The mammoth project Star Citizen has no release date, but has made a lot of money and spent so much time to develop something special. This is evident in Chris Roberts’ letter to players and supporters at the turn of the year into 2023. Only good news, wherever you look. Well, except for the schedule.
What are common accusations against Star Citizen? There are two major accusations against Star Citizen:
- Feature Creep – Players were promised an increasingly large game with more and more features to obtain donations. The vision of a “fully playable MMO-SF universe” has become so enormous over the years that it is now technically hardly manageable. Therefore, there are no release plans or firm commitments, it is a “castle in the air”.
- Release is not worth it – The game earns so much money from the sale of ships that a release is not urgent, as the company makes enough anyway.
More players, more money, more employees than ever at Star Citizen
This is the current status: In particular, the second accusation “Release is not worth it” seems to be indirectly confirmed by Chris Roberts in a letter to players. Because the message from the letter is: “Everything is running fantastically.”
Roberts elaborates:
- that now more people are playing Star Citizen than ever before:
- 240,000 people log in each month – that’s 33% more than every year.
- Daily, the platform has 50% more users than in 2021 and double the number compared to 2019.
Money is also flowing like never before:
- Star Citizen surpassed the mark of 100 million $ in revenue in November 2022.
- In 2022, they even earned more than in the previous years, where more money came in due to Covid, with 30% more earnings than 2021.
- A large part of the money comes from new players, more than 800,000 accounts have been created. 70% of them have become “paying players” who bought the starter pack, Roberts boasts.
And they have employees in abundance: 861 employees are now working on the mammoth game.
The big feature didn’t go live in 2022 after all
And how is the progress of the game? At one point, there is something like a “negative remark” in Roberts’ jubilation.
Looking back at the last year, it is mentioned in passing: The big feature planned for 2022, the persistent universe, did not go live in 2022 after all, but it was tested on the test server. At least something.
Roberts emphasizes how wonderful and elaborate a persistent universe is for an “MMO with millions of players.” He knows of no other “large-scale MMO” that even attempts such a thing.
The project is something very special – would be impossible with a typical publisher
Doesn’t it take too long for him personally? Roberts makes a virtue out of necessity. He plays once more the narrative that the “Star Citizen” project takes an extremely long time, but is therefore also something very special.
Only with the support of the players is such a thing possible. A normal publisher, especially a publicly traded one, would never give the development team the time to develop something great:
“There is no other way to build Star Citizen without the community-driven model. The investment in time and money is too expensive for a normal gaming publisher.”
This is what’s behind it: In the letter, Roberts proves once again that he is a master at explaining to players that they are part of something unique. You cannot disagree with him there.
This narrative that “normal games” are so severely restricted by the profit craze of the publishers, and that crowdfunding is needed to develop something unique, has long been represented by supporters of Star Citizen:
- It also seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the enormous financial success of the crowdfunding campaign has made Star Citizen a unique case.
- The fact that the project has been in production since 2011 and that even the single-player campaign “Squadron 42” does not have a real release date makes it difficult for outsiders to fully share Roberts’ enthusiasm.
In the end, Chris Roberts once again said that the next year will be great for Star Citizen. Probably the biggest year so far.
More about the game:
After 12 years and 504 million $, Star Citizen explains its skill system
