Beat me to this one Pinback, yes that was my feeling as well how similar in scope the EVE universe is developing into a Star Citizen type universe. I think Star Citizen will probably be the 800lb Gorilla in the room when its done. I mean its Roberts brothers making an epic game for us all and I REALLY DO HOPE IT IS ALL WE EXPECT ... no pressure.

When it first came out, CCP made some exceedingly bizarre decisions for Dust.  It made it exclusive to Sony even though they already have a huge player base, many of whom are as fanatical about PC's as they are about EVE, and they released it using Unreal 3 right when both the PS3 and the Unreal 3 engine were about to become obsolete.  They consistently claimed that they were not getting payed by Sony to do this, but it is hard to imagine any other reason, unless they REALLY believed that the PC is a dead platform (which I think it's showing it's not).

Apparently they have learned the error of their ways.  I think it is probably unfair to compare EVE and SC directly, most of the actual gameplay mechanics (with the possible important exception of the economy) are totally different.  I think of EVE as more of a "capital" ship simulator (as all playable EVE ships except frigates are "capital" by the usual Star Wars definition), while SC focuses on direct control of small fighters and corvettes.  Of course, this does not mean that the two games won't be competing with each other.  My main problem with EVE (and it's a big problem) is that all the more interesting things you can do require some sort of time commitment on your part.  When you can't just stop, save, and go back to what you were doing, and when you have to actually coordinate with other human beings, it is very hard to fit this sort of thing into real life.  From most of what's being said about SC it should not suffer quite as badly from this problem.

Valkyrie looks like it is trying harder to compete directly with the new wave of space-sims.  While it looks nice,  it looks and sounds vastly inferior to SC and (more demonstrably) Elite: Dangerous.  (I am saying this as a long time EVE player and huge fan.)  The flight model looks entirely arcade-like, and it is sounding like it will be entirely an multiplayer-arena sort of thing.

Still, looking forward to playing Legion, though I will probably mostly get trounced as I used to in Unreal.

True you might not be able to compare SC to Eve directly but I think what Star Citizen has achieved (even if it fails to live up to it's own hype) is that it has set the bar a lot higher than it used to be for this type of game, a few years ago most developer would just make a basic Elite/Wing commander clone  with some pretty graphics and be done with it.

Now any developer doing one of these games is bombarded with question about ship boarding or planet exploring ect as the buying public has comes to expect to see these feature in a game. Established developer like CCP and Egosoft which have had pretty much the field to them selves over the last decade are being force to added or change their games in order to compete with the new wave of games being made.

Which in it self is no bad thing as we see in the case of CCP adding and expanding their core game into other game genres and in Egosoft case it needed to be done as the X games were stagnating as they continued to pander to dwindling fan base.

Biggest difference is that Eve is a game and SC is ... well ... a fund raising campaign.