Star Citizen, from Cloud Imperium, is one of the most bizarre projects you’ll ever lay your eyes on. In 2012, Cloud Imperium kickstarted a crowdfunded project to bring Star Citizen to life, and within a couple of months, millions of dollars had been raised to support the development of this space-faring epic.
Today, the game still hasn’t been ‘released,’ and it still sits in alpha. Recently, the team at Cloud Imperium passed the $800 million mark on the crowdfunding (and sales) scale, moving ever closer to the almighty and ludicrous $1 billion mark.
Burning Money
In October 2024, our Tom Henderson secured a monumental exclusive report from within Cloud Imperium, diving deep into the company’s culture and the decade-long development cycle of Star Citizen.
It came off the back of a new working mandate that forced employees to grind their asses off to hit deadlines for a time. The report delved into financial updates that suggested the hundreds of millions of dollars the company had raised had been poured into developing the title and that the financial outlook for the firm was ‘bleak’ at best.
Then came the layoffs.
We heard from those inside CIG that the creative processes internal to the company weren’t working and that even the minutest of details were taking days to be decided on because of poor creative control and micromanagement.
In January, CIG’s founder, Chris Roberts, stated that the team is ‘closer than ever’ to hitting that 1.0 release mark, but there are still no timelines or indicators to suggest when that will happen. Until then, players will keep pouring in their pledges, donations, subscriptions, and purchases, some of which can sell for as much as $48,000.
It’s possible to track the trajectory of Star Citizen’s financials through the official site, where it’s revealed that, at the time of writing, $802,335,704 has been raised or earned by the project.
Have you ever invested any cash in Star Citizen, and are you jonesing for the 1.0 release to hit? Let me know in the comments.
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