Despite No Release Date In Sight, Star Citizen Breaks $350M In Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding might be a bit of a misnomer, considering most of those dollars are coming from people actually buying in-game items. That’s more like what you’d get in a live service game than a round of Kickstarter crowdfunding. But then again, Star Citizen still hasn’t been released yet, so technically those in-game items are really pre-orders for a game that doesn’t exist. But you can still fly around in them in a limited capacity.

Confusing? That’s sort of Star Citizen’s modus operandi, which helps explain how it’s managed to accrue over $350 million in funds.

Cloud Imperium Gaming broke the $350 mil barrier late last month after getting another $5 million from its 3 million+ players. That’s nothing compared to what Star Citizen raked in back in November of 2020, which almost broke $17 million. That was Star Citizen’s biggest month in 2020, and helped the game gather a record-setting $77 million for the year.

A lot of that had to do with November’s Intergalactic Aerospace Expo 2950, a free-fly event that let players get into spaceships without putting any money down to see how they like ’em. It was the biggest free-fly event in Star Citizen history, complete with its own purpose-built space station where new players can explore all of Star Citizen’s various ship manufacturers in one place.

Star Citizen is still in its technical alpha phase, however, the development of the game is unlike any game ever made. For starters, it’s been in development for a decade and continually adds features to a never-ending roadmap. The first monthly report of the year told us that there are still numerous assets to be implemented in-game, as well as engine tweaks, graphical improvements, UI changes, and much much more.

This process of constantly moving the goalposts down the field means that Star Citizen basically will never have a release date. But then again, if people keep buying what Star Citizen is selling, I guess it doesn’t need one.

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Actually a collective of 6 hamsters piloting a human-shaped robot, Sean hails from Toronto, Canada. Passionate about gaming from a young age, those hamsters would probably have taken over the world by now if they didn’t vastly prefer playing and writing about video games instead.

The hamsters are so far into their long-con that they’ve managed to acquire a bachelor’s degree from the University of Waterloo and used that to convince the fine editors at TheGamer that they can write “gud werds,” when in reality they just have a very sophisticated spellchecker program installed in the robot’s central processing unit.

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