The head of the sprawling space MMO Star Citizen has addressed the community with a long letter. In it, founder and CEO Chris Roberts talks about the past year – and what to hope for in the future.
What kind of game is this? Star Citizen is a double-edged sword:
- On one hand, it is known as a wildly ambitious space project that aims to implement many exciting ideas.
- On the other hand, it is also known as an endless story that has, so far, generated a lot of money but often pushes back release dates and does not maintain enough pace in development.
This has led to ongoing criticism of the project.
Now, CEO Chris Roberts has provided a retrospective and prospective outlook for the waiting community.
The pandemic slowed things down, but the numbers are growing
What Roberts says in the letter: In his statement, Roberts reports on the last year and the difficulties of the pandemic that have somewhat slowed the development progress.
While they were proud of the seamless transition to “working from home”, as the situation dragged on, they faced challenges: “When all employees work from home, it becomes increasingly difficult to solve problems spontaneously or to receive or give feedback,” Roberts said. The number of meetings and video calls has also skyrocketed.
This was noticeable:
“I personally felt the difference in our release rhythm; we took longer to release each patch, and it became more difficult to identify or fix bugs.”
Therefore, they are looking towards a hybrid model of office and home work in the future.
Here are the numbers: Despite the slowdown, Star Citizen reportedly experienced positive developments according to Roberts: “We have seen more people flocking to Star Citizen than ever before, driven by waves of goodwill and enthusiasm from current players inviting their friends to join.” Additionally, complete newcomers have also found their way into the game.
According to Roberts, the rate of new players has more than doubled and since Alpha 3.17, over 2,000 new players are joining daily, Roberts stated.
Roberts further noted that since December 2020, the number of daily active users has increased by 50%. Also, since then, nearly a million new accounts have been counted and more than half a million new players. The two-millionth player just registered earlier this week.
“We are on track to break the 4 million total accounts threshold this year, have more than 1 million logins this year, and are set to achieve more than 500 million dollars in lifetime revenue.”
Despite what Roberts sees as positive numbers, it must not be forgotten that Star Citizen still has a lot of development work to do after many years – it is still, as Roberts himself says, “on the way to beta.”
Roberts defends this, describing SC as a game that combines many features in a scale that no other game offers: “It is a dogfighting space sim, a first-person shooter, a trading game, a resource gathering game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game, and a social game. Star Citizen is a space simulation,” Roberts said.
New content on the way to “4.0”
What’s next? In his statement, Roberts also addresses many points that are expected to come to the game moving towards “Alpha 4.0”.
As an example, he mentions the new “Persistent Entity Streaming” system, which Roberts describes as a milestone and requires a lot of work. This ensures, for instance, that items dropped in the universe of Star Citizen stay there – even after logging out and logging back in. If one were to drop a weapon in the woods, it could be found days after logging out – unless someone else removed it.
This technology is crucial for the game, according to Roberts, as it is also the basis for the “Server Meshing” technique, which is still under development. However, this technique requires a lot of testing time, he explains: “We suspect that the PTU phase could take up to three months, but it’s hard to predict.”
To ensure that the advancement from the players’ perspective doesn’t come to a halt, additional content is planned: “Therefore, we plan to release a content-rich alpha patch 3.17.2 with stable code, new missions, new locations, and other gameplay by the end of June,” Roberts stated.
However, by the end of 2022, the “big” features are also expected to arrive – such as Persistent Streaming, but also “Salvage” and the cargo overhaul. After that, efforts will focus on server meshing and the “Pyro system” with more content and gameplay, which are also to be tested by the end of the year, at the latest in Q1 2023.
What is still missing, however, are release dates for things like the major campaign “Squadron 42”, which has been in development for years and continues to be worked on. Earlier this year, there was talk of 2023/2024 as a possible release for the first episode of an epic story that Star Citizen aims to provide.
