Cloud Imperium Games marked a major milestone Sunday (May 24) as the game developer’s open world massively multiplayer online space game “Star Citizen” has reached $1 billion in lifetime funding before formalizing a release date for its full commercial launch.
It’s an impressive benchmark for any title, but especially for a game 14 years in the making that was originally targeting a 2014 release.
From Chris Roberts (the mastermind of the hit ’90s PC game “Wing Commander”), “Star Citizen” has been in the works since 2012, when Roberts co-founded Cloud Imperium Games alongside wife Sandi Roberts. The young studio decided to forgo traditional funding from a publisher or private backers, and instead reached out to the larger gamer community through a crowdfunding campaign.
Chris Roberts built a prototype for “Star Citizen,” and Sandi Roberts orchestrated a campaign that showed off the development. The end result was a quickly crashed website and $6.2 million raised by players eager to see the game come to fruition.
Since then, Cloud Imperium has slowly but surely been developing “Star Citizen” in front of fans through weekly livestreams and blogs, regular roadmaps releases, and — most recently — early playable access for the continuously updated alpha build. And Cloud Imperium says that every dollar raised by the developer — which has now reached that above-mentioned $1-billion mark — has been reinvested directly into development and operations on “Star Citizen” and Cloud’s latest project, “Squadron 42.”
