‘Star Citizen’ crowdfunding passes half a billion dollars

Star Citizen has now received over $500,000,000 (£440,942,500) from fans via its crowdfunder, with $100,000,000 (£88,200,500) of that coming in the last 12 months.

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Star Citizen was originally announced back in 2012, with the initial crowdfunder raising $2.1million (£1.8million).

Now, a decade later, it’s gone on to earn developer Cloud Imperium Games $500,123,234 (£441,051,178) according to the official “funds raised” section of the Star Citizen website, with over 4million people pledging.

Star Citizen was originally meant to be released in 2014 but according to Cloud Imperium Games’ Carl Jones, both it and standalone spin-off Squadron 42 (the game’s long-awaited and much-delayed standalone single-player story adventure) are apparently “years away” from launch.

“I guess we’ll see how long [director Chris Roberts] needs to be over,” he said earlier this year. “But yeah, it could be one or two years more. He’s spending more time over here with the Squadron 42 team and with our other developers, but it’ll be this year when he moves over for longer periods of time. Hopefully, that means we can progress Squadron 42 through to completion faster. We want to get that game finished, but it will be finished when it’s ready.”

Despite Star Citizen still only being in alpha testing, $100,000,000 has been raised over the past ten months, with the project breaking $400,000,000 (£352,802,000) last November. 

Earlier this year, Cloud Imperium announced it would be limiting the amount of details it shared on its development roadmap in an attempt to stop players getting angry when things were delayed (via Eurogamer).

“It has become abundantly clear to us that despite our best efforts to communicate the fluidity of development, and how features marked as Tentative should sincerely not be relied upon, the general focus of many of our most passionate players has continued to lead them to interpret anything on the release view as a promise,” read a statement from Cloud Imperium.

“Their continued noise every time we shift deliverables has become a distraction both internally at CIG and within our community, as well as to prospective Star Citizen fans watching from the sidelines,” they added.

In other news, Trombone Champ, the world’s first trombone-based rhythm music game, is already getting rave reviews after it launched last week.

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