Because SC is not actually a game. It has evolved into a dream business. They are selling dreams. So secrecy is most important, else the glamour collapse. They lost me when they hired Gillian Anderson, but DRM ridiculousness is on the same level. Such things should not be the focus of a studio working to provide an actual game.
I have thought about this and realized I don't have the knowledge of how Gillian Anderson and the other big name actors have been compensated for their involvement to be critical. Maybe the actors receive the rights to their hirez digital scans, for example. Maybe the actors are getting a cut of the eventual 'box office take.'
The digital scans on their own probably aren't worth much, doing anything with them is a lot of modeling and shader work tied to the game engine. My bet's on good old fashioned money, possibly a cut of Squadron 42 sales, but probably not a cut of the giant pile of crowdfunding.
Mark Hamil and John Rhys-Davies might have been an easier sell, having been in Wing Commander. For the rest, maybe they were excited to work on something that hasn't been done before. The quality of the characters shown in the trailer is crazy.
Such actors do not work for cuts of crowd-funded games. They may get residuals or a share of sales, but they were paid cash for their time. You can hire C and D-list with promises of future pay, but A/B demand money.
A cut of future money means no money. Anyone who is even a bit savvy and carries the kind of clout that comes with a big bank account doesn't need to work for empty promises. If they were promised both, it would be really surprising to me if the immediate money wasn't already enough to pay them for their time. Given that that is the case, "both" suddenly doesn't make sense anymore.
I fire it up for a couple hours every patch, but you're right it's not much of a game yet. There's a certain sense of awe from the scale that other space games don't give me though, so I'm still excited about what it might become. And from a tech perspective, watching all their engine work has been really interesting to me.
