That may be your companies definition of release, but that's not ours. We have several levels of releases for internal employee teams to either add their apps then another release for the validation team before it goes out to the public. These releases are denoted in our versioning. But I don't work in video game development, so perhaps that's the generally accepted nomenclature in that realm. This is my understanding of the definition of release:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/release_version
I can see your reasoning behind calling it an alpha/beta. It is a very playable game as it is if you have a beefy computer, albeit with some bugs and glitches and server lag and desync.
But from the beginning, this game was run like a kickstarter campaign. You pledged ships early on. Before there was even something to download and play. Like a kickstarter, if CIG goes belly up, that's it, you get nothing.