Star Citizen makes $25m in crowdfunding

Chris Roberts’ upcoming space sim Star Citizen has broken $25 million in crowdfunding, its biggest month yet.

The game had reached $24m just last week, and has this week hit the $25 million mark.

“This milestone also means that October has been our single biggest month for crowdfunding yet… that’s truly astounding,” he wrote.

Roberts started crowdfunding for his space trading MMO almost exactly 12 months ago, and, initially, he told Develop that he was sceptical of Kickstarter and the fame that seems to be prerequisite for game projects to be successful on it. Still, Robert’s proposition for a sprawling galactic adventure hit the right note with potential players, and his crowdfunding project – run through Kickstarter and private donations – cleared $1 million with ease.

Having cleared $25 million, Star Citizen has raised $15 million more than the closest games-related crowdfunding project, Ouya – which finished with $8,596,474 on Kickstarter.

Roberts and his studio, Cloud Imperium Games, plan to use the additional funding to build a wider alpha test than originally intended for the first phase of Star Citizen’s launch.

“The initial plan was to first launch servers in North America and then expand to areas such as Europe and Australia to decrease latency in these areas, perfecting the game as we improve the experience around the world," said Roberts.

"This funding will allow us to invest in a wider infrastructure for our early testing, spinning up remote servers earlier. Hitting this goal will also allow us to increase the number of remaining alpha slots. Extra alpha slots not only means more Star Citizens will travel the ‘verse at launch, but that we will receive more feedback and more stress testing. This in turn will allow us to better balance and enhance the Star Citizen experience!”

Roberts also detailed the next stretch goal for Star Citizen, $27 million, for which the team plans to spend additional resources developing the game’s Banu species and their technology to offer players a “completely different way of experiencing their universe”.

As Star Citizen has reached a stupendous amount of money, Roberts also felt the need to explain that his studio will be putting those dollars on the screen: “Even though we’ve fully funded the base game, every extra dollar helps to make the experience better. The content we talk about in these stretch goals isn’t ‘feature creep’; it’s elements we’ve been building and planning that will be all that more impressive with additional resources. In essence, you’re putting things we’ve already discussed for the future into development now. The extra funding means we’re secure in assigning resources to go ahead and begin developing that richer content we had initially planned to fund through the game’s success upon release.”