Star Citizen breaks $25 million

Star Citizen is a behemoth at this point. Not only is it the most successfully crowd funded campaign ever, but it continues to blow even its own estimations out of the water. It's been over a year since the space-sim's original Kickstarter campaign and it's just earned another $1 million in the last week.

Announcing this threshold breach on the official Roberts Space Industries website, founder Chris Roberts said that this made October the biggest month of funding the game has ever had – which with a game like this, you know is a big deal.

What's perhaps more impressive about the developer though, is that despite continuing to add features, items, ships and areas to the game, RSI is still sticking pretty closely to its initially announced release date. Likewise, it's moving very steadily towards an open Alpha in 2014. Compare this to other games that have gone over budget, like Double Fine's Broken Age, and you can see that over-funding was seriously detrimental to having the games release on time, even if they do end up bigger in scope than was originally planned.

However, Star Citizen too is growing, with this extra $1 million going towards an enhanced Alpha phase:

“We will use additional funding to build a wider alpha test than we had originally intended for the first phase of Star Citizen’s launch,” said Roberts. “The initial plan was to first launch servers in North America and then expand to areas such as Europe and Australia to decrease latency in these areas, perfecting the game as we improve the experience around the world. This funding will allow us to invest in a wider infrastructure for our early testing, spinning up remote servers earlier. Hitting this goal will also allow us to increase the number of remaining alpha slots. Extra alpha slots not only means more Star Citizens will travel the ‘verse at launch, but that we will receive more feedback and more stress testing. This in turn will allow us to better balance and enhance the Star Citizen experience!”

But it isn't stopping there. Already Roberts is already taking about the $27 million stretch goal, which considering the game has over a year to go until its official release, seems like it will easily be surpassed. This one will offer a “Banu Merchantman,” a specialised trading vessel, but it will be an alien craft, so will be quite different to what has been seen so far from the Earth based ship manufacturers.

Roberts signed off in his address with the following: “Thank you for your continued support of and trust in project. You have empowered the team to make Star Citizen something truly special… the Best Damn Space Sim Ever!”

KitGuru Says: Every time I see Star Citizen I get more impressed – I'm just not sure I like the idea of some ships costing $70 + of real money.

[Cheers AusG]

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