They lost something like 90% of their player base.
Really interesting concept, but a lot of broken promises turned a lot of people off.
This sounds like it's meant as an evolution of Elite 2: Frontier back in the day, which was a similar concept of flying around a fully realized universe of neutonian physics, planets that orbited suns and that you can interact with/land on, accept random missions ect.. In practice, it sounds like a step back (You can approach suns and mine them for gas in E2, and here you can't really even orbit one..)