Behold, your irregular Star Citizen funding update is here, with the news Cloud Imperium Games’ controversial space sim has now raised over $800m – despite there still being no sign of a version 1.0 release date some 12 years after its original Kickstarter campaign.
Star Citizen’s last major milestone arrived last May, when Cloud Imperium’s funding tracker – which aggregates money raised from likes of paid alpha access and those eye-wateringly expensive ship packs – ticked over the $700m mark. That does, of course, mean the game – as far as it can currently be described as such – has raised a staggering $100m in just 11 months, and, perhaps more remarkably, is now “just” $300m from crossing the $1bn threshold.
All this and there’s still no sign of a 1.0 release date for Star Citizen, although its paid public alpha continues to evolve with regular updates. The space sim was originally targeting a 2014 launch, but sailed right past that (and just kept going) as Cloud Imperium Games’ plans grew ever-more ambitious and the project fell into a vortex of feature creep.
The closest Cloud Imperium has come to suggesting an end is in sight in recent times came last March when CEO Chris Roberts wrote that the “team [was] hard at work, heads down, driving towards the finish line.” But while the massively multiplayer persistent universe portion of Star Citizen is potentially still some signifiant way off, its story driven, single-player counterpart – known as Squadron 42 – is supposedly on the horizon.
Cloud Imperium last year said it was targeting a 2026 launch for Squadron 42 – whose star-studded cast includes the likes of Gary Oldan, Mark Hammier, Gillian Anderson, and Andy Serkis. But whether that holds true, given the number of time the project has already slipped back (it was described as “feature complete” in 2023), remains to be seen.