Am I the only one who don't get why some people compare EVE Online and Star Citizen? They say that Star Citizen will have a hard time competing with EVE. I get that both are space games and MMOs, but they offer a totally different experience, different mechanics etc.
I played EVE from 2005-2011, interspersed with several lengthy hiatuses, participating in much of what the game had to offer: Everything from mining and running missions, which are considered chump-tier casual gameplay by savvy veterans, all the way up to being a member of Agony Unleashed (a selective small-gang PvP corporation), infiltrating and spying on influential alliances, and earning vast quantities of spacebux through playing the market and exploiting wormhole space. I permanently retired in early 2011 because I simply grew tired of the game... also, even 8-10 hours a week spent on EVE was time I could instead use to develop a real-life skill or read educational literature.
There is room in the market for Star Citizen, I think. EVE has a huge learning curve and a very high skill ceiling (which is a barrier to entry for many), but even so, its combat is ultimately mouse clicks. This is far more difficult to do masterfully than I can possibly explain in a reasonable time frame, requiring several months of study and practice by new players to gain basic competence, and yet it's completely different from flying a star fighter in real-time from the perspective of the cockpit.
EVE is a very particular breed of game, and the reason it's the only game in town isn't that there's no more room left in the market, but that no competent developers have been able to compete with EVE (even indirectly) in a meaningful way. Few are willing to try. Apparently, just being set in space and featuring space ships is enough for people to presume a game will compete with EVE, yet space and space ships are really just a theme for EVE. You could re-skin it, change its textures, meshes, backgrounds and flavor text to reflect a series of deep-sea colonies and submersibles, and the mechanics would work exactly the same way.
You could do the same to Wing Commander (or Star Citizen), of course, but the point is that stripped of space and space ships the games at their core will be completely different.