This time last year, Star Citizen had managed to raise $200 million through crowdfunding with the help of over two million backers. And now, that grand figure has risen by another $50 million. Cloud Imperium Games" official funding tracker now shows a cool $250 million raised from almost 2.5 million backers of the ambitious space game.
With multiple studios set up worldwide, Cloud Imperium Games has been developing Star Citizen using this crowd-funded capital since 2012 - although it kicked into full production a couple of years later -, when the game started as a Kickstarter campaign.
It has been a rather eventful year of development for the studio too. Early in 2019, the studio managed to ship the city-planet ArcCorp, new moons, and playable female characters. Updates later on brought overhauled law and order systems, caves, on-foot mining and harvesting, and more. Of course, a steady stream of new ships has been arriving too.
It wasn"t all a smooth ride however. The star-studded single-player campaign of Star Citizen, Squadron 42, got hit with a three-month delay, pushing back the beta release to the third-quarter of 2020. The delay was due to Cloud Imperium Games changing the project"s development to a staggered approach, giving its teams more time to work on features.
There"s one more major Star Citizen update slated to land in 2019, one which will carry the microTech planet plus its New Babbage landing zone, major updates to all previously released planets, and even an early implementation of server-side object container streaming.
Looking towards 2020, Cloud Imperium Games is planning to expand the game even further, with wormholes being added for jumping between solar systems as the Pyro system is in development for arrival. See the recent CitizenCon 2019 presentation to get a glimpse at these features and more that"s under development.
Those who would be interested in trying out Star Citizen would normally have to put down $45 for a Starter Package, but there is a Free Fly event going on right now that has opened up the game to everyone, even offering free ships to fly that refresh with new models every day. This free event is slated to last until December 5.