Games

That's a little unfair, because enjoyment of something doesn't necessitate it being experienced from beginning to end in a linear progression. Something like the seasonal(?) content on No Man's Sky often requiring a save file being restarted and not needed the main story to be completed to finish the new objectives. Or, something like Path of Exile, where each season progresses from a fresh start at level 1, with no progress carried over.

Progress gets rest on those about as frequently, it not more so, than the resets in Star Citizen, except those games are also feature complete with a full story involved.

Maybe something like Ark, then, with the creation of new servers. No real story being progressed through, but a multi-player sandbox environment. Again, though, that's a feature complete game where all the systems (mostly) work.

I guess where I'm going is that you can certainly look at individual elements of the game and compare those to similar systems in other games. And if expectations are of it being a sandbox you can mess around in and experience some cool systems, it will deliver. But it is not a finished game that has persistent player driven progress. It is not a game with a story path you can follow (though, I don't think it claims to be once fully released, either). It is buggy at times and suffers server issues as the small changes and interactions build up over time, making an instance unstable and eventually kicking everyone logged in.

"Demo" might be the closest description, but that doesn't quite capture the experience of playing it. It falls very short of being a full game. It also is something that other games just don't capture the same feeling of.

Again, I'm not trying to convince anyone to spend any money towards it, but absolutely give the free fly events a chance.