So my undeying love to space 4x mostly dervies from the unforgettable Freespace 1and 2. Before these games hit me like a breath of fresh air there was painfully little talk abouth logistics, strategic overview on system level and fleet loadouts. This is why I usually aim to reproduce those feelings on the breefing or in combat via 4X games as well

BUT I jsut notcied that there was actualyl modding community producing new content and imporving upon the game for the last 20 YEARS :
https://www.hard-light.net/

I know I am pretty late to the party but it wasnt that obvious to bounce on this gem of community production so if you are like me check this out right now ! The many many, many campaigns there are sure to provide more inspiration for SiS runs

I once mentioned how cool it would be to have another Human faction in a DLC with sleek high-tech ships that are less abouth expansion and more abouth garden worlds - guess what there is a campaign for that as well and the production values are off the charts - will be trying to reproduce this scenario for sure next

The space sim genre has a small but very dedicated following, as you can tell from projects like Star Citizen that keep making money from backers even though it's been 20 years and it's still not released yet.

Yeah Star Citizen is an interesting one.

Seems indeed like there is a core fanbase that are continously financing the development of the game.
My guess is that the developer has realised the potential in this setup and that is why they keep producing new ships for sale instead of the single player campaign (as a psuedo WoW payment model) but if true we will likely never see the single player campaign of that game

I also supported the project in the early days but not keeping my hopes up that it will become something more then an in-DEV multiplayer platform. But is also not needed anymore We have the above page with content that already rivals SC in quality and while the latter will is slowly becoming outdated, the former keeps improving while also offering finished single-player campaigns