Star Citizen has crossed over $1 billion in crowdfunding from more than 6.5 million people more than 14 years after it started raising money.
Chris Roberts started raising money in 2012 with a Kickstarter campaign for development studio Cloud Imperium Games, which is making the Star Citizen universe and its single-player campaign Squadron 42. We’ve covered the effort from the beginning, but we’re as puzzled as anyone else about why the games haven’t launched yet.
It’s an astounding amount of money from Roberts, who made games such as Wing Commander and Freelancer as well as the failed Wing Commander movie in 1999. I played and loved the Wing Commander series from the beginning with the first game in 1990.
Star Citizen first emerged in 2012 as a spiritual successor to that sci-fi flight sim gaming universe. The game went into early access in 2017, when Cloud Imperium Games had raised over $170 million. But nine years after that, the game is still in alpha testing. It’s an even longer gestation than Grand Theft Auto VI, which started its development sometime after Grand Theft Auto V shipped in September 2013.
In an interview with Variety, Roberts said, “It’s not something that would be able to be done under a traditional big game publisher funding it, or private equity. They usually wouldn’t have the time and the patience, but with what we’re doing, people just want to see the biggest, best world possible, and they love the idea of the dream. And as we’re going along and they see more of it, it reinforces itself, basically.”
He added, “I fully believe that we’ve still got a long time, even after we’ve got what we call 1.0 out, and we’re not considering an alpha anymore, that we’ll be adding and building on the universe and the world, and it will be a place for people to adventure together and meet up together and have fun together.”
Squadron 42 is expected to debut sooner, but Cloud Imperium Games has not yet announced a release date.