Star Citizen has recently run afoul of the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for selling ships that don't actually exist yet. They're called "concept ships"--ships that are currently under development but aren't available in-game. Since Star Citizen is still very much a work-in-progress, the idea is to offer pre-sale ships at a discount before they arrive.
However, Cloud Imperium Games wasn't too clear in its advertising emails which ships are concepts and which ships are actually available to fly around. A few weeks ago, Reddit user mazty filed a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority and told them about CIG's misleading emails. Weeks later, mazty received a response confirming that CIG did "go against the Advertising Code of Practice" in those advertisements and have since added a disclaimer to identify which ships are being sold as concepts.
CIG took that advice to heart with its latest email ad. You can see that both the Crusader Ares and A2 Hercules have an asterisk leading readers to the disclaimer at the bottom of the email.
"The Crusader Ares (Inferno and Ion), A2 Hercules, Genesis Starliner, are being offered here as a limited vehicle concept pledge," reads the disclaimer. "This means that the vehicle is in development but is not yet ready to display in your Hangar or fly in Star Citizen. It will be available as playable content in a later patch."
In a reply to the original Reddit post, mazty said that the disclaimer still doesn't go far enough. "The wording is still extremely misleading as they claim the ships WILL be playable," although there's no guarantee of that. The Ares Crusader, for example, has been in development for almost two years.
Star Citizen's monetization strategy has drawn sharp criticism over the past eight years of development. Star Citizen passed $350 million in funding as of last March despite being in a perpetual alpha without even the barest hint of a release window.
Thanks, Eurogamer!