For some reason Wikipedia said 2011, but either way the first trailer was in 2012
www.pcgamer.com/star-citizen-preview-the-open-world-space-sim-of-our-dreams/
But yeah, no one should be saying this game is never coming out or is too late after only three years of development. For a game of this scale? That's a ridiculous expectation
Chris Roberts starting working on the prototype for the game in 2011, that is what we see in the trailers from the original Kickstarter in November 2012. The actual game, not the prototype, really started development after it was succesfully crowdfunded. So it has actually been in actual development for almost 4 years.
Exactly, there are so many factors why this "game is taking too long" argument is invalid.
1. Most games aren't announced until they are nearly finished to avoid deflating hype. Because of this, people wrongly assume big games only take one or two years to make. Due to the way it is funded, Star Citizen was announced in its concept stage and has been completely transparent with its development ever since. Probably the best comparison of a Triple-A studio doing this is with Cyberpunk 2077, but unlike Star Citizen we don't see the development process, we don't get to play early builds of the game and we have heard little word about it for over 3 years. I'm not sure why they didn't wait for the game to be in some cohesive state before unveiling it.
2. Star Citizen is actually two games. Squadron 42, the first of three episodic games featuring a 20 hour single player campaign with some co-op functionality, and an MMO. Most MMO's alone take over 5 years to finish, and the MMO part of Star Citizen alone is absolutely massive in scale. It's way bigger than most, so don't be surprised if it takes longer. My guess is optimistically, the MMO will release sometime in 2018. Who knows how far along they are with other star systems and gameplay mechanics, so it could be sooner but I doubt it. Squadron 42 is planned to release by the end of this year or early next year the latest, we'll know more in a few weeks at Citizencon. The other two episodes of Squadron 42 are full fledged single player games that apparently will be released two years apart from one another.
3. Chris Roberts had to form Cloud Imperium Games while development of the game was going on. They went from under 20 people, mostly part time workers, to about 500 employees (including contractors) with four studios around the world. It takes time to get the ball rolling.
4. The Q4 2014 release date was the estimated release date for the original concept of the game back in 2012. It was never concrete to begin with. As funding kept pouring in, much more than the original game would ever need, Chris held a poll in 2013 and asked the community if they would like to see the money be used to vastly expand the game's scale and scope. The community responded with a resounding yes. This obviously meant that development would take much longer, but most backers are fine with them taking the time they need to have the game fully achieve its potential. We get to see each step of development from concept to release, and we get to play every version of the game since the pre-alpha hangar module, so it's not likely we have to blindly trust CIG.
