Star Citizen is an in-development space exploration, combat, and trading title by Cloud Imperium. Star Citizen entered pre-production in 2010 and officially entered production using CryEngine 3 in 2010. It has been more than a decade since, and we’ve seen no tangible release date announced. However, some good news comes in the form of more than $500 million that has been raised for the game through crowdfunding.
Just for reference, the game has been in development for so long that it’s changed game engines. Star Citizen is currently being developed on Amazon Lumberyard – no longer CryEngine 3. CryEngine 3 is no longer even current. Crytek’s latest iteration of its AAA game engine is CryEngine 5.7. However, although the game has taken more than a decade to develop and still isn’t in a state where it can be released, donations keep pouring in, and backers keep backing its development.
As of the writing of this article, Cloud Imperium has raised $500,075,150. This crowdfunding phenomenon started in 2012 with a successful Kickstarter that raised $2 million. From there, the crowdfunding campaign intensified and snowballed until November 2021, when the company reached $400 million. That means that it took just a little under a year for the company to generate a further $100 million.
Let’s just reiterate that we still haven’t seen any hint of a final release date for Star Citizen. However, the game’s development is being led by Chris Roberts, and this isn’t his first foray into the gaming industry, or even space exploration simulators. Star Citizen is a sort of extended retry of the plans that Cloud Imperium had for another of Robert’s games; Freelancer.
Freelancer is a similar space combat and exploration simulation title that was published in 2003, and is, itself, a chronological sequel to 2000’s game of the same type, Starlancer. The latter also being a product of Chris Roberts. Clearly, this man knows how to negotiate space-based gameplay, with his prior experiences garnering much public attention.
Hopefully, we’ll soon see something more concrete than trailers and previews of what Star Citizen will be like when it eventually releases.
