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The start of 2025 brought a familiar refrain, with Cloud Imperium CEO Chris Roberts sallying forth to declare that ‘we are closer than ever to realizing a dream many have said is impossible’ with Star Citizen. Which is to say actually releasing the thing: the holy grail of version 1.0.
Naturally Roberts didn’t even put the vaguest of timelines on this. Why bother? Star Citizen, and its singleplayer component Squadron 42, have now passed an almost unbelievable milestone: at the time of writing Cloud Imperium Games has raised $802,165,273 since its first crowdfunding goals were set in 2012. Eight hundred million dollars for a game that’s yet to reach a full release.
Star Citizen began as a purely crowdfunded project, though for years now CIG has funded the game through microtransactions: paid access to the alpha, subscriptions, merch, and prohibitively expensive spaceships. Despite this, CIG still considers all purchases a pledge toward making Star Citizen a reality.
The project has from the start attracted both starry-eyed believers and die-hard cynics, the former backing Roberts’ vision (and how) and keeping the faith that CIG will eventually deliver a transcendent space MMO, while the latter mostly laugh from the sidelines at whales spending tens of thousands of dollars on in-game spaceships.
It’s notable that CIG has topped $800 million thanks to considerable financial momentum: Star Citizen has made over $100 million every year since 2022, and there’s little reason to expect that to slow down. The backers for this one, you sense, are all-in either way.
CIG has at least answered the question of whether the game even exists: version 4.0 of the alpha was released in December 2024, introducing among other things a server meshing feature allowing players to travel seamlessly between different areas.
But despite regular additions, the alpha that began nearly a decade ago is far from feature complete. CIG has promised that the finished Star Citizen will feature a full campaign, player bases, an EVE-style player driven economy, various crafting systems and so many other incidentals it’s hard to list them all.
Roberts has previously claimed that server meshing was the last big technological hurdle and, once it was in place, the team was setting sail “for Star Citizen’s own finish line… Star Citizen 1.0 is what we consider the features and content set to represent ‘commercial’ release. This means that the game is welcoming to new players, stable, and polished with enough gameplay and content to engage players continuously. In other words, it is no longer Alpha or Early Access.”
Those words are from March 2024. Almost a year on Star Citizen remains in alpha and early access. “I can promise you the gameplay I described is not a pipe dream,” said Roberts, “nor will it take 10 to 20 years to deliver.” That was in 2020. See you again next year.
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Kurt Indovina
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