Among recent tales of crowdfunded success and disappoint, usually focused around Kickstarter projects, there sits a galactic anomaly. Star Citizen is a game being created by legendary Wing Commander creator Christ Roberts, it is planned to be a space flight simulator of truly enormous proportions. The game has just passed $49 million in donations and that amount is still climbing. The initial Kickstarter campaign for the title back in 2012 only raised a little over $2 million and that was obviously not enough to create Roberts’ vision.
This is surely an encouraging sign to the developers, as interest in the game has not waned over time. If anything, it seems that the opposite has happened and the fervour surrounding the project has increased over the years. So why then, is all this cash needed to fund a project that was only initially asking for half a million dollars? Helpfully Chris Roberts has adhered to the more recent demands for developer transparency and answered this question in a recent ‘Letter from the Chairman‘. Roberts explains the enormous scale of the project and the necessity of the continued funding saying “We know that Star Citizen is an incredibly ambitious project, after all its basically several high fidelity AAA games all rolled into one; a MMO Space Sim, a First Person Shooter, a rich Single Player story and a fully-fledged Trading and Economy game. I’m pretty sure this level of ambition is why the majority of you backed. If I had pitched Star Citizen to a typical publisher, told them I wanted all these features and wanted to make it just for a PC I would have been laughed out of the room.”
Star Citizen also keeps up the tradition of stretch goals and rewards for backers. The stretch goal that has been met for $49 million? A “Xi’an Space Plant” that is apparently similar to a bonsai tree. The next stretch goal will be reached at $51 million and Roberts has promised new levels of developer-backer interaction, he stated that he would “like to try something a little different in the hopes that it might be another way to involve you, our backers, in Star Citizen’s development process. For the first time, we’re going to try giving you a say in Star Citizen’s production schedule!” With this in mind, perhaps there has never been a better time to donate to Star Citizen than now.
You can donate to Star Citizen on their website.