I'm skeptical as balls about indie developers now. I let my hype get the better of me when I preordered this game. Too many people go far too easy on indie developers just because they're "indie". The general thought seems to be "oh but guys, they're only indie!" and suddenly they can get away with murder.
PC gamers are a really, really fickle lot. Chattox basically has the same sentiments as I currently do towards indie devs. This is not a rant towards any particular studio, but the well-funded ones lately.
When we finally had real alternatives to big game studios' offerings, we were quick to dismiss the AAA console ports. We jumped on the indie bandwagon, and for a while - everything indie was gold. A lot of mediocre games were propelled to staggering heights just on the wave of being developed by an "indie studio". The community went all in with supporting the indies - they served as financiers through paid alphas, marketing departments through guerrilla marketing through forums/youtube, documentation through wikis, and QA/QC through constant feedback to the devs. If anything, indie studios should be able to make games cheaper and more efficiently now and provide maximum return on the $.
For some reason, this hasn't happened. Indie studios make huge amounts of money in preorders/kickstarters, and give very little in return for the money. But , you say, there's a game going to come out eventually... isn't that enough? No. I am under the expectation that if I buy something earlier, that gives the studio more resources up front, which means the game should have additional content or a quicker release date.
Let's take Starbound for example. They've made 1.7 million off preorders. If they paid out everyone that has been working on it full time for 1.5 years $100,000, they'd likely still have enough money to employ several more programmers, an artist, and the office space to house them for a year, provided it was not paid all upfront. And now they've released a lot more information, and guess what? No evidence of either. No release to the public, promised features still not in game with no timeline to be implemented, and no announcements of hiring.
And before anyone says "The stuff is there, they just haven't posted it for ___________ reason" - look, there's no barriers to truly showing progress nowadays. Creating a quality youtube video of gameplay takes trivial amounts of time and can be widely distributed without cost. It's even a small revenue stream possibility. If it's already been announced that it's been done - there is no reason not to show it to the public.
(edited some wording -not fully awake when originally typed )