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 hint of a version 1.0 release date some 12 years after its original Kickstarter campaign.
Star Citizen’s previous 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” $200m 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, you might recall, 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 significant way off, its story driven, single-player spin-off – known as Squadron 42 – is supposedly much closer 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 Hamill, Gillian Anderson, and Andy Serkis. But given the number of times the project has already slipped back (it was described as “feature complete” in 2023), it remains to be seen whether that 2026 release window holds true.