets would work with each other, the engine, or the aforementioned motion capture. Spoiler: it didn't.
He also spend untold millions of dollars building 4 studios around the world, because successful game development studios have that. The fact that real publishers earned them over time by actually creating and releasing games is lost on him.
They also spent millions of dollars creating a real-life Truman Show analogue consisting of constant video feeds, "behind the scenes", "lore", fake world assets, and thousands of hours of complete bullshit video intended to make it look like they're making progress on a "game."
What Chris did not do - what nobody in CIG has ever done - is decide what Star Citizen is. Nobody has created a game design, nobody has proposed a core game loop, nobody has considered even one single moment of gameplay or how any of this will work. It's just Chris Roberts continuing to exist as the genetic error he was born as. Stupidity is expensive.