That doesn't sound quite right. For all of SC's seemingly infinite problems, Chris Roberts has actually shipped a whole bunch of beloved classics. Derek Smart has not.
http://gameranx.com/updates/id/70033/article/the-chris-rober...
Derek Smart, since 1996, has developed and shipped over a dozen games. He still makes games.
You could say they're rivals in who is going to turn out to be a bigger scammer and purveyor of unfulfilled promises. Roberts might end up winning that one overwhelmingly as well.
All the profiles he's written about himself seem extremely conceited. His posts present hyperbole and opinions as fact. And to top it all off, the exact things he is criticizing SC for he has done himself with his most recent game Line of Defense... https://steamcommunity.com/groups/acpreport/discussions/3/48...
Dude has an entire subreddit where a majority of the users seem to be devoted to "calling his crap out": https://www.reddit.com/r/DerekSmart/
And of course encyclopediadramatica has their own page on the guy (of course nothing there should be taken at face value, just found it amusing after reading up on him): https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Derek_Smart
Line Of Defense isn't crowd-funded. It was released on Steam Early Access. His games traditionally take a long time to develop and release because they are complex, and he doesn't have a large team or resources.
Comparing an indie funding his own games to a company that has taken over $200 million Dollars in crowd-funding, and also investor money, is laughably foolish.
http://www.dereksmart.org/2015/08/star-citizen-how-i-got-inv...
Since that time, the most avid backers of Star Citizen have been waging a proxy war with him on behalf of CIG. And at times it gets a lot worse than the Usenet flamewars he was engaged in back in the day. They even hijacked a sub Reddit bearing his name, and were using it as a way to harass, attack, dox him etc. Until it was closed (by the mods) about a year ago. They re-opened it temporarily due to him being right (once again) about the dire financial straits of the project, as revealed in their financial statement released this week.
Kotaku has a five-part series which also covers the beef between him and Chris Roberts.
http://www.kotaku.co.uk/tag/inside-star-citizen/
Don't believe everything you read from those who have a vested interest in either Star Citizen, or those who don't like him. So far, he has been 100% on the ball regarding the key issues with this project. From the money part, all the way down to the technology, challenges, schedules etc. Since Summer 2015, he has been obsessively documenting everything about this project. So much so that many on the Internet, including the media, go there for material when writing about this project. It's uncanny and disturbing to say the least.
He apparently has plenty of friends who work on or have worked on the project. And they are the ones who appear to have been feeding him his most accurate leaks. For example, about this investment, he leaked the news on Twitter in May. That same month CIG was closing this deal. We know this because the public filings in the UK which became public in Dec, show all the signatures and actions regarding this $46M investment taking place in May. His latest article lays it all out.
It seems like Derek Smart has come up in every thread about SC for a few years now. Why? Google tells me he developed a similar singleplayer game a long time ago and is currently working on some kind of online venture. Is he attached to the SC project?