Back-end server technology, they want to make it a persistent MMO with thousands of concurrent players and effectively infinite objects in space.

But this MMO is the most expensive video game of all time (although there's others that have had more invested in them over time, I'm thinking of World of Warcraft or GTA 5, possibly upcoming titles like GTA 6), therefore the server technology also looks like some of the fanciest of all time. They have 1100 employees working on a game that's been in development for over 10 years now, funded to the tune of $600 million so far, with about 50-60 million still coming in every year just from pre-orders / donations / in-game purchases / ships for a possible game that may come out at some point.

The majority of the team is actually said to be working on the "solo" project which is Squadron 42. So they have an excuse for the sluggish development pace. Funny thing is, there hasn't been a single footage of SQ42 in 5 years, and you can't even buy the game anymore. There's a roadmap that says that the game is nearly done, but well, they seem to say this all the time.

>So they have an excuse for the sluggish development pace.

Except it shouldn't take almost 1000 people more than ten years to make a single player space game.

I would say it can take an infinite amount of time, if you have bad management, scope creep (or no defined scope at all), high turnover, obsoleted core technologies, and if people give you money even if you don't do anything anyways

Looks like someone mapped out the tech deliverables that SC has completed to meet their tech goals.