The Star Citizen crowdfunding campaign surpassed $500 million

Star Citizen passes yet another impressive milestone

It’s a known fact that it takes a long, long time to make games, but Cloud Imperium Games is testing gamers’ patience with their in-development title Star Citizen, which began pre-production all the way back in 2010. The game was officially announced in 2012 with the launch of a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for development, and while it was anticipated to release in 2014, the game was delayed multiple times… and still is yet to receive any sort of official release window.

Ten years after the launch of the Star Citizen crowdfunding campaign, the game has reached an incredible milestone by raising over $500 million — the official count as of today is $500,075,150 from 4,096,384 backers. (Thanks, Eurogamer.) I’m not sure if I’m more impressed by the numbers, or whether fans are still holding out hope a decade later.

I get that huge MMOs like that are insanely difficult to develop, but at this point, I’m amazed things haven’t shut down yet. I guess they have the funds to keep going for a while. The project is known for being the highest-funded video game of all time, and it actually won a Guinness World Record back in 2014 for being the highest crowdfunded project when it had raised $39,680,576.

Cloud Imperium started releasing small gameplay snippets called “modules” so that players could get a sense of the game (and probably to slow the complaints for a while). The last module was released in 2015, but it still receives regular updates.

A side project called Squadron 42 was also announced with the initial Star Citizen crowdfunding project and was intended to be the story mode. Now it’s supposed to be a standalone project, and Cloud Imperium is already discussing plans for multiple sequels before the game is even finished.

It’s nice that fans are still excited for Star Citizen after all these years, but man, knowing what I know about game development, I’d be shocked if players get a fraction of what they were promised all those years ago.