Today, thanks to the Unreal Marketplace, it is now much easier for game developers to produce finished looking products without significant development time. With starter kits, even an MMO can be brought to a rough Alpha State as quickly as you can assemble a map to play in. I know this, because CoT did that, two and a half years ago. The problem comes in going past this point. This low level work and premade assets can only carry a game so far. The Lions share, years of work, still has to be done. This is, I suspect, why Ship of Heroes is listing their Alpha for the end of this year, but launch in 2019/2020.
It is a different world today than it was in 2012. What is available for game developers is far cleaner, far more production ready. Shoot, we now have what are called Asset flippers on Steam Greenlight who take these premade kits and just dump them onto the market for a quick buck. They did not even make anything, just used these alpha play kits as/is. (Look up "Uncrowded" sometime for a great example of this)
This makes me very glad to see that the folk behind Ship of Heroes have a realistic timetable, because that tells me that they are serious about making this game. I will admit, I was disappointed at their first day turnout. I was hoping for them to make at least $150k on their first day, because their hearts are in this. Still, they did have a respectable result, and I hope will build on it.
We are a lucky community, to have not one, but several groups willing to sacrifice time for this. Each of us brings something different to the table. And the folk who win, is all of us.